D&D General RPG Theory and D&D...and that WotC Survey

[clearstream]

However Wizards of the Coast has no duty to any existing, potential or former fans to either elicit feedback or design a game that fits their interests. They are group of creatives making a product they want to sell. They don't owe us anything and we don't owe them anything either.

I would say that there is a discernible designer ethos toward service in many studios. A feeling among the designers that they do owe their players something. And an appreciation that their players in return do not owe them anything. That players engage or disengage, criticise or praise, only on the merits of their work.

It's that in part that leads design teams to efforts to understand their players. A typical process goes roughly - understand your audience (who are they, what do they value, how do they want to engage), understand your context (what thought and expressions e.g. as captured in other games will form the context for your game), and then of course, what can you do for players (what insights, innovation, solutions, ideas, experiences can you attempt to craft for and with them)?

 

[pemerton]

I would say that there is a discernible designer ethos toward service in many studios.

The existence of an ethos is quite consistent with @Campbell's denial that there is a duty.

In a large commercial firm like WotC, which is producing a luxury entertainment good, I suspect that there is also a strong blurring of any such ethos with commercial considerations. The goal of WotC as a company is to sell product, and in mass production of an entertainment product there can be no assumption that "quality" as judged by the designer will produce commercial success. (Similar considerations are at work in fiction editing/publishing, where as I understand it, market research is more influential than it once was.)

 

[clearstream]

The existence of an ethos is quite consistent with @Campbell's denial that there is a duty.

I think an ethos can have deontic power, but there isn't a contract or law, agreed.

In a large commercial firm like WotC, which is producing a luxury entertainment good, I suspect that there is also a strong blurring of any such ethos with commercial considerations. The goal of WotC as a company is to sell product, and in mass production of an entertainment product there can be no assumption that "quality" as judged by the designer will produce commercial success. (Similar considerations are at work in fiction editing/publishing, where as I understand it, market research is more influential than it once was.)

The tension tends to be felt in the resources made available to pursue less travelled avenues. Frex the innovation on itch.io outpaces the innovation from a large company like WotC. Market research has become more effective due to theoretical and technological advancements. That effectiveness results in it having the increased influence that you rightly identify.

 

[Lanefan]

Specifically, at the time, they were not considering the data submitted by gamers who were born before 1964. So, by and large, the excluded folks were the original grognards - gamers of the 1970s, the folks who were in their teens or older when D&D was first published.

We should all expect that group to be vastly outnumbered by the the gamers of the 80s. So, yes, we should expect the excluded segment to have been small.

I'm not at all so sure about that, given that in the early 80s at least (i.e. the height of 1e) the main demographic playing was still college-age types like me.

I missed the survey cutoff by 3 years.

 

[Aldarc]

I'm not at all so sure about that, given that in the early 80s at least (i.e. the height of 1e) the main demographic playing was still college-age types like me.

I missed the survey cutoff by 3 years.

Do you think that your feedback then would have differed substantially from someone who was 35 at the time? If it was as prevalent as you claim it was, then it was likely represented in that bracket.

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

I'm not at all so sure about that, given that in the early 80s at least (i.e. the height of 1e) the main demographic playing was still college-age types like me.

"Demographic figures released by TSR showed that 46% of D&D sets in 1980 were purchased by or for children between the ages of 10 and 14, with another 26% for those between 15 and 17. ....{In 1980, the median age of subscribers to Dragon was already at or under 16.}"

-Source Game Wizards

My recollection is that 1980s D&D was largely a high school and even middle school phenomenon.

 

[Reynard]

"Demographic figures released by TSR showed that 46% of D&D sets in 1980 were purchased by or for children between the ages of 10 and 14, with another 26% for those between 15 and 17. ....{In 1980, the median age of subscribers to Dragon was already at or under 16.}"

-Source Game Wizards

My recollection is that 1980s D&D was largely a high school and even middle school phenomenon.

It is really easy to assume that your experience was the common experience or representative of some larger truth.

 

[Aldarc]

"Demographic figures released by TSR showed that 46% of D&D sets in 1980 were purchased by or for children between the ages of 10 and 14, with another 26% for those between 15 and 17. ....{In 1980, the median age of subscribers to Dragon was already at or under 16.}"

-Source Game Wizards

My recollection is that 1980s D&D was largely a high school and even middle school phenomenon.

Same energy:

 

[Micah Sweet]

Which came first, the chicken or the egg? This survey was done before WotC did anything. What reason is there to suspect that WotC "wants" people to play that way, instead of WotC catering to what they found was already a steady and widespread pattern?

Well, any theory that requires frequent purchase has a fairly obvious motive.

 

[Willie the Duck]

It might be true that they left money on the table by not getting feedback from older fans. No clue on that score here.

There is a clue in SKR's writeup...<quote>."So, across the age range they did look at, neither age nor length of gaming career was a determiner for what segment you'd end up in. We should not expect there to be discontinuity in the results - being 36 or 37 wouldn't be that much different than being 35, after all. We should expect there to be at most gradual change outside the selected age range. The more gradual the change, the less money they'd be leaving on the floor.

So here's the thing -- I saw the same text as everyone else about who they were and weren't including in their survey. Absolutely regardless of that, I don't for a hot buttered moment believe that they didn't use the data of people over a specific age. Maybe not for the specific marketing decision about which the quote was referencing, but they still looked at the responses and drew conclusions (of some kind). Surveys are too expensive not to. If they didn't draw any hard, usable conclusions from that age group's data, it would be because the response rate was low enough that they didn't feel that the data could be trusted to be representative of that market segment as a whole. Bottlenecking in survey data is a real issue, particularly when someone from a niche sub-group can notice that the survey exists and get all their friends to go take it, making their voice unrepresentatively prominent.

However Wizards of the Coast has no duty to any existing, potential or former fans to either elicit feedback or design a game that fits their interests. They are group of creatives making a product they want to sell. They don't owe us anything and we don't owe them anything either.

The maxim of that notion is something I've seen plenty of fellow greyhairs espouse--right up until it comes back to mean them.