Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Rocket your D&D 5E and Level Up: Advanced 5E games into space! Alpha Star Magazine Is Launching... Right Now!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ourph" data-source="post: 2390468" data-attributes="member: 20239">It does if we only start measuring Handling Time when an instance of "Handling" occurs (i.e. - we start measuring when the game stops and the rules are consulted and stop measuring when the game resumes).  If no instances of "Handling" take place during the session (the game never stops), the session provides no data.  "No data" does not get an entry of 0 seconds, it gets an entry of "No data".  The reason to make that distinction is that groups can have different levels of familiarity with the rules and can also have different levels of commitment to getting the rules right.  If a group of players who are clueless about the rules of Rolemaster are playing Rolemaster and never look at the rulebooks in their 6 hour game session (but handle almost every rules situation incorrectly) they also would score an average Handling Time of 0 seconds.  Similarly, if a group has been playing D&D twice a week for 5 years and has absolutely every rule they ever use completely memorized (and get it exactly right every time) then they also would have an average Handling Time of 0 seconds for their game session.  Including those measurements in the study would be completely misleading, because we're not asking about how familiar the group is with the rules already or how committed they are to getting the rules correct.  We're asking "Once the game is stopped to consult the rulebooks and answer a rules question, how long does it take come come up with a satisfactory answer and get back to the game".  If the game never stops, then the session provides no answer to our question. Look at it this way, if we were measuring the flight speed of an unladen swallow by clocking swallows who flew by our observation post with a radar gun - but we never saw a swallow during the entire time our experiment was running, we would NOT record the flight speed of an unladen swallow as 0mph (even though the only number our radar gun ever read during the entire experiment was 0mph).  We would have to report a result of "No data" instead, because we didn't actually take any measurements.</blockquote>

Verification