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Message: <blockquote data-quote="ThoughtBubble" data-source="post: 1056752" data-attributes="member: 9723">Heh. I so know exactly what you mean. Something recent happened with my current game. It started as a dungeon > you meatgrinder megadungeon. I made sure everyone understood this. "You'll have to work as a team. Expect deaths otherwise. It's combat heavy." And that was an abysmal failure.So I ran a survey to find out what the players want. Here's what I found out.1. Role-playing scored #1. This from the people who didn't know eachother's names for 3 days, and who never once spoke to an NPC without me prompting it.2. Character development scored #2. This from the group who has one character history between them (orphan, no family or friends).3. Puzzles scored third. Puzzles are my weakness.4. Generally, the answers were geared towards things with concievably little to no consiquence. 5. In many cases, when asked for prompting, or when presented an opertunity to say something bad about the DMing style (ie: Not enough campaign info as a choice) they avoided it.This brings me to what I have learned about surveys. They are most useful when you've got an issue you want clarified. Mostly they've been of use to me when I know something's wrong, or when I'm directly worried about something. An example was asking if I overused the battle map. Everyone liked it, and in fact asked for more, but no one was willing to go to the point of saying that it replaced a good room description. Hence, it helped me make my decision. But it was only a factor. I actually cut back on the battle mat, simply because my players used that instaed of talking to me, or spent time worrying about their exact positioning around the table when it didn't matter (that and the calls of "move me to the window, would you?" got annoying).Tacky, your situation sounds a lot like mine. If I let you join my game, can I join yours? <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin    :D"  data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" /> For the most part, the "Write it and they will play" section is correct. The only area that I differ in (from painful personal expierence) is that you may want a screening process. They will play. With the situation as I can imagine it, you could get enough force for a game if it was about lawn gnomes amasing adventures in watching grass. However, you wont' have nearly as much fun if the players aren't the right type. At one point, I was going to run a campaign somewhere between a fighting game and a kung-fu movie. It had three basic requirements. 1. The playes had to supply a plot hook. 2. The characters had to be committed to finishing this action no matter what. 3. The character had to be willing to work on a team with the others. I wound up with one character, weak on 1, but strong on 2 and 3. The second was strong on all 3. The third was a pacifist who lived in a monistary somewhere who managed to piss off his entire team in the first trial run, and nearly got everyone killed.Needless to say, I stopped that game before I hurt myself, but I left the promise that if I found a decent third, we'd take it up again. The key is to make a game you want to run, but also get people who are willing to play that game.I'd say that goes both ways. I recently quit a game (about to get back into it, as it's finally started to get interesting) run by a good friend of mine (player #1 above). He really refused to be cornered on what the game was focused on.  From what I gathered, there was going to be an emphasis on exploration, character interaction, character growth, plot, and only the occasional combat (in rare cases when it was unavoidable). I wound up with a sociable medic/radio operator, with far too much depth for the game. Unfortunately, I read into his evasions what I wanted to play. The game I'm currently playing in had a similar setup. Except I couldn't get even that much from the DM. In either game, we spend a lot of time walking from place to place, waiting for a cue of what we can do, and talking to NPC's who don't have or want anything to do with us. The locations are kind of neat in both though.If the game doesn't have an identity, it falls down to the group to do a lot of communication to keep the game running smoothly. This has been a flaw in all the games I've played in or run to date, except the one that's waiting on another decent player.Woah, got a little off track there.Anyway, do not leave the question open ended. Especially for CRPG players. Give them 5 or six answers, each obviously weigted in a certian direction. You'll still get all the information you need from them, but you'll be able to pull out something useful from it.Hope that helped.</blockquote>

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