D&D 5E Wandering Monsters: Wraping Up

[Plaguescarred]

Wrapping Up
Wandering Monsters
By James Wyatt

We’ve come to the end of a long line of wandering monsters. What do you do? WE are going to thank you so very much for your input on the surveys and in the comments, plus show off a few interesting graphs. Come look!

What do you think?

 

[Plaguescarred]

It was a fun column and i liked that James would show us results of previous week's polls. It covered a lot of monsters and a few other subjects more or less related but it was by far the column that gathered our opinions the most IMO.


Farwell Wandering Monsters column and than you James & the D&D team!

 

[howandwhy99]

<Loud applause> That was a very significant column for the years it lasted.

 

[Iosue]

Not that it wasn't apparent before, but surely this is a sign that we can expect a big announcement any day now...

 

[Kobold Avenger]

I'm sure that next week we'll just get another column in its place. The last few Wandering Monsters were all questions about campaigns asked.

 

[fjw70]

Not that it wasn't apparent before, but surely this is a sign that we can expect a big announcement any day now...

I am hoping so. It will be Spring next week so it's about time to give us more details of the summer releases.

 

[the Jester]

I'm sure that next week we'll just get another column in its place. The last few Wandering Monsters were all questions about campaigns asked.

Yeah, let's hope we start seeing some actual previews of the finished product!

 

[I'm A Banana]

I always like to see stats.

Though I get suspicious whenever most of the feedback is "you're on the right track!" While I get that Wyatt's column probably served a more advertising/evangelizing role, and so is fine there, if you're actually interested in finding out what your audience wants so that you can make something for them, "you're on the right track!" is not the most constructive feedback. Passive assent makes me nervous.

But, I don't think anyone can say that responding to polls and posting on message boards doesn't affect design decisions these days! It's at least one element. Which is cool. If they are hearing the voices of those with passionate assent and dissent, perhaps the tendency for polls to run into the milquetoast "yeah, sure, sounds good" after being actively sold on an element can be mitigated. And heck, even that isn't as useless as it could be! We're getting a hopefully-less-blah 5e dragonborn out of the deal.

 

[ExploderWizard]

We're getting a hopefully-less-blah 5e dragonborn out of the deal.

With the current incarnation being; play a dragonborn if you want to.....(wait for it)...look like a dragon!, that doesn't seem like an impossible barrier to vault.

 

[DEFCON 1]

The most interesting part of the polling process to me was hearing that not only were they looking at the span of numbers 1-5 on individual questions and individual monsters... they were looking at the span of numbers across all monsters.

One of the repetitive complaints about Wyatt's polls were that they always were dominated by results in the 3-4 range. So just looking at those by themselves, it was always "Well, the polls were written so to get the results they were looking for! Self-fulfilling! Meaningless!". When in truth... the proof of the pudding was in comparing monster results against each other. So that while yes, most results still fell within 3-4... there was definite indications (like Wyatt pointed out) where 4s spiked. Or 3s spiked. Or 1s and 2s spiked, pushing the 3s and 4s further over. Thereby telling him (for instance) that the Good Monsters article was not up to stuff in comparison to all the other monsters he looked at, and thus some rethinking was in order.

Taken just on its own... a person would look at that Good Monsters article, see that the range was still primarily in the 3s and 4s, and thus think there was no worthwhile info gained from it because most votes were still in "Right track!" territory. When in truth, there was more info behind the numbers than we all were realizing.

We are people of hyperbole nowadays. Everything has to be "The worst thing I've ever seen!" or "The greatest thing ever!" As a result... unless these polls showed massive amounts of 1s or huge numbers of 5s... everything else was going to be read as just middle-of-the-road results that were to be expected, and thus nothing noted or gained of any worth. "Useless polls." Which also explains to a T so many of the arguments on boards like these... where you can't just offer moderate responses on either side of an issue... everything has to be EXTREME!!!! Because we think that only results that fall on either far end of the spectrum are "real". Anything in the middle is an 'Eh!' and thus too easy to ignore.

Whereas quite honestly... being able to read the tea leaves of the middle results actually can get you closer to the truth.