D&D General WotC Asks What Makes YOU Play Dungeons and Dragons?

WotC has a new survey asking about what you want from D&D -- "Extra extra! The D&D team wants to know what makes YOU play Dungeons & Dragons! The open world? Character customization? Shared storytelling with friends? Iconic art? Take our survey and help shape the future of what we're working on at Wzards. Please share to help us spread the word and hear from more fans."

https://www.surveygizmo.com/s3/5231853/pas?sglocale=en

 

[bedir than]

It's rather clear that there are questions you won't see based on your answers to other questions.

 

[Lanefan]

I didn't really get that vibe from the survey. They seemed very much on the whole "are you bringing in new players?" That might be due to the branches I went down.

Must be, because while I got a bit of that, my questions seemed more geared toward "will you (or do you, or would you) play online?"

 

[V0RTEX]

There were some weird questions in there which did worry me a little bit like "Do you create your own PCs?". I mean what the foo-foo excuse me? Do you think my valet creates my PCs for me or something? That's awful - obviously he gets his own character!


Please keep the language “grandma friendly”.

I said “no” as I DM, so don’t create PCs.

However, I have a buddy who‘s been playing for 30 years and always uses a pre-generated character, or gets another player to make one for him. He’s not fussed with keeping up with each new edition of the rules and just happy to play with whatever’s on his character sheet.

 

[ad_hoc]

Well, these surveys apparently get six-seven figure response rates: they might not want a representative sample, but a through look at a large subset of the population.

I recall that they closed their last big survey early because they got too many responses.

I forget the estimations that were given but my memory serves somewhere over 300 000.

They said they had gotten 3 times the amount they were going for before shutting it down I think.

That's a what a good sample size looks like.

 

[Parmandur]

I recall that they closed their last big survey early because they got too many responses.

I forget the estimations that were given but my memory serves somewhere over 300 000.

They said they had gotten 3 times the amount they were going for before shutting it down I think.

That's a what a good sample size looks like.

And they aren't looking for a representative sample, probably.

If their goal is to sell 100,000 copies of a given book, if they can determine that at least 120,000 people would kill for a given book (like a Spelljammer setting or a Critical Role book), then anything beyond that is gravy.

 

[Harzel]

When I went through the "Motivations" section, it immediately struck me that they had no items addressing one of the things that I like most about playing D&D, which is discovering new aspects (people, places, things) of the fictional world. This piqued my interest enough to do a quick inventory of their items vs. the long-known, but widely ignored eight-part taxonomy of fun in games. *

Long story short, WoTC's survey items completely miss 2 of the 8 categories ("Discovery" and "Submission") and a third ("Narrative") is either absent or weakly addressed depending on exactly how you evaluate things. Seems like whoever put the survey together did not do their homework. Or perhaps the exclusion was more deliberate, though I have a hard time imagining what the reason for that would have been.

OTOH, WoTC's survey items did cover some things not included in the eight categories. First, they include some queries directed at what one might term "Community", that is, the interest/benefits of interacting with other D&D players outside game sessions. Since the original taxonomy emerged from consideration about game design, it's reasonable that they wouldn't cover that; it's reasonable as well, of course, that WoTC would ask about that.

More interestingly, a couple of WoTC's survey items broach a concept that isn't really covered by any of the 8 categories, but perhaps should have been - group leadership. The closest the 8 categories get is "Fellowship", but that is usually described as focused on desire to be part of a cooperative group; motivation based on being the group's leader is a bit different dynamic.

* Not the original source, but the most fleshed-out description that I know of is here: Gaming for Fun (Part 1): Eight Kinds of Fun. Also, no such taxonomy is going to be beyond criticism, but it's always seemed to me to be a decent attempt.

 

[bedir than]

How did you see 100% of the questions?

When I went through the "Motivations" section, it immediately struck me that they had no items addressing one of the things that I like most about playing D&D, which is discovering new aspects (people, places, things) of the fictional world. This piqued my interest enough to do a quick inventory of their items vs. the long-known, but widely ignored eight-part taxonomy of fun in games. *

Long story short, WoTC's survey items completely miss 2 of the 8 categories ("Discovery" and "Submission") and a third ("Narrative") is either absent or weakly addressed depending on exactly how you evaluate things. Seems like whoever put the survey together did not do their homework. Or perhaps the exclusion was more deliberate, though I have a hard time imagining what the reason for that would have been.

OTOH, WoTC's survey items did cover some things not included in the eight categories. First, they include some queries directed at what one might term "Community", that is, the interest/benefits of interacting with other D&D players outside game sessions. Since the original taxonomy emerged from consideration about game design, it's reasonable that they wouldn't cover that; it's reasonable as well, of course, that WoTC would ask about that.

More interestingly, a couple of WoTC's survey items broach a concept that isn't really covered by any of the 8 categories, but perhaps should have been - group leadership. The closest the 8 categories get is "Fellowship", but that is usually described as focused on desire to be part of a cooperative group; motivation based on being the group's leader is a bit different dynamic.

* Not the original source, but the most fleshed-out description that I know of is here: Gaming for Fun (Part 1): Eight Kinds of Fun. Also, no such taxonomy is going to be beyond criticism, but it's always seemed to me to be a decent attempt.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

In the D&D motivations section, it had essentially the same page three times. I'm glad I noticed it so I could make sure not to get disqualified by answering "the same" question too differently. Those subtle differences often create a very different question with a possibly different answer for me.

Yes, that's standard practice when designing a survey of this kind. It's somewhat equivalent to repeating an experiment three times to make your results more reliable.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

It's rather clear that there are questions you won't see based on your answers to other questions.

Certainly.

Do You play AL?

No.

Skip several pages.

 

[Harzel]

How did you see 100% of the questions?

Are you talking about the whole survey? I don't think that I did see 100% of the questions on the whole survey. In my previous post, I was talking specifically and only about the survey items labeled "Motivations for Playing D&D". For me, these were presented as three pages with 10 items on each page. I suppose it is possible that they only presented a subset of those items to each participant, but that seems like a really weird way to structure that part of the survey. If you're asking about someone's motivations, you probably don't want to presume you (partially) know the answer and a priori exclude some possibilities.