Saturday, November 3, 2012

New Campaign Questionnaire

         Before a campaign starts, it is vital to get a read on your players.  You must figure out what your players like and then make sure your game works for them.  If everybody wants to play a sandbox game, then you are either going to run a sandbox game or your campaign is going to fall apart.

         One way to get a read on your players is to give them a short survey.  It may sound a little corny, but it's far better to know what they want now then to be surprised with it later.  The survey should tell you everything you need to know about designing and running your campaign.  Remember - if your players don't have a good time, the campaign will fall apart!

         Once you have responses from all of your players, then you can start to analyze.  Try to built your campaign right about at the average of what people want.  For example, if most people want a sandbox campaign, then you should try to either run a sandbox campaign, or adapt your current plan to be more sandboxy.

         Some questions you should consider on a player by player basis.  For example, some players will be comfortable with character death, and some of them will not.  Try to avoid killing the characters who don't want to die, and not pull any punches with the players who don't mind.

         You can find the New Campaign Questionnaire at this link.  Simply open the spreadsheet, copy it to your google drive and then send it out to your players!

Take a look at the New Campaign Questionnaire Here!

13 comments:

  1. Is there a link for the questionnaire itself? I see the results doc, but can not find the questionnaire. Maybe I'm just missing something.

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    1. The link is in the sentence: You can find the New Campaign Questionnaire at this link. Here is the url if you have trouble clicking on the link for some reason: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AoA5AgofZk9qdHE3TmRjNHJiNmFvdU1QdkNZS0FDSlE

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    2. I'm still getting the spreadsheet results from that link, how do I get to the questionnaire itself?

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    3. Never mind, I extracted the link from the HTML source of this blog page. The link is this:

      https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1uRlXRP6qNaaYxICfgstXJ7X8Q7dSYRt-oQY3jucFk1A/viewform

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    4. I believe that you want to open up the spreadsheet and make a copy to your own google drive to use it. Then send that copy to your players.

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    5. I've made a copy of the spreadsheet, but I don't understand how to send it to my players as a form to fill out, I can only find a link to it as a spreadsheet.

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  2. All good and solid points

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  3. Why are answers 2 and 4 blank on every question?

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    1. Each of the answers represents a range, 1 through 5. 1, 3, and 5 are marked for reference but 2 represents an answer somewhere between 1 and 3, and 4 represents and answer somewhere between 3 and 5.

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  4. Ok. Umm, I would like to point out that you made a slight error in the spacing of your side-bar in releation to the document.

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    1. Google docs and blogger don't interact too well. Technical suggestions are welcome!

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  5. what would you do if all players put in different results? and all players cant work with the others type of play?

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    1. People don't always know what they want, and they may be flexible. Try a few one-shots and see if things work out.

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