Early Survey Results

I was trying to get this out yesterday but yesterday didn’t like me. I wanted to throw out some highlights of the RPG design survey thats running right now. Some of the results are what you’d expect. I put in questions that should be predictable so I could make sure the survey works the way I’d expect it to. There are some really interesting results.

I’m using four types of analysis on this data. First I’m looking at which selection got the most votes. Second I compare number of positive votes and the number of negative votes and see if the result is positive or negative. The third type of analysis weighs the votes according to how strongly someone feels about them. The fourth method compares the functional and dysfunctional form of the question and uses the Kano Model to pull some extra insight from the data.

So lets just hit the strongest results for now.

Social Conflict Rules

The first pair of questions to give a strong indicator to a GM or game designer is social conflict rules. The results show that while conflict rules are not needed for a game to attract players, they are something that most players like.

Dice

There are a lot of dice questions on the survey. My thoughts at first would be that players don’t really care about the dice. In general, the results are heavily neutral but there are trends for specific dice. D20s seem to trend negative. So do d100s. D6s trend linearly meaning that including them is good for player interest but not including them is detrimental. Keep in mind though, this trend is not overly strong but it shouldn’t be ignored.

Pricing

There are some nice pointers on what players want on pricing. Free games are an exciter meaning that they don’t need to be free but players do view it as a positive. There has been some debate over the perception of free games in the past so that is a good result to have.

Players seem to like PDFs to be $10 or less. For a game book the price point of $30 is somewhat positive and results are neutral for the price being more than $30 but $50 is strongly negative. It would seem that $30-$40 is the limit of what players are interested in buying.

GM Control

With a good number of GMless games out there I was expecting a more tempered response to the question of GM Control.

More To Come

That’s just a taste of what I’m seeing in the survey. Have your voice heard. Take the survey today.