The Simple Beauty of the Player Survey

If you (like me) play games like Genshin Impact, subscribe to Square Enix Newsletters or have participated in a game's beta, you've probably encountered The Player Survey. If you (like me) are also one of the ten people on the planet who actually fills them out for the meager reward of in-game currency and a pat on the back, you probably do so because you know how valuable they can be to the development of a game. And you know what? GMs should take advantage of this too.

A sagely friend of mine's advice to GMs is first and foremost to "run what you want to run." And I heavily agree with that. However, if you (like me) have a whole boat load of ideas you'd be happy running, a Player Survey can help set expectations, offer options and give you some ideas as to where your energy and interests may best be focused!

The Primary Use

This past week I've been prepping to run a full-scale old-school styled "campaign" that involves lots of players dropping in and out of a persistent world. However I've realized I have a lot of ideas for what kinds of worlds I'd run and how to run them. Thus, I figured I'd turn it to my players to see what people were most interested in. Queue the Player Survey:

You can find the full version of this Player Survey here! [[ https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1lTZZW_aPCWBXGiud617qEkx7a4TqkNyvrF8xAZVgYyQ/edit?usp=sharing ]] I formatted it so that everything fits on a single double-sided sheet of letter paper, so feel free to copy it and make your own!

My goals were pretty simple: Pitch each setting and what excites me about them, as well as pitch different mechanics I'm considering designing to see what Players want to see fleshed out the most! Much like Safety Tools and Bankuei's Same Page Tool, a good survey can help a campaign thrive and give the GM a better sense of the direction Players are looking to go while helping set Player expectations. If you (like me) don't want to pitch and re-pitch the same set of ideas to 12+ people, the survey can become a great conversation starter for Players to start asking questions and making suggestions. What's more it helps me quickly identify Players who might not enjoy what I'm planning on running, and giving me more specific info to start a conversation as to whether or not the campaign will be right for them before we even start rolling dice.

Already this survey has provided me with some valuable feedback. Namely that Players are relatively Neutral on survival mechanics, thus my energy might be better focused on some of the other ideas than spending time fleshing out that one. It has also helped me narrow thing down to two settings I might run (between an original 4), though I still have some players to poll before making the final decision. If I could have done anything differently with this survey, I might have added a "I don't know how I feel" or "I'd have to see it before I could judge it" type of response to the questions (though Players created their own version of this by marking their X with an additional "?")

Making a Survey

Player Surveys are usually about asking leading questions to try to get clear answers for questions on your mind. If you (like me) have a lot of players who try to be nice to everyone, it's important to remind them that no campaign has started yet, no offense can be taken and you want them to be as brutally honest as possible.

Another tip is (in the case of multiple choice response) to give Players at least 5 "shades" of responses, ranging from very positive to very negative. Pretty much every Player Survey I've taken does this and it works. The extreme responses give you rapid information and the Positive/Negative trends paint a wider picture of how your Players are feeling. 

Important Questions to Ask:

• What kinds of mechanics will be present?
• What are the expectations in regards to "realism"?
• What kinds of characters can players make?
• What kinds of goals can players pursue? 
• What are the meta-expectations at the table? (E.g. campaign length and attendance)
• (For story focused games) What are topics you're interested in exploring as a GM?
• What mechanics and expectations from games your group usually does play won't be present?

If you (like me) are asking more than ~8 questions, I'd advise breaking up your questions into categories that players "tally" their responses into. This serves two purposes: Firstly the tally is a mental reset that lets your Players go into the the next category with a more open mind. Nextly, if you (like me) are polling for different settings, it can tell you at a glance what people are most excited about. I broke up gameplay elements in this way as well, to see how much Players were interested in some of the more experimental meta ideas I had for my upcoming campaign.

Lastly for tools, Google Forms is pretty solid, and Google Sheets can equally be very useful! If you (like me) are using Sheets, consider darkening the background of your "headers". If you (unlike me) have time, alternate the background of your responses between White and Off-White (like 10% black) for better readability.

Fun Alternate Uses

If you (like me) have players who find glee in filling bubbles and taking personality quizzes, then the Player Survey can have some other uses beyond just being a pre-campaign tool. For instance, in NET//realms (a campaign I ran where Players take the role of a Player in the real world and their Avatar in a full-dive VR MMO) I gave Players the following survey to help them create their characters:

((Feel free to right click that and open it in a new tab to read the whole thing))

By using the clinical format of a Player Survey it helped Players effortlessly create their more abstract in-game Players and get into the headspace of the kinds of themes and topics I was looking to explore in the campaign! (While also being thematic with the idea of an MMO setting)

Hopefully this has given you some ideas for writing your own Player Surveys and some samples to copy-and-paste to get you started! Be sure to ping me if you (like me) make any such surveys public because I'm a slut for filling out forms ~