Monday, February 9, 2015

Campaign Prep Survey Help

I’m crowd-sourcing for advice and suggestions. I'd tossed together a GM Prep Survey focusing on session prep. That got enough responses I had to drop some cash on SurveyMonkey to get at all the data. Since that sub lasts a month (28 days in this case), I figured I should get at least one more use out of it. Several people pointed out gaps in the Session Prep Survey (i.e. what specific game they were running). Some mentioned how they frontloaded prep for campaigns. So I thought I should do a parallel one and get feedback on questions before posting them.

This is aimed to be rough and illustrative. I’m not doing controls. Instead it's more about curiosity and thick description. 

I’m thinking I’ll ask the same set of questions about two or three campaigns the GM has run. I’m considering campaign prep as everything done before the first session of play (be that a cc session or AP).They should pick the most recent, most important, or most long-lasting. Or should I stick to most recent. With campaign defined as 4+ sessions?

Here’s what I thought I’d ask about each campaign:
What system did you use?
Did you use a published setting, a homebrew setting, or some mix of the two?
Did you run online or f2f?
How often did your group meet?
How long was the average session?
How many players did you have on average?
About how many sessions did you run for?
Was that more or less than you expected when you prepared the campaign?
Did you have what you’d call a “finale”?
Roughly how many hours would you say you spent on campaign preparation?
Give a rough percentage of your time spent on the following activities:
  • Learning or relearning rules
  • Developing or homebrewing mechanics
  • Drawing maps or other illustrations
  • Developing NPCs
  • Plotting Incidents, Arcs, or Stories
  • Writing Up World/Setting Backstory
  • General Research
  • Player Character Work
  • Other
I think given the number of questions, I’ll probably just ask for the last two campaigns. What do you think? What else should I ask?

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