Earlier this month I put together two surveys intended to
gather self-assessments of the level & kind of prep work GMs did. Originally I focused on sessions, but many commented that campaign
prep fed into their session prep style. So I created the latter survey with aid
from several people. Yesterday I closed out the surveys and downloaded the
info. I haven’t had a chance to seriously dig through it yet, but I wanted to put
the raw data and a “graphic” version out for anyone to look at. I’d thought
about this project for some time, but
Keep in mind this survey’s rough and unscientific. It has no
controls, the question wording hasn’t been checked, and there’s some serious
limitations to the format. So why do it? Because I’d seen many threads about
prep online. Often they escalated into a game of one-upmanship. If someone talked
about having done a ton of work for a session, commenters would pop on to say
they’d done more. Threads about “prep light” approaches had wildly differing
definitions. Sometimes participants engaged in a race to the bottom to
declare no or negative prep. I understand those kinds of comments. We feel
strongly about the process we’ve invested in. I wanted to see, removed from comparison
signposts, how GM’s self-assessed what they did.
We ended up with 313 responses for the Session survey and
106 responses for the Campaign survey. I have three documents for those
interested in the details. Survey Monkey generated two compiled pdfs of the
data. You can get the Session Prep material here via Dropbox. You can get the
Campaign Prep pdf here. I should note that weirdly the former includes the “Other,
Please Specify” details, but the latter does not. I’m not sure why it generated
it that way, I suspect there’s a space question (I wouldn’t let me output whole
indivual response material as a pdf due to those limits). I’ve also put together
the individual responses and details in a Google Calc table. If you’re looking
for the crunchy bits and associative data, check that out. I’ve stripped out IP
identifiers, but left the comments intact.
Feel free to check out and play around with this data.
Consider it released under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International. If you post something about
it, a link back to the blog and a heads up would be appreciated. I hope to offer up my own
thoughts on this in the next week or two.
Thanks again to everyone who took the time to fill out these
surveys. I know they weren’t quick, especially the Campaign Prep one. I might
try something like this again the future. If I do I’ll definitely crowd-source
the questions to get a tighter approach.
