Knights & Knaves Alehouse

If you're so inclined, check out the survey and throw some love toward Greyhawk!: http://dnd.wizards.com/articles/news/dd-survey-1

Allan.

A huge percentage of those, "Do you play D&D in order to..." questions my answer was, "Ugh! God, no!" It felt like 80% of them, but was probably only 70% of them.

Yeah, same here.

Ditto. I tried not to be mean.

*sigh*
Okay, I filled out the damned thing. Couldn't answer much of it because Wi$bros were looking for validation of their current product line (5E?). I guarantee that anything which does not fawningly praise 5E will be defenestrated, but wutevs.

On Q #42 I made sure to plug the old-school forums like K&K

Allan.

WotC just isn't making products for me or anyone like me, and that survey indicates that's not likely to change.

The company really ought to discard input from me, I guess. I mean what is WotC supposed to do with a recommendation that they fire themselves and feed their product into a woodchipper?*

* In the spirit of compromise, it'd be okay with me if they instead fired their product and fed themselves into woodchippers.

I've had a little insight into how these work. Basically, they're used as a method of validating the feelings of the creators. All this data? They're not looking at the answers, or even the questions, they're looking at a bell curve for each piece of data. The elements of the graph they're interested are the extreme ends and the middle. "Maybe" and "possibly" and "slightly important"? That gets thrown out. At the end of the day, marketing looks and if they see a nice comfortable curve overall in the left, right, or middle of each question (depending on the question), they're satisfied.

Guy like me, I was all over that. So, my data will be ejected. So, most likely, will everyone else's here if you answered the poll honestly and didn't try to play to them. They want nice, safe, predictable.

Now with that said, they DO sit up and notice if, say, some question they were expecting a given skew on skews entirely in a different direction; say for example literally everyone who took that thing clicked "Original/Basic D&D" and "1st Edition Advanced D&D" for D&D's they played, and those ONLY. I don't just mean people here, I mean EVERYONE who took the survey. That would cause some raised eyebrows, and merit further investigation. But 10 of us from 'round here? Nah, they'll discard that and move on.

Sorry, not interested. Maybe if there was even 1 single person working for WoTC that I could respect or like or even want to play D&D with it might be different. But there isn't, so no.

I started the survey, but after about a dozen questions, I realized I'm already getting exactly what high-quality materials I want from small-print hobbyists like OSRIC, AS&SH, E.M.D.T., The Scribes of Sparn, Chaotic Henchmen, Advanced Adventures, MonkeyBlood, Usherwood, and many others. Let big corporate WotC spend its time catering to the lowest common denominator with McModules while I eat filet. It's a really great time for us!

rogatny wrote:A huge percentage of those, "Do you play D&D in order to..." questions my answer was, "Ugh! God, no!" It felt like 80% of them, but was probably only 70% of them.

Agreed! If I can dig up their pre-3.0 survey (I was one of the random public participants who took it at the time, and kept a copy of it), it would be interesting to compare/contrast the survey Qs.

Allan.

They forgot a couple of questions:

I enjoy wandering through steam tunnels (Y/N).
I once, in character as a Cleric (Holy Man), went to the top of the World Trade Center with the intent to jump off (Y/N).
I love art design featuring spikey armour, tribal tats, ridiculously huge swords (Y/N).
I love tons of skill lists, synergy bonuses, prestige classes and feats -- lots of feats! (Y/N).
I enjoy dressing up in homemade costumes and whacking fellow players with foam swords (Y/N).
I am an emo SJW/PC wanker whose trigger is the killing of monsters (Y/N).
Artwork of females in chainmail bikinis makes me feel uncomfortable. (Y/N).
If I cannot use weird in-character voices I throw a temper tantrum (Y/N).
I feel that 5E is the best edition EVAH!!!!1 (Y/N).
As a DM I demand that all 1st lvl PCs have extensive character backgrounds of no less than 25 pages (front and back) in 5-point Linotype (Y/N).

Will take a look.

I think its a bit of a lost cause. At least when it comes to WOTC ever designing toward 1E/0E. Unfortunately, he ship has sailed. People are deemed to different perhaps (then the 80s).

Not unlike Camelot. "For one brief moment there was greatness..." or however it went.

https://youtu.be/_lhduy0Em74 Oh yeah, thats it.

I took the survey. It felt like WotC plans to continue in their current vein, and want validation for that.

I don't think there's any interest on their part in the kind of D&D I play.