In my profession I am used to very regular feedback sessions, I work in IT and every 2 weeks as a team we spend a few hours reviewing the past 2 weeks in an open honest forum, discussing what went well, what has gone badly and what we can do to improve/resolve issues. 

I have taken this into one of my campaigns, where again we all work in IT and a few weeks ago did a retro, a full and frank and honest discussion about the campaign, what people liked, didn’t like, wanted less of or felt was missing. Some great stuff came out if that and it made me think, beyond session 0 how often do you as DMs actually have formal feedback sessions? 

I don’t have formal sessions specifically for feedback, but I do keep a conversation going via Discord for that purpose.  And at the beginning of each gaming session, I glance over my notes from the week before, and briefly discuss them with my players.  If there are any problems during a game, I make a point of discussing it with them the next day, also via Discord.

I don’t have formal feedback, but I do chat casually with my players after game sessions and listen to them. 

No formal feedback. I asked a couple of times. But not much came out of it. Most of my players are also new so they may not have much to compare with. 

I suppose to clarify this session specifically looked at style of play, how much fun the players where having and have them a chance to talk to each other as opposed to rule clarifications or game mechanic discussions.

Might be partly down to the fact we are so practiced at it by now from work but we probably over killed it lol, we had a remote white board, people put “sticky notes up” for discussion points. Some of the things that came up wouldn’t have necessarily come out of the time we have post game to chat (partly I think a covid thing as this game so far is fully remote). But it wasn’t just feedback players to me, I was able to bring up things in my head to them and get them thinking about things like roleplay styles, supporting me with player backgrounds etc. We probably went over the top, we listed actions, people owned them, the bag of holding inventory for instance was on a players physical par at home, which isn’t really useful remotely if that player can’t make it (in a physical game I keep copies of everything with me so nothing gets forgotten) so they moved to using Google docs.  I took on board the fact some felt I overuse the secret squirrel channel I created for those 1 on 1 moments and asked me to trust the players more to enjoy those storyline moments without it then being meta gamed so I am going to balance that a bit more. One asked if there can be an old fashioned dungeon run at some point (as he said not a long one but something) which made me realize that my maps are really open plan, even underground I try and give complete freedom so I have created a couple of encounters that have that old school feel. 

I also got some great feedback, I always worry my players are feeling railroaded even in an open world, they all said independently they loved the sense of complete freedom I was giving them. They love my narriative approach and where happy with the slow pace to their personal stories in relation to the early part of the campaign. 

I imagine when we get back to face to face some of this will work its way out during normal post game discussion, but currently we jump in discord, play, spend 30 mins or so post game catching up on life and don’t really have that post game conversation and then between sessions we are online talking about everything else. When we are physically working in town meeting up for drinks and having more general chit chat I imagine we will talk about the game. 

Another campaign I am a player in the DM did an anonymous survey online and we talked through the results, that was a cyberpunk game and again he got some great feedback, from overusing the VTT, to how we felt netrunning was breaking up play, to the tone of the game and how we enjoyed the pacing. He went away really excited by the feedback.