Just finished filling my my feedback for the latest OneD&D playtest.
Right at the end there is a question asking your age and you can only answer using 1 or 2 characters.
I will have to tell my 100 year old friend not to spend the time filling the form in because right at the end they will have ot give up as they can not finish it (at least not truthfully)
It really doesn't seem like the primary age target that's going to answer that survey. But yes, it would be nice to allow 3 digits so that your centenarian friend could correctly indicate his age in the survey.
on a more serious note. I am not sure adding ages for anyone really helps the design. It Potentially allows a more malicious use of the data. The marketing team "Could" start adding weight to the demographic more likely to spend money rather than for general popularity or expertise. (both with their own potential issues)
My real question is what benefit is adding age to the survey and is it enough to justify the downsides?
on a more serious note. I am not sure adding ages for anyone really helps the design. It Potentially allows a more malicious use of the data. The marketing team "Could" start adding weight to the demographic more likely to spend money rather than for general popularity or expertise. (both with their own potential issues)
My real question is what benefit is adding age to the survey and is it enough to justify the downsides?
I am not saying they will not use it for more malicious means knowing age is useful in determining how widespread the survey responders are. Ideally they would like feedback from all of those likely to play one D&D. (So they might be less interested in players over 100 as they are less likely to be playing in 2 years time or whenever oneD&D comes out). If 40% of responders are over 40 but (from other surveys) WOTC known only 20% of players are over 40 those responses might get less weight than the 10% of responders who are teenagers if WOTC know 25% of players are teenagers.
If a rule gets an overall satisfaction of 75% it looks good but among teenagers that was 40% that would be an area for concern, especially if teenagers were underrepresented in the survey.
The same thing applies to questions like what versions of D&D people have played people who started with 3e might want different things than people who started with 5e but the survey is not a random sample of all players so they may weight responses appropriately.
I am not saying they will not use it for more malicious means knowing age is useful in determining how widespread the survey responders are. Ideally they would like feedback from all of those likely to play one D&D. (So they might be less interested in players over 100 as they are less likely to be playing in 2 years time or whenever oneD&D comes out). If 40% of responders are over 40 but (from other surveys) WOTC known only 20% of players are over 40 those responses might get less weight than the 10% of responders who are teenagers if WOTC know 25% of players are teenagers.
If a rule gets an overall satisfaction of 75% it looks good but among teenagers that was 40% that would be an area for concern, especially if teenagers were underrepresented in the survey.
The same thing applies to questions like what versions of D&D people have played people who started with 3e might want different things than people who started with 5e but the survey is not a random sample of all players so they may weight responses appropriately.
I'm curious about how you're quantifying the metrics of a survey you are not running or are formulating results from.
These assumptions you've made are malformed at best, and offensive at worst.
I'm curious about how you're quantifying the metrics of a survey you are not running or are formulating results from.
These assumptions you've made are malformed at best, and offensive at worst.
I am sorry if you found my post offensive. I obviously know nothing of the actual methods used in analysing the results but I did do a degree in mathematics and statistics which included how to deal with sampling bias (the people who answer a survey are not a completely random sample) and I was applying the general principle I learnt to the OneD&D survey. Since then while my work has involved a lot of statistics I have only conducted one significant survey (investigating the level of unsafe and unlicenced HGVs on British roads)
My degree was over 35 years ago and the survey was nearly 30 years ago so it is quite likely that techniques or objectives have moved on since then, so if what I said was maliformed or offensive I apologise.
I'm curious about how you're quantifying the metrics of a survey you are not running or are formulating results from.
These assumptions you've made are malformed at best, and offensive at worst.
I am sorry if you found my post offensive. I obviously know nothing of the actual methods used in analysing the results but I did do a degree in mathematics and statistics which included how to deal with sampling bias (the people who answer a survey are not a completely random sample) and I was applying the general principle I learnt to the OneD&D survey. Since then while my work has involved a lot of statistics I have only conducted one significant survey (investigating the level of unsafe and unlicenced HGVs on British roads)
My degree was over 35 years ago and the survey was nearly 30 years ago so it is quite likely that techniques or objectives have moved on since then, so if what I said was maliformed or offensive I apologise.
I didn't think your post was off or intending to be harsh. Honestly I think it was a simple mis-understanding. I think you added enough qualifiers for it not to be a negative assumption. Franky you were more fair than my post. Just to be clear, I actually do not believe that malicious use would be intended or even possible {except by very rare circumstances.} I just think the possibility of its existence is interesting. I am more concerned about incidental issues. For example the survivorship bias is rarely an intentional issue. Although, I have a hard time seeing that one apply here.
At the same time , My question was if age added a bias complication {intentional or intentional}. If we had a ratio of possible benefits to possible complications. Would it show giving out your age as satisfactory result?
It is interesting that i never thought to use age as a check for balance or spread of results.
In particular I do believe in a spread of appeal rather than a general appeal. or another way of saying it there should be a spot for almost everyone not every spot should appeal to almost everyone. The second half (general appeal) leaves bigger groups of outcasts. Now if age tracking truly is used for spread of appeal I am all-in. but....... is it really used for that? are there other ways to achieve such spread? is it sacrificing spread of other categories?
I may also have misunderstood Sedge. From his post I thought he found my suggestion the WOTC might be weighting answers to reduce sampling bias as malinformed / offensive as he referred to how I was quantifying the metrics rather than my saying that I could not rule out Roscoeivan's suggestion that it could be more malicious in that they want a prodct that is more attractive to the players likely to buy the most product.
While I hope that the objective is to make one D&D attractive to everyone there are many cases where businesses have done things far more unethical than targetting their product at those which will maximise company profit. For example the abuse of personnal data by a number of different social media companies. Cynthia Williams view that D&D is "under-monetized" and the original plan for the OGL I think at least means players should be open to the possibility that WOTCs will prioritise profit ahead of overall popularity.
Cynthia Williams view that D&D is "under-monetized" and the original plan for the OGL I think at least means players should be open to the possibility that WOTCs will prioritise profit ahead of overall popularity.
Generally, profit and popularity go together. Can't profit off a system nobody wants to buy.
Cynthia Williams view that D&D is "under-monetized" and the original plan for the OGL I think at least means players should be open to the possibility that WOTCs will prioritise profit ahead of overall popularity.
Generally, profit and popularity go together. Can't profit off a system nobody wants to buy.
Revenue = Number of customers * Average revenue per customer
If all their customers are only using the SRD or getting their stuff from pirate websites they don't profit either. (Though I suppose that is also a system noone wants to BUY)
Cynthia Williams view that D&D is "under-monetized" and the original plan for the OGL I think at least means players should be open to the possibility that WOTCs will prioritise profit ahead of overall popularity.
Generally, profit and popularity go together. Can't profit off a system nobody wants to buy.
There needs to be a balance, though, between making a game that a lot of people want to play as PCs while also making a game that someone would want to DM. Too much in one direction and the potential for the other often gets diminished. According to their 2020 site player data scrape, most popular class created on DDB is the Champion Fighter. The most vanilla, un-flavorful, skills-less subclass there is. Is it popular? Yes. But how many of those players are the kind that eventually want to become GMs? How many GMs would want to GM for a parties that only had Champion Fighters?
Revenue = Number of customers * Average revenue per customer
If all their customers are only using the SRD or getting their stuff from pirate websites they don't profit either. (Though I suppose that is also a system noone wants to BUY)
If it were truly "all", sure that would be true - but in the real world it's a sales funnel. The more people that get comfortable with the free Basic/SRD content, the more will eventually monetize.
My larger point is that Cynthia's statement is not some mask-off blasphemy / anathema to the true gamers' stance, rather it's an admission that getting more people to play D&D will benefit the bottom line. That does not have to be, and indeed isn't, at odds with simply making the most appealing game they can to the most amount of fans (new and existing.)
There needs to be a balance, though, between making a game that a lot of people want to play as PCs while also making a game that someone would want to DM. Too much in one direction and the potential for the other often gets diminished. According to their 2020 site player data scrape, most popular class created on DDB is the Champion Fighter. The most vanilla, un-flavorful, skills-less subclass there is. Is it popular? Yes. But how many of those players are the kind that eventually want to become GMs? How many GMs would want to GM for a parties that only had Champion Fighters?
I don't see how you can draw any meaningful correlation between Champion Fighter's popularity and eventual tendency to DM. Champion is popular because it's the most straightforward starting point for a new player with no books who just wants to sit with their friends and hit/shoot stuff. However many of those players go on to become DMs has nothing to do with the Champion itself.
There needs to be a balance, though, between making a game that a lot of people want to play as PCs while also making a game that someone would want to DM. Too much in one direction and the potential for the other often gets diminished. According to their 2020 site player data scrape, most popular class created on DDB is the Champion Fighter. The most vanilla, un-flavorful, skills-less subclass there is. Is it popular? Yes. But how many of those players are the kind that eventually want to become GMs? How many GMs would want to GM for a parties that only had Champion Fighters?
I don't see how you can draw any meaningful correlation between Champion Fighter's popularity and eventual tendency to DM. Champion is popular because it's the most straightforward starting point for a new player with no books who just wants to sit with their friends and hit/shoot stuff. However many of those players go on to become DMs has nothing to do with the Champion itself.
Well, i understand that I did not make a very clear argument there. There are reasons why the # of people who have ever DMed is always a lot fewer than the total # who have ever played. Being a DM takes not just time and money, it also requires the inclination to not be bothered by having to attend to a lot of fiddly little details, reading a lot, planning a lot and some people skills. Even DMs who mostly use modules do a lot of planning if they are engaged in long-term campaigns with the same group(s) of people. Champions Fighters are the least detail-oriented subclass from a very straightforward class. People who are satisfied playing a Champion Fighter (rather than those who merely pick it up for a one-shot) tend not to become DMs because DMs are people who enjoy some degree of complexity to their games. A subclass with no complexity on top of a class with no complexity would be boring to someone like that. People who become DMs are therefore far more likely to enjoy playing more complex classes and subclasses like the Battlemaster Fighter, any non-evocation-centric Wizard, Artificers, Bards, etc. So what is the most popular is not always what is healthy for the hobby in the long run because you will always need DMs (unless a chat bot somehow gets so advanced as to replace DMs in general) and DMs are less likely to enjoy playing the game just to roll dice and joke with friends - because there are plenty of games where you can easily throw dice and joke with friends that take a heck of a lot less commitment in terms of time and money than D&D.
Yeah sorry, that's still a heck of a reach. It assumes a lot of facts not in evidence - including that most people who play Champion do so to the exclusion of more mechanically complex subclasses rather than as a stepping stone to them, that they're doing so out of a general aversion to complexity in play that can then be translated 1:1 to an aversion to common DMing preparatory tasks, that DMs as a group are less likely when playing to want to just tune out and roll dice with friends, and a bunch of other qualities that just read more like personal projection to me than anything statistically significant about either set. And all of the above is then somehow being bundled up and tenuously linked to a statement Cynthia Williams made that had neither any bearing on Champion Fighters nor on DM conversion rates. It's just a few contortions too many.
Yeah sorry, that's still a heck of a reach. It assumes a lot of facts not in evidence - including that most people who play Champion do so to the exclusion of more mechanically complex subclasses rather than as a stepping stone to them, that they're doing so out of a general aversion to complexity in play that can then be translated 1:1 to an aversion to common DMing preparatory tasks, that DMs as a group are less likely when playing to want to just tune out and roll dice with friends, and a bunch of other qualities that just read more like personal projection to me than anything statistically significant about either set. And all of the above is then somehow being bundled up and tenuously linked to a statement Cynthia Williams made that had neither any bearing on Champion Fighters nor on DM conversion rates. It's just a few contortions too many.
There is also no published evidence that people who play Champion Fighter move on to play more complex classes, so that's not a very useful argument either way. To acknowledge your point, I'm sure there are many who try the Champion Fighter, quickly get bored of it, then move onto something more complex. However, without hard evidence that is the case, my point still stands. People who are happy playing the most detail-less subclass are not the people who eventually become DMs, at least not the DMs who do more than dabble at DMing. A profitable TTRPG market relies on people who want to be DMs and while DMs might dabble at playing Champion Fighter, the underlying personality types who commit to DMing, who buy multiple sourcebooks, modules, etc. are not same personality type as the people who not only try out the Champion Fighter, but who also consistently enjoy crit fishing using the least complicated subclass there is.
People who are happy playing the most detail-less subclass are not the people who eventually become DMs, at least not the DMs who do more dabble at DMing.
Even if you had a citation for this claim, you have no evidence that the D&D audience, never mind the TTRPG market, is meaningfully impacted by this group.
In fact, while Champion Fighter is indeed the most played subclass in the game, the vast majority of characters in the DDB statistics are something other than Champion Fighter. Its existence is not indicative of anything for the game as a whole, positive or negative.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
To post a comment, please login or register a new account.
Just finished filling my my feedback for the latest OneD&D playtest.
Right at the end there is a question asking your age and you can only answer using 1 or 2 characters.
I will have to tell my 100 year old friend not to spend the time filling the form in because right at the end they will have ot give up as they can not finish it (at least not truthfully)
It really doesn't seem like the primary age target that's going to answer that survey. But yes, it would be nice to allow 3 digits so that your centenarian friend could correctly indicate his age in the survey.
Yeah, this is discrimination against the elderly.
I told them that age doesn't work like that in a previous survey.
I'm pretty sure you can skip the section about your age and those other credentials. Only the parts with red asterisks are necessary to complete.
So, your friend doesn't have to lie about this at least, though the fact that you aren't able to enter 3 numbers is annoying and should be changed.
BoringBard's long and tedious posts somehow manage to enrapture audiences. How? Because he used Charm Person, the #1 bard spell!
He/him pronouns. Call me Bard. PROUD NERD!
Ever wanted to talk about your parties' worst mistakes? Do so HERE. What's your favorite class, why? Share & explain
HERE.Y2K all over again
EZD6 by DM Scotty
https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/397599/EZD6-Core-Rulebook?
on a more serious note. I am not sure adding ages for anyone really helps the design. It Potentially allows a more malicious use of the data. The marketing team "Could" start adding weight to the demographic more likely to spend money rather than for general popularity or expertise. (both with their own potential issues)
My real question is what benefit is adding age to the survey and is it enough to justify the downsides?
I am not saying they will not use it for more malicious means knowing age is useful in determining how widespread the survey responders are. Ideally they would like feedback from all of those likely to play one D&D. (So they might be less interested in players over 100 as they are less likely to be playing in 2 years time or whenever oneD&D comes out). If 40% of responders are over 40 but (from other surveys) WOTC known only 20% of players are over 40 those responses might get less weight than the 10% of responders who are teenagers if WOTC know 25% of players are teenagers.
If a rule gets an overall satisfaction of 75% it looks good but among teenagers that was 40% that would be an area for concern, especially if teenagers were underrepresented in the survey.
The same thing applies to questions like what versions of D&D people have played people who started with 3e might want different things than people who started with 5e but the survey is not a random sample of all players so they may weight responses appropriately.
I'm curious about how you're quantifying the metrics of a survey you are not running or are formulating results from.
These assumptions you've made are malformed at best, and offensive at worst.
I am sorry if you found my post offensive. I obviously know nothing of the actual methods used in analysing the results but I did do a degree in mathematics and statistics which included how to deal with sampling bias (the people who answer a survey are not a completely random sample) and I was applying the general principle I learnt to the OneD&D survey. Since then while my work has involved a lot of statistics I have only conducted one significant survey (investigating the level of unsafe and unlicenced HGVs on British roads)
My degree was over 35 years ago and the survey was nearly 30 years ago so it is quite likely that techniques or objectives have moved on since then, so if what I said was maliformed or offensive I apologise.
I didn't think your post was off or intending to be harsh. Honestly I think it was a simple mis-understanding. I think you added enough qualifiers for it not to be a negative assumption. Franky you were more fair than my post. Just to be clear, I actually do not believe that malicious use would be intended or even possible {except by very rare circumstances.} I just think the possibility of its existence is interesting. I am more concerned about incidental issues. For example the survivorship bias is rarely an intentional issue. Although, I have a hard time seeing that one apply here.
At the same time , My question was if age added a bias complication {intentional or intentional}. If we had a ratio of possible benefits to possible complications. Would it show giving out your age as satisfactory result?
It is interesting that i never thought to use age as a check for balance or spread of results.
In particular I do believe in a spread of appeal rather than a general appeal. or another way of saying it there should be a spot for almost everyone not every spot should appeal to almost everyone. The second half (general appeal) leaves bigger groups of outcasts. Now if age tracking truly is used for spread of appeal I am all-in. but....... is it really used for that? are there other ways to achieve such spread? is it sacrificing spread of other categories?
I may also have misunderstood Sedge. From his post I thought he found my suggestion the WOTC might be weighting answers to reduce sampling bias as malinformed / offensive as he referred to how I was quantifying the metrics rather than my saying that I could not rule out Roscoeivan's suggestion that it could be more malicious in that they want a prodct that is more attractive to the players likely to buy the most product.
While I hope that the objective is to make one D&D attractive to everyone there are many cases where businesses have done things far more unethical than targetting their product at those which will maximise company profit. For example the abuse of personnal data by a number of different social media companies. Cynthia Williams view that D&D is "under-monetized" and the original plan for the OGL I think at least means players should be open to the possibility that WOTCs will prioritise profit ahead of overall popularity.
Generally, profit and popularity go together. Can't profit off a system nobody wants to buy.
Revenue = Number of customers * Average revenue per customer
If all their customers are only using the SRD or getting their stuff from pirate websites they don't profit either. (Though I suppose that is also a system noone wants to BUY)
There needs to be a balance, though, between making a game that a lot of people want to play as PCs while also making a game that someone would want to DM. Too much in one direction and the potential for the other often gets diminished. According to their 2020 site player data scrape, most popular class created on DDB is the Champion Fighter. The most vanilla, un-flavorful, skills-less subclass there is. Is it popular? Yes. But how many of those players are the kind that eventually want to become GMs? How many GMs would want to GM for a parties that only had Champion Fighters?
If it were truly "all", sure that would be true - but in the real world it's a sales funnel. The more people that get comfortable with the free Basic/SRD content, the more will eventually monetize.
My larger point is that Cynthia's statement is not some mask-off blasphemy / anathema to the true gamers' stance, rather it's an admission that getting more people to play D&D will benefit the bottom line. That does not have to be, and indeed isn't, at odds with simply making the most appealing game they can to the most amount of fans (new and existing.)
I don't see how you can draw any meaningful correlation between Champion Fighter's popularity and eventual tendency to DM. Champion is popular because it's the most straightforward starting point for a new player with no books who just wants to sit with their friends and hit/shoot stuff. However many of those players go on to become DMs has nothing to do with the Champion itself.
Well, i understand that I did not make a very clear argument there. There are reasons why the # of people who have ever DMed is always a lot fewer than the total # who have ever played. Being a DM takes not just time and money, it also requires the inclination to not be bothered by having to attend to a lot of fiddly little details, reading a lot, planning a lot and some people skills. Even DMs who mostly use modules do a lot of planning if they are engaged in long-term campaigns with the same group(s) of people. Champions Fighters are the least detail-oriented subclass from a very straightforward class. People who are satisfied playing a Champion Fighter (rather than those who merely pick it up for a one-shot) tend not to become DMs because DMs are people who enjoy some degree of complexity to their games. A subclass with no complexity on top of a class with no complexity would be boring to someone like that. People who become DMs are therefore far more likely to enjoy playing more complex classes and subclasses like the Battlemaster Fighter, any non-evocation-centric Wizard, Artificers, Bards, etc. So what is the most popular is not always what is healthy for the hobby in the long run because you will always need DMs (unless a chat bot somehow gets so advanced as to replace DMs in general) and DMs are less likely to enjoy playing the game just to roll dice and joke with friends - because there are plenty of games where you can easily throw dice and joke with friends that take a heck of a lot less commitment in terms of time and money than D&D.
Yeah sorry, that's still a heck of a reach. It assumes a lot of facts not in evidence - including that most people who play Champion do so to the exclusion of more mechanically complex subclasses rather than as a stepping stone to them, that they're doing so out of a general aversion to complexity in play that can then be translated 1:1 to an aversion to common DMing preparatory tasks, that DMs as a group are less likely when playing to want to just tune out and roll dice with friends, and a bunch of other qualities that just read more like personal projection to me than anything statistically significant about either set. And all of the above is then somehow being bundled up and tenuously linked to a statement Cynthia Williams made that had neither any bearing on Champion Fighters nor on DM conversion rates. It's just a few contortions too many.
There is also no published evidence that people who play Champion Fighter move on to play more complex classes, so that's not a very useful argument either way. To acknowledge your point, I'm sure there are many who try the Champion Fighter, quickly get bored of it, then move onto something more complex. However, without hard evidence that is the case, my point still stands. People who are happy playing the most detail-less subclass are not the people who eventually become DMs, at least not the DMs who do more than dabble at DMing. A profitable TTRPG market relies on people who want to be DMs and while DMs might dabble at playing Champion Fighter, the underlying personality types who commit to DMing, who buy multiple sourcebooks, modules, etc. are not same personality type as the people who not only try out the Champion Fighter, but who also consistently enjoy crit fishing using the least complicated subclass there is.
Even if you had a citation for this claim, you have no evidence that the D&D audience, never mind the TTRPG market, is meaningfully impacted by this group.
In fact, while Champion Fighter is indeed the most played subclass in the game, the vast majority of characters in the DDB statistics are something other than Champion Fighter. Its existence is not indicative of anything for the game as a whole, positive or negative.