Pre-Campaign Survey

I mentioned a campaign survey once that I used for my campaigns, but I never actually published it. You can find it here. The idea is that players fill out the survey by indicating where they want the campaign to be on seven sliding scales.

For example, a player might check off the box halfway between role-playing and roll-playing, indicating a fairly typical campaign with a mix of combat and non-combat. They might go slightly right of center on rural/urban, indicating a slight preference for being in and near civilization.

I usually fill one out myself too and take the average, though I keep in mind any outliers. It helps me plan my campaign around what the players want and expect to play, sometimes in a way that changes the campaign significantly. Here’s how my last one turned out, with a surprisingly high preference toward a campaigned, non-episodic game:

I know the rows are reversed. Not sure what happened there.

These are general guidelines. Just because the players wanted to be around PG-13 doesn’t mean I can’t have G-rated moments, and vice versa. But it does indicate that I shouldn’t be running a campaign where the players are typical people just trying to survive after the End Days (low tech, low power, dark tone).

It’s clear that this is focused toward D&D; other systems don’t have a magic level to chart (though they might have a tech level, or a spirit level or something), or they assume a certain power level, or they don’t have patience for combat as a campaign focus. It also works best if you’re making your own setting, like a grown-up; Eberron, for example, leans toward dark tone, high magic, and low power level, and the survey results should be weighted accordingly.

Treating each as a scale from 1 to 7, like my players tend to do, my baseline is something like 3/6/5/5/3/5/6. It varies based on the campaign and what media I’ve recently consumed, but this line probably isn’t terribly surprising to anybody who’s seen my influence map. There aren’t any extreme values there, and that’s to be expected. In the survey above, I asked six players (and myself) seven questions to get forty-seven values with two abstentions. Only three of those values were a 1 or 7, and two of those were me trying to skew the results to fit the setting. Players tend to want something in the middle, and when they don’t it’s the DM’s job to sit up and take notice.

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