Fascinating...

Many moons ago, Wizards of the Coast did extensive marketing surveys to help them design D&D 3rd edition so it would sell. Can't fault them for that.

Anyway, some of the results of the survey have recently been posted at . I must say, I find the sections that are given (and I don't really believe that these represent the entirety of the results, which isn't claimed there anyway) quite fascinating. The only thing that I wish we had was a copy of the surveys and also the algorithms used to profile people - it would be useful to profile the group in order to better tailor adventures to the players.

Anyway, the thing I found most interesting was the section that said that pretty much all players, regardless of other results, looked for games with the following elements:

• Strong Characters and Exciting Story
  
• Role Playing
  
• Complexity Increases over Time
  
• Requires Strategic Thinking
  
• Competitive
  
• Add on sets/New versions available
  
• Uses imagination
  
• Mentally challenging
  

So, if one ditches the sixth of these (add-on sets), this provides a checklist of elements for a DM to incorporate into his games in order to help ensure a good time is had by all.

(Also interesting was the notion that most good DMs fall into the "Storyteller" category, while most good game designers fall into the "Thinker" category. I'm not sure that's right - I suspect most good DMs and game designers probably have a little of both, but I might well be wrong.)

"So, you all meet in a pub, when this old guy..."

Sorry I haven't posted in ages. The problem with agreeing with what the other person says is that it doesn't leave much room for comment.

Anyway, it looks like my next game is going to be another D&D campaign. For this one, I've been looking into creating an entirely new setting, and one of the elements that I wanted to get rid of was the generic pub, especially as a launching ground for adventures.

So, I've set up the major culture of the setting with a social taboo against eating in front of strangers. It is considered common to do so (except in the military, but that's life for the enlisted grunt). Instead of the standard in with a single common room, villages would have boarding houses, where small groups would rent a large room, and both dine and sleep there, in the company of their friends. (I'm reasonably sure that the eating thing was more or less how things worked in the days of the Roman Empire, but I may well be wrong about that. It doesn't really matter.)

There are three problems with this, derived from the role of the inn in the standard campaign:

1) The inn was often used as a starting point for adventures, a recruiting ground for mercenaries, and so forth. Removing the common room removes the usefulness of this approach.

2) The common room was the best place to look for rumours and gossip in the village. Without the common room, again we lose out.

3) The inn also provided a safe haven and a few regular NPCs, which could be used to ground the game. To a certain extent, this can be lost as well, since PCs will dine alone.

Naturally, each of these problems can be solved quite easily, by ensuring that there are marketplaces and fora in which to gather rumours and information, arranging for alternative sources for adventure hooks, and ensuring that there are familiar NPCs. Still, just one more thing for me to worry about.