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Easy Surveys for the GM

Good GMs care about making the gaming experience better for their players.  However, soliciting candid feedback at the gaming table is colored by the interaction of personalities.  To get real feedback from the group, you need it to be on their own, and often, you need it to be anonymous.  Enter the survey.

Surveys are sets of questions you can pose to your players to get very specific feedback.  Luckily, doing surveys has gotten a whole lots easier with the availability of Google Forms.

Google Forms (lots of how-to information found here) are easy to use, free, and automatically take care of pulling the data together into an easy-to-digest form.  I recently used one of these to do a survey to determine how the players liked the previous campaign and to get ideas for the next campaign.

From this experience and based on previous experience with surveys, here are some quick pointers:


  • Keep it short.  Nobody wants to spend a lot of time answering questions.
  • Make sure you give all the possible answers.  Avoid write-in answers, because these just get left blank.
  • Give incentive for doing the survey.  In my case, I gave everyone an extra karma point for getting it done (I use karma points as a hero point-like construct.)
  • Focus on the aspect of the game you want to get at, not on everything.
  • Make it fun.  Boring questions and boring answers suck.  Make some of the options strangely descriptive.

Here's an example question and answers to give you an idea (Yes they are meant to be slightly crazy -- that keeps it interesting.):

What is your favorite playstyle?
A)  Hack 'n' slash -- I like my foes small and in greater numbers.  Bring on the bald goblin hoards!
B)  Puzzling and thinking -- I like to watch the veins in the the other player's heads grow and throb while I ponder the goblin that only tells the truth and the goblin that only lies who hold the keys to two doors, each having four colors painted on them.
C)  Role-playing -- I think costumes should be mandatory, especially for Player X, the big burly man who plays a fairy in a pink tutu with a sparkly wand.  I want to be able to grow my character into something almost real enough for his own TV series.  We need more props.  I am almost done building my character's purple skull ring with green emerald eyes.  Is it ok if my background is more that 10 pages?
D)  Roll-playing -- I need more rules.  I want to be able to bring my own lawyer to the game, so he can help me rules lawyer the right way.  I want to use the rules to argue that my animal companion gets his own mount.  I also have a configuration of rules that allow me to argue that I can open a black hole using a bag of holding, an everburning torch, and a ray of enfeeblement spell.
E)  Meh -- I don't care.  I like hanging out and I don't play MTG. Can we order pizza next game? 
F)  Masochistic -- You know what we really need -- more character deaths!  We haven't even had a TPK yet!  What happened to that plot line where Cthulu returns riding a Tarrasque?  Oh, and I want another chance at Tomb of Horrors!
G)  Godlike -- I want to be able to min-max my character so I can ride a Tarrasque and take over the entire planet!  And that is just on Tuesday!
H)  GM -- I want to GM.  Payback is fun O Mighty GM!  

Of course, this is just an example.  You would need to ask the questions you are interest in and customize the options for the players at your table.  If you can make the questions and answers fun enough that they laugh out loud, you are probably on the right track.

Once you have built your survey, Google Forms gives you a URL to send it out to your party.  Be patient -- getting even a small party to fill out a survey takes time.  Make sure you tie it to a reward so they can have a reason to do it.  Offer to bring a special snack if everyone completes it, or offer an in-game incentive.

Most importantly, take the results from the survey as an important directive from your players.  If you think your players are comfortable with discussing the results, do that, but keep in mind that at the table, stronger personalities will dominate, while the survey truly gives everyone an equal voice.  Take the conclusions of your survey and do something concrete with them -- like improve your game for your players.  In the end, it makes everyone happier.
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