[RPG] Post-Act Survey or Same Page Tool

campaign-developmentgm-techniquessame-page-tool

I have been running a campaign for some time now that is winding its way down to finish what I'll call "Act I". Soon my group will take a break from my campaign to let someone else DM and I'm wondering if before I start working on Act II, if I should give my players some sort of survey to assess good/bad things they liked/disliked in the campaign thus far and how I could improve.

On the other hand, there is a lot of success behind the Same Page Tool, and I'm wondering if I wouldn't be better off having everyone sit together and do that to assess how to handle Act II.

Has anyone done something like this? Is there greater value in a normal survey when you're trying to assess what you can handle better as a GM or is the Same Page Tool the end-all-be-all super-tool for assessing how you should run your campaign?

Best Answer

Feedback is good, getting useful feedback is hard.

First, to your question about the Same Page Tool: in my experience it's more useful as an idea or a prompt than it is as a tool.* I certainly wouldn't recommend it, unaltered, for a post-campaign or intermission/course-adjusting survey.

*-This is in no way intended to disparage the SPT: I perpetually thank its author for their contribution to the practice of reasonably discussing our games!

The key to a planning survey is to get actionable and understandable suggestions. Compare these three questions:

  1. What do you enjoy in an RPG?
  2. What was an enjoyable moment in the last RPG you played?
  3. What was your favorite moment of our campaign so far?

To the first (again, in my experience) you're lucky to get anything more than "um... an interesting plot? A fun character?" The second is quite a bit better: we're much better at remembering what we have enjoyed than predicting what we will enjoy. But you don't have to stop there: you can go to the third question and listen to an answer that implicates your future plans directly.

Compare, too, these questions:

  1. What do you like in a GM/what makes a GM "good" for you?
  2. What do you think I do well and poorly as a GM?
  3. Tell me about a time we were playing and you thought 'I might have done that a different way.'

Same progression, right? Question 2 is much better than 1, but we're really bad at telling friends what they're doing wrong--we sugar-coat things, we throw them a duck, &c. Question 3, though, gets to it: your friends probably have had some ideas they haven't shared--explicitly ask them to share. And listen to them.

Turn it up a notch.

I think the above is enough to get you thinking/writing a useful instrument either for written feedback or as a set of conversation prompts. But there are two further things I suggest:

  1. Do this frequently. There's no need for this to be a mid-campaign-only exercise. I try to make a habit to ask, at the end of every session, for "things you liked, things you didn't, something you thought 'oh, we could have used this here,' something you'd want to get rid of, and any other suggestions." I've rarely gotten much feedback other than "thanks, this was great." But I have gotten actionable suggestions which, I believe, is more than I'd get if I never asked. (I also add that sort of tag-line to inter-session e-mails. It's marginally more productive there, I believe.)

  2. Prepare them for these sorts of questions. If all you do is ask the players questions like above you're missing one huge source of feedback: you. I believe you already know things you'd like to to better, things you'd like to add, things you're working on. Tell that to your players. Starting a campaign with "hey, everyone, I'm really trying to focus on livening up my descriptions of scenes as you encounter them. I'm reading a lot and practicing a lot, but any time you think of something--good or bad--I'd appreciate a note or suggestion. Thanks!"