Greetings, programs! I'm using factor analysis to find a scientific answer to the question, "What kinds of GM styles are there?"
You're going to answer 43 questions about your GM style. All of the questions have answers ranging from "strongly X" to "strongly Y". If you're neutral, strongly ambivalent, prefer a balance between the two options, or wish there were a third answer, click the middle option. If the question doesn't apply to you at all, skip it.
Once all the data's in, I'll run the numbers and work out which questions have a lot of correlation with each other, so that GM style can be reduced to a few key factors. Those factors will be our most scientific answer to our research question. However, there's no such thing as objective science. Our questions were submitted by the MCDM community, so the final results will reflect the kinds of things the MCDM community thinks are important to ask about GM style, and the patterns of association in your responses. So if you want the factors we find to reflect who you are, please answer all the questions and send the survey to your friends.
Special thanks to Matthew Colville for coming up with this research question, and to our question designers, Geddy Lee, Tgnewman, Argent, and tidnabemit. This survey was designed by Viridian Grail.
Greetings, programs! With the MCDM community’s help, I’ve prepared a survey of GM styles, so that I can use factor analysis to find the common variables underlying GMs’ responses, and come up with a scientific answer to “what kinds of GM styles are there?” The survey has 43 questions and takes a few minutes to complete. The more people answer, the better the data we’ll get.
EDIT: We got 101 responses and now we’re analysing the data. First results: There are 9 dimensions of GM style! Not sure what they are, but there’s 9 of them.
One that felt most silly to me was “does your world have spinoff adventures and one-shots or is it one big story”, because this question assumes
A) I have “my” world
B) I always use that world
C) That there is a “main” story
D) Any deviation from that “main” story is a “spinoff”
E) That one-shot adventures have anything to do with any of the above points
There’s definitely a version of that question I could answer, but it would be more like one of these (and I’m honestly not sure which the question means):
“Does your group play one continuous campaign or a variety of episodic scenarios?”
“Do you always use the same homebrew setting when you run campaigns?”
“Does your game have a single primary story, or are players free to pursue their own objectives and deviations?”
One that felt most silly to me was “does your world have spinoff adventures and one-shots or is it one big story”, because this question assumes
A) I have “my” world
B) I always use that world
C) That there is a “main” story
D) Any deviation from that “main” story is a “spinoff”
E) That one-shot adventures have anything to do with any of the above points
There’s definitely a version of that question I could answer, but it would be more like one of these (and I’m honestly not sure which the question means):
“Does your group play one continuous campaign or a variety of episodic scenarios?”
“Do you always use the same homebrew setting when you run campaigns?”
“Does your game have a single primary story, or are players free to pursue their own objectives and deviations?”