Mastodawn

What kind of GM are you?

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.

What is your GM style?

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.

Google Docs

S. John Ross 1d ago

@Grail Some of the questions were phrased in a way that made them unanswerable.

I'll go ahead and do closest-I-can-get, but there are so many baked-in assumptions that it'll render my answers worthless.

You can go ahead and skip those questions if you like.

S. John Ross 1d ago

@Grail Too late; I just used the "3" answers to mean "this doesn't apply at all to my games and it's ridiculous that anyone would assume it might." 😂

This applied to questions that amounted to "Do you live on Mars, or a moon of Mars?" questions that amounted to "Do you eat burgers, or pizza?" and those that amounted to "Would you rather eat nails or broken glass?" 😆

That’s fine, a neutral answer is good too.

Out of curiosity, which questions did you find most absurd?

S. John Ross 1d ago

Ooh. I'd say the ones that were nails-or-glass ... two things that I'd never do, and the idea of some combination or middle ground between them equally undesirable.

No thanks to nails.
No thanks to glass.
And no thanks to nails-and-glass salad.

Which ones were those?

S. John Ross 1d ago

@Grail Too many to list, but one example is "Is your game an open world sandbox or a linear railroad?"

Nails or glass. Yum.

I didn’t know there were options outside of the spectrum of those two. What’s your game?

S. John Ross 1d ago

Most of the GMs I know have several worlds and games. Many have dozens, and some have hundreds.

So the questions that talk as if I have just one - as you just did - were strange to me.

Anyway, bedtime for me. Best of luck with it.

Oh, I have several too. I’ve run in Doskvol, Orden, the Planescape, and two homebrew worlds I invented. I answered all of those questions with a weighted average of My worlds.