My playtesters and I are playing Doomsday Dawn every Tuesday, barring scheduling conflicts and bad weather. Alas, one of those scheduling conflicts is coming up on Tuesday, December 25. Therefore, our last scheduled session will occur Tuesday, December 18. And we won't finish Affair at Sombrefell Hall.
I will try to arrange another session to finish, but it might not work out. And the surveys shut down at the end of the year, so we cannot continue in January and still answer the surveys.
Affair at Sombrefell Hall is an endurance test. It says we should be prepared to answer questions such as how often characters were healed. If we don't finish, that number will be short of what would have happened if we had finished. That would be misleading data.
If we don't finish the chapter, should we skip the numerical survey and just answer the open survey? Should we take the numerical survey and skip the questions that require a finished game? What advice should I give my players?
While I know you of all people would be particularly pained to contribute to this - and I respect that - I must assume Paizo has robust methods in place to handle quirks in the data.
I would say take both surveys and complete as much as you feel comfortable completing. You will hardly be the only group to not finish that adventure but still take the survey, and there's probably still some useful information in your data. Especially with how meticulous you seem to be. :)
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I would suggest definitely take the open, and then maybe take the numerical survey but leave the portions that seem like they would be misleading blank. You're the GM and your wife is a player if I recall your group correctly, so you and she might want to go through the player survey together and decide which ones would be good to leave blank and then tell the rest of the group for their player surveys, or something like that. All the resource management questions come to mind as good to leave blank, and maybe questions about whether anyone died and the like since you won't have reached the boss. When you leave a question blank, it just doesn't count you for that question only, so it never skews the data.
Thanks for working hard to run through each adventure with an eye for RP and creative players trying unusual strategies. Having some groups do that is honestly more valuable than having every group methodically speeding through all 7; we need both types of playtests and we definitely got them!
Hey Mark, how does the survey data separate itself for these types of situations?
Hindsight but it seems it would have been useful to have a question for each part that asked if the adventure was run strictly by the book or if parts were modified. If marked as modified it would prompt them to write out what was modified in the adventure.
I'm wondering how many false positive/negative results were received based on table varience/Homebrew. Ex: people not using updated DCs for Mirrored Moon but still using errata past that change.
Thanks for the info Mark. My group is currently planning a double session the weekend before the New Year to see if we can crank out Part 7, but I'm not confident we'll finish in time (been taking an average of 3 session per part for us). Still want to contribute what I can, especially since the character creation session alone provided a few things I want to provide as feedback in the open survey.
I was wondering this as well, since our players are about to take off to the four winds for holidays and we haven't quite finished Mirrored Moon. It's helpful to know that I should still fill out what I can, while avoiding the numeric data that doesn't make sense without having reached the end. I should be able to manage that.
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Hey Mark, how does the survey data separate itself for these types of situations?
Hindsight but it seems it would have been useful to have a question for each part that asked if the adventure was run strictly by the book or if parts were modified. If marked as modified it would prompt them to write out what was modified in the adventure.
I'm wondering how many false positive/negative results were received based on table varience/Homebrew. Ex: people not using updated DCs for Mirrored Moon but still using errata past that change.
It doesn't separate itself out; it just doesn't include you in that question, so it'll show a different number of people as answering.
We can also figure out if any of the answers are obviously erroneous, like someone saying their group rested 50 times in Part 3, an adventure that all takes place in one night.