The 'Clan Questionnaire'

From: Viktor Haag <vhaag_at_...>
Date: Mon, 14 Jul 2003 11:34:24 -0400

So, with two episodes under our belts, I decided that a change of pace would be good, so last Friday, I directed my group through the clan questionnaire.

I would rate the experience B- to B.

The questionnaire is problematic, I think. Here's some observations:

• Who is the intended audience for this thing? My players (and, indeed, I, to a certain extent) are all Glorantha-newbies, and this questionnaire seemed in many cases to be pitched for more utility a people with a better understanding of the background.

  In many cases, the choices were not really comprehensible to   the players, and as a result, maintaining interest was tough.

• How long should the process take? It took us about 2.5 hours to get through the whole questionnaire. I tried to keep things moving, but it still took us that long. I think this is too long to maintain interest in the thing. I thought that we could have split the thing up over a series of nights, in hind-sight, but perhaps that advice would have been well situated in the book itself.
• When should this process take place? It seemed to me that, if you're intending to campaign as we are: a bunch of people, all of the same clan, with clan-centred adventures (indeed as BA and OiD seem to encourage one to do), then this questionnaire really needs attending to very early in the campaign's existence.

  Although we've only been playing for a few months, we had   filled in a fair amount of detail about the clan just through   play, and greater effort was then required to reconcile this   detail with the questions in the form.

  This was made doubly difficult because, as newbies, the   implications of many choices weren't really obvious to us, and   in a few cases, we had to retcon the choices that "seemed to   feel right" because they didn't really jive with the   established setting we had built.

I thought of several things that might make this questionnaire more newbie-friendly:

• Rewriting the point of view of questions that asked you "what your clan did" in the specific instance, and then tying general historical choices to this modern behaviour, rather than the other way around, might be useful.

  For example, all the various factors involved in determining   your Clan's precise wealth and Lunar Friendliness might be   handled better by newbies with questions that *started* from   the following two general inquiries: Is your clan wealthy,   average, or poor? Is your clan friendly, neutral, or hostile to   the lunar occupation?

• Rewriting the questionnaire to start in modern times and work backwards through history, rather than from the dawn age forward might work better. The easiest questions for newbies to answer about their clan are the most immediate and practical ones. Once these details are sketched out, it should be easier to successfully refine them by building up a clan history tracking backwards through time, I thought, than by starting with nebulous mythical contexts and working forward through time.
• Rewriting the questionnaire so that questions never had more than three or four choices. Some of the quetions plainly provide too many options. In some cases, perhaps those options can be arrived at in successive refinements of decision trees with three options at each stage, rather than one question with nine choices. This would increase the number of questions, but reduce the options at each stage (making each choice easier and more comprehensible).

  The refinement approach could also be used to make choices   based on the underlying meaning behind the many options   (instead of saying "which hero does your clan revere the most,   provide a series of questions that help focus on the particular   hero based on clan values or behaviour that the players can   more easily make choices about" -- frex, "does your clan value   direct physical confrontation as a way to solve problems, or do   you prefer the diplomatic approach?") These general "root"   behaviour questions can then also provide initial refinement   choices for not only one particular question (which hero does   your clan revere the most), but rather a host of more specific   questions (i.e. your clan's attitude to problem solving with   violence can affect a wide variety of the choices it made in   the past).

I think a combination of these improvements could help build a questionnaire that first and foremost helps the players illuminate the fundamental societal nature of the group in which they live, and then explicate and enrich that understanding with historical detail.

Perhaps these thoughts are useful?

-- 
Viktor Haag : Software & Information Design : Research In Motion
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