The Art of Feedback

Now that the first UA of One Dungeons and Dragons has been out for some time, Wizards of the Coast has opened up a survey for feedback. Everyone I have talked to online has a lot of thoughts and opinions on the changes Hopefully they will submit them through the survey. While giving feedback is important, how you give this feedback is just as important. For GMs and Players alike, having the skill of giving useful feedback can make your games much better.

Constructively Express Your Opinion

Communication at the table is vital to a well working TTRPG Game. Like any group, you need to have a consistent and clear way of expressing your thoughts and feelings between all involved. Giving feedback is one of the best ways to do just that. In order to grow and improve our abilities, this communication is key. Letting someone know what you liked, and maybe what you did not like, makes sure that everyone improves. It opens the door for discussion and learning, and allows all sides to know what works and what does not.

Tips to Improve Feedback

When giving feedback, it is important to make sure that it allows for growth and understanding. It is one thing to share your thoughts and feelings about an adventure or instance at the table, but another thing to refine those opinions into something that can be used for constructive purposes. I have a few tips that I find quite useful to make this happen.

Time to Process

Feedback can feel very reactionary, especially when it involves something you may not have enjoyed. The urge to express your opinions and share your feelings in the moment where everything is fresh on your mind can feel very important in the moment. This can cause a few problems. Immediate feedback can end up being more of an emotional response than one intended to help. 

Imagine a combat encounter that ends in a TPK. Emotions ran high and the session was stressful, and it ended in a way that might not entirely feel rewarding. At that point your feedback might be more negative out of reaction to the unfortunate encounter, especially if it feels like it was unfair. It may lead to accusatory wording or an accidental defensive remark that hurts someone’s feelings.

Taking a step back to think about the situation helps you detach a little emotionally, and view the situation logically. In our above situation, taking some time to process what happened can be incredibly useful to have a more rounded opinion of the situation. Once you let the fresh emotions relax a bit, you may see the other side of the situation. Returning to the above example, perhaps the encounter was created in favor of the enemy, with some element of the environment to help balance things out or end the combat entirely. Maybe the party did not have the right focus. Taking the time to step back and think before you give your thoughts can help you realize this.

Making a Sandwich

When giving feedback, it can often be easy to focus on either positive or negative elements. Both are useful on their own, but neither make a balanced feedback. Giving nothing but praise and admiration can feel good to the person receiving, but it will lack anything that they can use to improve. Inversely, focusing on the rough patches can be a bit deflating, and make it feel like what you are giving feedback on had no redeeming qualities whatsoever. Instead, a mixture of both creates the best kind of feedback. There are many ways to do this, but one method I like to use is known as the “Compliment Sandwich”.

The way a compliment sandwich works is that you start with something you liked, follow up with areas you thought could be improved, and finish with some more positive elements. It makes sure that you have a variety of both positive and negative feedback. Additionally, it begins and ends with things that you enjoyed overall, which can help make sure that your feedback is diverse and informative. Let’s walk through an example.

Imagine you just ran through a dungeon. The party stalled out on a puzzle, and ended up taking longer than you expected. You ask for feedback, and get back a variety of results. Some feedback just focuses on what they liked about the encounter. They talk about how your puzzle felt right at home in the dungeon and that it really helped immersion. This feedback might make you think that there was nothing wrong with the encounter altogether. Inversely, you get feedback focused on how hard it was to pick up the hints, and how frustrating it felt to determine clues for the puzzle. The feedback that dwells on the elements that need to be improved might make it feel like there was nothing redeeming about your puzzle at all, and make you want to scrap the whole thing, either reworking it entirely or just avoiding it. The sandwich style feedback, however, gives the best of both worlds. It confirms what elements of your puzzle worked and were enjoyed, but also lets you know the areas that need improvement. 

Feedback should not just be positive or negative whenever possible. You want feedback to provide an honest opinion with areas that can be improved by the creator. Just one or the other can make the feedback feel incomplete, just like how a sandwich made with a single ingredient does not really feel like a sandwich. Mixing the two also makes for a more palatable response, giving praise where applicable but also pointing out areas that could be improved.

Interactive Feedback

Feedback is all about communication. Getting the thoughts and opinions from someone helps you improve. However sometimes it can be hard to get decent feedback when only one side is asking all the questions. As the creator, you might have a very specific viewpoint that has been honed after the time, energy, and focus you put into your work. GM Blindness, as I talked about previously, is a very real thing that can happen. It can also happen to any creator, causing you to fixate on areas differently than someone else with less experience with whatever it is you have created. Having the ability to have interactive feedback, where both sides can ask and answer questions, can help mitigate that.

Let’s say you are planning a Heist encounter for your party. They need to break into the Noble’s house and retrieve some incriminating evidence. You spend your prep focusing on creating the perfect encounter. You work to make sure that the party can Fail Forward, and not stall out in a game. Time comes to run the encounter, and the party stalls out when they cannot get in the front door. The rogue fails to pick the lock, and they do not know what to do. After the session, you reach out for feedback, asking the party to give their thoughts back to you.

If you only provide one direction of response, it might be hard for you to really understand the scope of the situation. Your party members might say “We could not proceed after finding the door unable to be opened” and that in itself will feel like a wall. You learn part of the problem, but no further information. However, if you either allow your players to respond with questions of their own, or make it a conversation, you will get far more information. Perhaps in this situation the response is instead “We could not proceed, did you intend for this to be the only way for us to get in the manner?”. At that point you turn the feedback into a conversation which can allow you to have a better understanding, and have both sides explain their perspective. Using this tool you might find out that your two other ways of entry felt a bit harder to notice, and that you need to make their clues more readily available to the group itself.

Both the person giving feedback and person requesting feedback can make this more of a conversation by trying to ask these questions. It is easier for the person requesting feedback, asking for clarification can help that process along. 

Ways to Facilitate Feedback

Now that we have talked about some ways to give useful feedback, I want to talk a bit about how you facilitate the feedback. You can go about it in many different ways, but they can be grouped into two main categories: Passive and Active Feedback.

Passive

Passive Feedback involves one way communication that allows responders flexibility when submitting their thoughts and opinions. Often this is done in the form of a survey that gets filled out and submitted. The benefits of this method are the flexibility involved in giving the feedback. Once a survey is sent out, you can give a certain amount of time until you need all responses. This gives everyone the time they need to collect and analyze their thoughts into the best possible responses. Additionally, private responses on the survey can allow people to share their feelings a bit more. Being able to share privately or anonymously can make people feel a bit better about being honest with what they are saying, especially if they worry about hurting feelings.

The downside of Passive Feedback is a decreased ability to generate conversation and allow for clarification. It can be difficult to explain intent or further describe feelings when submitting feedback through a survey. This can be resolved with follow up surveys, but that can become fairly time consuming.

Tools for Passive Feedback that I have used in the past are Survey Monkey and Google Forms. I currently use Google Forms since the free version has the tools I am looking for in collecting feedback.

Active

Active Feedback involves setting a time and place to discuss feedback, either together as a group or one on one. These discussions can foster a lot of discussion about specifics in whatever you are trying to receive feedback on, and allow for a greater overall understanding of how people have perceived your work and what you need to adjust moving forwards. 

The drawback of active feedback mainly comes down to the time and energy involved in running this kind of feedback session. These situations can take the place of a normal TTRPG session, and sometimes can run even longer than that depending on your schedule. Additionally, some people might be more comfortable sharing their thoughts privately or anonymously, and find the active format hard to make their voices heard.

When I aim to do an active feedback session it is often a Session 0-2. I plan these out of character roundtable discussions to come up whenever the party completes a character arc. The ending of an arc feels like a natural place to discuss what the players liked and what they thought could be improved upon, as well as their thoughts on the future of the game. I find these active feedback sessions to be very course correcting for my longer running games.

Mixing Both

Sometimes the best way to handle feedback is to use both Passive and Active methods. This can take more time for the reviewer t o process, but will tend to reach everyone as evenly as possible. Running a Session 0-2 and providing a survey to fill out as well can help to spread your feedback net as wide as possible, ensuring you get as much information as you can in order to adjust and improve.

Summary

When giving feedback it is important to remember the purpose of it. Someone asks for feedback so that they can improve. With this in mind you can make sure to focus on how you give that feedback in order to maximize that. Taking time before giving feedback can allow for processing your thoughts and emotions regarding what you experienced, allowing for a response that will be less emotionally driven and be more useful in the long run. Making sure to mix both positive and negative feedback together, potentially using the Sandwich Method, helps make sure that you have a mix of both that allows for a response that will be more useful. Making feedback interactive allows for better understanding of all sides involved, allowing for clarification and understanding in areas that might not entirely seem the most obvious. Avoiding blaming one element or person singularly can make sure that the feedback stays constructive and does not end up feeling like an attack. If you keep these in mind when you give or receive feedback, it will make sure that it remains the best possible.

Final Thoughts

Having solid feedback skills is something that goes beyond running games. Becoming versed in asking for and giving feedback is something that will pay itself back in all areas of your life. You can consider this a Soft Skill, and will definitely find use in the professional world as well. 

The First Survey for One Dungeons and Dragons is out. Now that you have read through, make sure you give your thoughts to Wizards of the Coast in a constructive manner. Through our feedback we have the chance to shape the Future of DnD, and that makes this all the more important.

Do you have any tips or tricks for giving and receiving feedback that I did not cover? I am always looking to improve, and would love to hear! Let me know in the comments below,My newsletter, Bjarke’s Dissonant Whispers, is now live! Find out what I am up to, what is coming up, and other miscellaneous things. If you are interested in signing up check here. Most recent email is available here.

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