Reflective Journal
Week 16
Monday 18-01-2021 to Sunday 24-01-2021
Research Paper Survey
For my Research Paper, I will also be making use of my existing knowledge and experience of both playing D&D and DMing in regard to the skills that I know that I have had to develop, and the knowledge of friends who play and/or DM.
I have created a survey (Primary Research) and asked many friends to kindly complete it. I know that by asking my friends I may well get a skewed result in terms of age distribution. But since you really need to have knowledge of D&D to even start to answer the questions, and I don’t have contacts with any adults who play D&D, I feel that this is just how it has to be, and I will need to bear this in mind when I look at the results.
I’ve put a link to my survey results here. Many of the questions were Qualitative ones since I wanted to get non-numeric answers, I wanted their thoughts on the subject, However I did also include a few Quantitative (numerical) questions.
I’m going to use my survey results, research and practical experience of D&D to creative a list of skills that I think that I have developed from playing D&D. Then I will make a second list of skills that are specific to DMing, since although both sets of skills overlap, there are additional skills that being a DM both requires and develops, for example, organisational skills of keeping track of the whole world that you develop and run. You can use pre-existing worlds and campaigns from D&D books when you start, indeed I did, but most DMs end up wanting to create their own worlds. And even if you use a pre-created world, you still have to keep track to ensure consistency and continuity throughout the game.
I must remember to keep referring specifically to being a DM, rather than just general playing D&D. However, it is helpful to consider both aspects for my research.
