Babble Post 101: Talking to your players (again)

 Imagine my surprise when I realised that I've hit over 100 posts on this blog...

... no really! It was a surprise. I mean, I babble and have been babbling on here for over ten years. That is an achievement in and of itself, but then to add that I have been babbling so much that I can note that I've reached that amount? Colour me stunned.

So today's post isn't actually about all that though. I wanted to revisit a subject I brought up in a previous TTRPG-related post about getting feedback from your players.

There's something exceptionally daunting about asking for feedback in any context. Asking for it as a DM when you're not prepared for the answer could make or break you - especially if you're not used to constructive feedback, or your players don't know how to delivered it in that fashion.

But a couple of months ago, I heard of a method of feedback giving/receiving that works fairly well. This method is called Stars and Wishes. 

Now again, I suppose it depends on the type of people you have in your party. But how this works is, in your discord server or roll20 talks or whatsapp group messages (whatever you use), you allow for a channel or time for stars and wishes after each session or so. 

This is an opportunity for the players and DM to hand out Stars to someone for something they did well - be it the plan the rogue came up with on the spot or the roleplay of a particular scene. So it's not just feedback for the DM but for everyone. Stars is the opportunity for praise that you don't usually give but might think of about a particular moment, incident, or aspect.

Wishes is a mix of feedback and desires: things the player/character would like to see or encounter or would like to see LESS of like politics and puzzles, particular monsters or story beats. It can also be things like "Less talky-talk and more combat". It can be projections into the future or feedback on behaviour like "Allow the DM to explain what you see first before exploring with your tokens" or "DM, explain what we see first before showing us the map so we don't go off into the unknown."

Stars and Wishes is a really great tool to get consistent feedback without the stress of directed, scheduled feedback. It also allows a space for people to chat after a session about the things they liked or would have preferred. 

I think the negatives of Stars and Wishes is that if you're looking for direct feedback, you're not necessarily going to get it or, if you have that particular player, you might get too much of it. So whether this strategy will work or not is heavily dependent on the type of people in your group.

But yeah, just an interesting concept I thought was worth sharing.