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Apr 25, 2012 -- 9:57AM, wrecan wrote:

Man, that shadowy cabal of whiners is crafty.  Voting for options that are against their interests just to ensure that people (even themselves) don't know they exist.  My Gods!  We could all be in the shadowy cabal and not know it!  They're brilliant!

Seriously.  Frostball, just drop it.  The polls are currently one of the only ways we have of letting the designers know quickly and clearly how we feel about certain topics.  I know I for one think about the questions before I answer.  As with anything, that is all we can conclude.  Your statement of "People often select things after only a handful of seconds of only halfway deep thought." isn't, I'm guessing, based on anything more than your opinion.

Polls can be misleading, its true.  But to take poll results and simply ignore them in order to twist it to fit your preconceived notions?  Not a good way to make an argument.

The point I have been trying to make in several threads these days is that we should focus on the facts when possible.  Most of what we say is opinion, so don't try to pass it off as fact.  Don't project your opinion on imaginary groups of people to give it more weight; let your ideas float or sink based on their own merit.

Currently, as I said, one of the few facts we have to draw on is the results of the D&D Next polls.  This is the reason I created the thread that puts all the results in one place.  Certainly polls aren't a perfect measure of how everyone thinks.  Thus if the top option was only a few points ahead of the second best option, I wouldn't say, "It is clear that the majority prefer Option A."  But when one option only gets a quarter of a percent of the vote?  It is pretty clear that people don't like that option.

Apr 25, 2012 -- 1:26PM, Fitzco wrote:

No, Arithizoo is asking you to stop because you're trying to justify your opinion with an appeal to authority that contradicts your opinion.  At best, its intellectually dishonest.

This.  It is not possible to have a rational conversation about possible D&D Next mechanics if you simply invent your own data.

It is one thing to feel that some polling bias changes the results a little, but to say that you think hundreds of voters feel differently from how they voted is a bit silly.  Especially because there is no evidence.  No one has posted saying, "Yeah, I voted for X, but when I thought about it more I prefer no death."  In fact, no one has posted to say that they like no death ever.

That is the real point here.  It all started because of an unfounded statement referring to an imaginary (in the sense that the poster had no way to know if they existed or not) group of people who never wanted anything bad to happen, ever.  And that this group of people was somehow steering the entire design of the game toward their style with increasing frequency.  Then, when it was pointed out that this type of gamer represents such a tiny number as to be effectively zero, for someone to say, "Yeah, well, I don't buy those numbers" makes it impossible to actually have a conversation.  At that point we are all just talking past each other and saying, "I don't believe you".

You are free to think whatever you like.  If you want to think that there is a secret cabal of D&D gamers who never want PC death (or anything else bad), and that this cabal has huge amounts of power such that they can direct the course of game design yet choses to hide this goal by not voting the way they really feel...well, go ahead.  But you should also realize that people aren't going to want to engage you in conversation.

As for me, I am going to conclude that the majority of gamers feel that "Character death is uncommon, but the threat of death should always be present" and "Character death is rare, but some encounters present a real threat of death".  It is certainly how my entire gaming group feels.  We all talked about it, and everyone was pretty much somewhere between these two options.  Everyone said that if there is never a threat of death, fights start to feel very pointless.
I am also going to conclude that the designers are going to use the results of this poll to craft D&D Next.  They will adjust hp and damage to reflect this view that fights should be dangerous.