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ggroy · 26th June 2009, 07:42 AM

In a post by Windjammer in the closed thread "WotC Strategy of Planned Obsolescence?", an issue of playtesting 4E stuff was brought up.

http://www.enworld.org/forum/4842667-post17.html

Quote:

In that vein, I recommend reading the same author's observations over there (and especially his two follow-ups here). As he points out time and again, WotC has NOT playtested a single version of skill challenges to date (June 2008-June 2009) and has not released a version that is actually used by the designers in their home games, whether in a core book for which they charged $30 or an similarly pricey online service. Which is disheartening.

Frank's 2006 post seems to suggest "never mind WotC stopping to playtest - it's for 4E", with the clear implication "WotC is directing all its playtesting efforts into 4E (ergo, 4E will be solidly playtested all around)". As it turned out, that was overly optimistic.

Does anyone know if the splats WotC currently releases are solidly playtested? Or are we back at the stage of the 2nd 3.5 Complete Series which was commissioned to be written by freelance writers and had only moderate quality control?

I vaguely recall something about the RPGA being used to playtest 4E before it was released. I remember reading older Dragon magazine articles which mentioned older editions also used the RPGA for playtesting, such as for 2E AD&D.

Does anyone know how much playtesting was actually done on older splatbooks, campaign settings, etc ... back in the 1E/2E AD&D and 3E D&D days?

Some of the links in Windjammer's article refers to articles by FrankTrollman suggesting that very little to no playtesting was actually done on later 3.5E splatbooks, such as "The Book of Nine Swords".

If it turns out that the 4E splatbooks had very little to no playtesting done on them before publication, it would be interesting to see how robust 4E is to overpowering/underpowering and whether balance is determined by a publicly unknown (ie. proprietary WotC) secret mathematical formula run on all new crunch rules.