Formatting Playtest Updates

[howandwhy99]

In the last round of playtest documents there were almost 100 pages of rules to read. Now a lot of the material was new, but a good deal was also edited work from before. I was thinking it might be easier to playtest, if edits to the previous documents were highlighted in some way or otherwise noted, so long term playtesters could easily spot what was changed.

My players are also signed up for the playtest and have their own copies of the documents, but for play at the table we created cheat sheets of the rules for both the DM screen and for the players. Updating these and remembering the most up-to-date rules would be much easier with some kind of editing history.

Comments?

 

[Chris_Nightwing]

This would be nice - but remember that they are busy little game designing bees. It might be convenient to highlight changes with a colour underlay, but it depends how they are producing these documents. In one of the file it lists major changes, though I think they could have spent another half an hour laying these out more clearly.

 

[Olgar Shiverstone]

That would certainly be helpful, particularly as the number of iterations increases.

 

[windywinter]

Seems "they" are using Microsoft Word (from pdf: Microsoft Word - 081312_Bestiary.docx).
So "diffing" should be rather easy...

 

[ComradeGnull]

This would be nice - but remember that they are busy little game designing bees. It might be convenient to highlight changes with a colour underlay, but it depends how they are producing these documents. In one of the file it lists major changes, though I think they could have spent another half an hour laying these out more clearly.

There are lots and lots of text management tools that could produce these sorts of highlights and diffs automatically one way or another. It would be helpful to see what is different- I'm already forgetting what the Packet 1 classes were like.

Also (I suggested this in another thread) it would be nice to have labelled rules that are 'not yet implemented' or 'not yet reviewed'. There has been a fair amount of concern over rules or text that seems to have been ported over whole-hog from 3e or 4e without any changes or examination- most of us suspect that these are just placeholders, but they are going to get a lot of useless feedback on features that aren't really the focus of testing.

It would be nice if nothing else if the summary document had said 'hey, for this play test, focus on areas X, Y, and Z and don't worry if I and J are a little clunky and K is unbalance- those are for a future play test.'

For instance, they are going to get a lot of feedback that says 'the Warlock and Sorcerer seem more powerful in combat than the core classes'; I think they already know this, and the two new classes are 'first drafts', whereas the Core 4 are 'second drafts'. If that is the case, it would be nice to make that explicit.

 

[Raith5]

The document titled Playtest Packet Summary does set out the main changes.