Pathfinder 1E WotC's playtest and Paizo's playtest -- how do they compare?

[Jester David]

I sympathize with the problem that WotC can't just release an "almost done" free version of the game and then expect everyone to purchase the final version.

I really don't why why they can't.

WotC's audience is generally intelligent and tech savy. If they want something and don't want to pay there are, *ahem*, avenues they can take to acquire the media.
As such, the trick is not making it so people have to pay but so that people want to pay. Make the product so good that they want it as a physical product. High quality. Glowing reviews. Solid rules. Those will sell books.
It's much easier to flip through a book that a PDF, so long as it is well organized with a good index. The convenience alone should sell the product IF people want to play for more than a one-shot.
And if gamers have tested the crap out of the rules and made the edition better, that will help.

Look at Paizo and the PRD. They give away all their rules. And yet the books still sell. And Kickstarter. If gamers like a product they will pay for it in advance before it is even finished.

It wouldn't be hard. So long as they expand the flavour and make as many revisions as possible between playtest and final document. People bought 3.5e after 3.0e for that reason: the rules were cleaner. If there were as many changes between the free final playtest doc and the actual published rules people would buy it again. And they'd feel happier knowing they were buying a finalized product rather than something that would be rewritten in three years (like 3e) or continually revised with revised with online updates making the physical product useless (like 4e).

 

[Cybit]

The PF playtest was a "here are the rules, have at it" test, which makes sense seeing as it's not a new system, but a modified version of a free set of rules they've changed. It makes much more sense to give a full mechanics playtest for a game that, by definition, is required by law to have their core ruleset for free, IE, the PRD.

5E's playtest started much much earlier in the process, more like an alpha test, with vastly different packets going to different playtest groups (wish I could show you the early playtest packets I was shown, there were some wild things in that packet); and updates throughout the alpha / midway through the beta. With multi-classing possibly being one of the last large mechanics they want to test out, I think they'll be OK the rest of the way. I would not be surprised if they do one last surprise playtest packet March 2014 or so, though.

As for the belief that a public playtest ala PF would catch exploits and loopholes; unfortunately PF itself has proven that to be patently incorrect. Most of the exploits and loopholes that existed in the playtest document made it straight into the core books (see the 6 "editions" of the Core Book, as well as the umpteenth grapple rewrite), as well as the walking failures in math (but cool) classes that are the Gunslinger and Magus. Note, I like the concepts of the classes immensely, but there are high end mathematics / mechanics issues with those two classes. People can say that a stress test will catch this stuff; I'm not so sure it has ever been proven in reality that way.

 

[Hussar]

Realistically, you can't compare the two directly. It just isn't the same. 5e is a ground up rewrite of several editions of the game. Pathfinder could draw on thousands of hours of play experience from 3e and then apply it to the new edition which needed to be backward compatible to 3e.

Additionally, WOTC's pool of playtesters is about two or three times larger (if not more) than PF's. Actually, at a guess, I'd say the pool is far larger than that. After all, we've got about 150 k 5e playtesters. The PF beta was downloaded about 60 000 times total (according to their own counter), which would mean a lot fewer than 60k actual playtesters.