D&D 5E 5E Playtesters: How Was It?

[Gadget]

I think the OP might have a couple of misconceptions about what the playtest was all about. It was not used, primarily, to fine tune and tweak the balance of specific features such as the moon druid level two shape change; it was far too unwieldy and course grained for that. The play test was primarily used to establish overall trends for what type of game and general mechanics that D&D players liked, disliked and preferred. They floated some specific 'trial balloons' on certain features and classes to see how the public would respond, some of it intentionally out of balance. I believe the internal playtest was used more to calibrate specific features and math, the public one was about 'feel'.

 

[Zardnaar]

I think the public play test was more about the feel of the game than mechanical testing. It was more about concepts IMHO and they tested if the fanbase would like a more TSR type D&D than 3E or 4E type game. The early packets were back to basics so to speak.

 

[Fralex]

Oh my, yes. As someone who has done a lot of my own design I completely understood why they were doing that. It is a waste of a lot of time and effort (which WotC is paying them for, btw) to refine all of the little mechanical details only to realize you have to throw out an entire system and start over, and all of that tweaking is now irrelevant.

But I had the hardest time trying to convince one of my best fellow gamers. His position was that you can't properly test it unless that math is right...he just didn't get it.

In most of my game design classes, artists were in the minority (engineering school), so I was usually the only artist on my team when we split into groups to make games. I don't know if this was related, but I tended to be the only person on my team who wanted to just try extreme ideas out and see what happened rather than make subtle changes and see if they made a small improvement. My programmer friends tended to want to be sure of something before implementing it as a mechanic, which, y'know, it's important not to waste effort, but as long as it tells you something about your game it's never that much of a waste. I prefer to figure this sort of thing out by feel and playtest, because sometimes a game is just too complex for working out all the math to be worth it. This kind of thing seemed to happen more often in the earlier years. Working with others gets easier as you get to know the others.

Game design is a science and an art. It takes an appreciation of both to get a handle on when each is the most helpful tool.