Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 9462170" data-attributes="member: 42582">Or is it more analogous to James Watt testing various prototypes, experimenting with various sorts of seals and valves, etc in the invention of his "perfect engine"?Editing is, primarily, about changing and (thereby) perfecting the way that certain content is presented. My experience as an editor is with non-fiction works in specialised academic fields (my own work, as well as the work of colleagues and students).   Editing in that context involves cutting out surplus words to meet word limits, without losing content; attending to, and improving, structure, so that ideas and arguments are more clearly presented; improving the quality of prose; as well as more prosaic copy-editing.The parameters for good editing of fiction writing will be a bit different from the sort of editing I'm familiar with, but the basic goal is I think the same: it's about strengthening the way that a work present what it is that it is presenting.Improving a prototype of a machine is not much like editing, beyond the fact that both involve iteration with a goal of improvement.Playtesting of game rules is aimed at improvement, again by way of iteration. But is it much like editing, beyond that? It doesn't operate on the content of a fiction, except for the special case of playtesting a plotted adventure. It doesn't change the way that a vehicle for a fiction presents that fiction, again with the exception of that special case.I don't think we need strained analogies to help us understand RPGing. Does it help us understand playtesting to compare it to editing? I mean, would that be a useful way of describing it to someone who was new to the whole idea of RPG design? I don't think so. I think a comparison to iteration in the design and development of a machine would actually be more apt, at least in most cases - again, a plotted adventure could be an exception in this respect.</blockquote>

Verification