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<blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 9273454" data-attributes="member: 82106">Yeah, I was just reading the credits and Kim Mohan's Preface. There's not a hint there that any playtesting was done, whatsoever. No testers are credited, nobody in charge of playtest, nothing. The closest thing is a credit 'Proofreading and tinkering: Mike Breault', who was a commonly cited contributor to various mid-80s TSR products. The Preface itself talks about process of creating the book in rather abstract terms, writing an outline, doing some research, writing the text. He doesn't really talk about what comes after that much, but obviously there was editing. Again not a whiff of any suggestion that anything was played by anyone before the book was published.It was an odd sort of blindness of that period that reflection on WHY something should be done, and what the possible approaches were, which would be most appropriate, etc., none of that was really considered. Certainly not considered in 1986 in mainstream RPG publishing circles. So you get these weird books like this which are entirely unusable in the fashion which they avow to be written for. It's not to say that the information is all junk, nothing like that. It is a bit shallow in that it is written by gaming geeks and not, say, some US Army Rangers (well, I don't know Kim's biography, perhaps I'm wrong there!) BUT having at least a modest amount of camping and hiking experience it doesn't seem like any of it is crazy. I'm sure DMs read it and often got some thought out of it that was useful, maybe referred to a table here or there. It's just damned weird, and I even remember thinking something along these lines in 1986, that you would present it like it is an actual coherent usable game system.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="AbdulAlhazred, post: 9273454, member: 82106"] Yeah, I was just reading the credits and Kim Mohan's Preface. There's not a hint there that any playtesting was done, whatsoever. No testers are credited, nobody in charge of playtest, nothing. The closest thing is a credit 'Proofreading and tinkering: Mike Breault', who was a commonly cited contributor to various mid-80s TSR products. The Preface itself talks about process of creating the book in rather abstract terms, writing an outline, doing some research, writing the text. He doesn't really talk about what comes after that much, but obviously there was editing. Again not a whiff of any suggestion that anything was played by anyone before the book was published. It was an odd sort of blindness of that period that reflection on WHY something should be done, and what the possible approaches were, which would be most appropriate, etc., none of that was really considered. Certainly not considered in 1986 in mainstream RPG publishing circles. So you get these weird books like this which are entirely unusable in the fashion which they avow to be written for. It's not to say that the information is all junk, nothing like that. It is a bit shallow in that it is written by gaming geeks and not, say, some US Army Rangers (well, I don't know Kim's biography, perhaps I'm wrong there!) BUT having at least a modest amount of camping and hiking experience it doesn't seem like any of it is crazy. I'm sure DMs read it and often got some thought out of it that was useful, maybe referred to a table here or there. It's just damned weird, and I even remember thinking something along these lines in 1986, that you would present it like it is an actual coherent usable game system. [/QUOTE]

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