Do you think 6 months are enough for playtesting?

[breschau]

I was wondering about this as well. If Wizards haven't started playtesting 4th edition outside their offices yet, then there's no way they'll be able to get it out to enough playtesters or give them enough time to try to "wreck" the system before the book gets printed. That does not bode well in my opinion...

I'm thinking along the lines of the previous poster who said the community playtest is more likely a marketing scheme to boost word-of-mouth (like they need it at this point) and/or playtesting specific things, like is this monster really a CL8, or something simple and non book changing like that.

 

[Vigilance]

Wow, I just looked at the archived Unofficial 3rd Edition News pages, and it sure seems like we knew much more about 3E a year out -- and a lot still changed in playtest even then -- than we know about 4E today 9 months from release.

Reinforces further my opinion that the schedule may still be too aggressive for 4E.

Edit: and further reinforces Logan's message about being "fixed in 3E thinking." There was a lot of "fixed in 2E thinking" back then. But then, it's easiest to couch concepts in relation to what you know than what you don't.

I frankly think Wizards had to release more info then, because they had a higher mountain to climb.

2e wasn't all that good, the company had been in shambles, completely new management had taken over... they were trying to fix a lot that was seriously broken and needed us on board.

The job isn't as hard this time.

 

[howandwhy99]

This is easily my biggest concern for 4E. They are effectively setting in stone the rules of the game for the next 5+ years and I don't believe they have done nearly as much playtesting as they have or will need to.

The two sneak peek books are due out later this year. That means they are shipping to press as we speak. They cannot have changes in them from playtesting.

The declared playtest period is to run from September to December. January mark when the finalized SRD is shipped to other publishing houses.

What this means to me is: the playtesting isn't meant to change the game at all. The major elements of the game are truly fixed and the coming 4 months are only to complete live testing on a variety of scenario designs. They are looking for coding bugs, not design flaws.

Or I could be wrong. Maybe they have refined their playtesting so they can have very fast turnaround and vast numbers of groups. Their communication set up mentioned in the blogs gives me hope.

Designs almost always fail without widely divergent POVs to test them. And working closely together tends to draw people's beliefs together rather than apart. (Or at least it should). I know I have widely diverging views about how a new game should run. I'm wondering how much of what I want will be addressed in the finished products.

 

[Seeten]

How do we know Piratecat isnt playtesting 4e right now, and hasnt been for 12 months already?

If he is, he's signed an NDA, and cannot tell us regardless.

 

[Samnell]

If 4e were going to be just a simple streamlining of things like grapple, I would be totally happy with the amount of external playtest WotC is planning on. It's not going to take too much to work out a single element of the game and find its issues, especially if the way its resolved is being simplified.

But from what we've been told, 4e boasts the following:
The game goes up to 30
The way monsters are statted and created is changing
The magic system is getting a huge overhaul
We're getting some kind of maneuver/magic system for non-casters
Races are being overhauled

That's too much. Too many very big changes that could interact in thousands of little ways that the designers might not have foreseen. I don't know that they're enough to justify the same length of time as went into 3e's playtest, but it's certainly enough to demand more than a couple of months with a diverse set of eyes looking at it.

I don't feel like WotC has burned me, and I don't think they're a bunch of wild incompetents who just can't see the transcendental brilliance of my own house rules. ...however transcendentally brilliant my house rules may or may not be. They are professionals and they've earned some credit from their track record. They've convinced me through actual play that some of the things they put out which appear unbalanced really do work pretty well. But this just isn't enough time. Even gifted professionals don't foresee every exploit or every gap in the rules.

I don't know whether sales projections are forcing a quick timeline, Hasbro is leaning on WotC, or the designers are just so sure of their own work that they don't see any reason to plan for incremental revisions in the playtest process, but whatever it is the short timeline is very worrisome. It suggests that large portions of the system simply will not be changed, even if major faults are discovered. They don't have the time to make or test those revisions before the books are off to the printer

The volume and length of playtesting for 3e did much to build confidence in it, especially in the face of major paradigm-changing innovations. The lack of the same here works to undermine my confidence in the very same. I understand that as soon as WotC announced, it was signing itself up for a big decline in sales of 3.5 material and that would push for a late announcement when the game was virtually finished. That can't be helped, and I don't want WotC to cut its own throat. But if they came out and told us that 4e had been quietly in secret external playtest for seven or eight months already and would continue to be so for some months afterwards, I would feel a lot better about things even aside my major disagreements with the direction design philosophy seems to be going in.

 

[Piratecat]

How do we know Piratecat isnt playtesting 4e right now, and hasnt been for 12 months already?

Because at GenCon you didn't overhear me begging Scott Rouse -- err, respectfully inquiring -- about playtesting opportunities!

 

[BSF]

Because at GenCon you didn't overhear me begging Scott Rouse -- err, respectfully inquiring -- about playtesting opportunities!

It's Acting!

WotC said they would be playtesting September - December. That isn't a whole lot of time, but with a strong project management team, a lot of things are possible. I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt until they prove otherwise. But we are a week from September and I still can't find anything on the WotC site for applying to playtest. I am beginning to think they won't have an application process. Perhaps they are cherry picking people?

I would think this would give RPGA members with good records a leg up. As well as non-lurking members of the community. Alas, I've never belonged to the RPGA and I have been increasingly quiet the last two years.

Still, I would love to do some playtesting. I've talked it over with my group and we are reserved in judgement of the 'stuff we know', but willing to give it a shot to see how it all plays out.

 

[Quartz]

I'm pretty confident. I'd be more confident if I were involved in the process, but I'm not.

Despite his industry knowledge, I think breschau is being unduly negative - I expect much of the preparation work to which he refers has been done already. As long as the document is properly constructed (this is the hard part - it's tempting to take short-cuts), re-prototyping a book is a breeze. The long part of the job is re-reading the document checking for formatting issues like widows, orphans, and odd page breaks.

Plus, with the ubiquity of email and web access, turn-around will be much faster. What's the betting that most playtesters will just get PDFs that they'll have to print themselves? This will likely be an issue for those outside the US because they may not have US-sized paper.

 

[breschau]

I'm pretty confident. I'd be more confident if I were involved in the process, but I'm not.

Despite his industry knowledge, I think breschau is being unduly negative - I expect much of the preparation work to which he refers has been done already. As long as the document is properly constructed (this is the hard part - it's tempting to take short-cuts), re-prototyping a book is a breeze. The long part of the job is re-reading the document checking for formatting issues like widows, orphans, and odd page breaks.

Plus, with the ubiquity of email and web access, turn-around will be much faster. What's the betting that most playtesters will just get PDFs that they'll have to print themselves? This will likely be an issue for those outside the US because they may not have US-sized paper.

Yes, I might be. And to clarify, I work in regular book publishing, not game publishing. I have done layout and design work for mostly straight text filled books with little use of pictures. The schedule I gave is the standard for that style of layout, i.e. no pictures. I can only imagine how much longer/harder it would be to constantly readjust a book filled with pictures to catch how text flows around images and causes more widows, orphans, and odd page breaks.

 

[KarinsDad]

We also do not know anything about the "metarules" if they exist.

For example, a bonus cannot excede +2 unless it is within the following guidelines, etc.

With a good set of metarules learned from previous editions and systems, it's possible that many of the balance issues might be straightened out fairly quickly.

Without them, it's possible that it might be a bit of a nightmare.

One of the problems I have with several of the books that came out in the last year or so is that it is obvious that they were not very well playtested or even carefully thought about: Bo9S, PHBII, Complete Mage all have some very serious glaring game balance issues within them. I do not quite see this as much with some of the earlier books like Complete Warrior, etc., however, even they have some powerful synergies that the designers never thought of.

The main advantage the designers have is that the synergies for 4E are limited to 3 books, not 30+ books like with 3.5. Even so, it might be a daunting task if they do not have good metarules in place.