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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 9632607" data-attributes="member: 6790260">Certainly. You should still have focus-group type playtesting, where the point is to make sure people really do enjoy playing the game. But the bulk of the playtesting should be done by people who are actively trying to break your game. That is the single best way to avoid the game ending up broken. It will still have broken elements--no game is perfect--but you'll do better than you would have.Personally, I think this is a design which only appeals to long-enfranchised, deeply-committed RPG players.Basically, pure point-buy is AMAZING when you already know pretty much what you want to do, and you just need to carefully assemble the pieces to make some specific thing.Pure point-buy is HORRIBLE if you're a brand-new user who has no idea what's good and what's not, what's beneficial and what's harmful, etc., etc.* If we're trying to make this the most profitable D&D of all time, we're going to need to focus on that. Plus...well. When absolutely everything can be combined with absolutely everything else, combinatoric explosion means you'll never truly playtest more than the tiniest slice of your game. So playtesting is...not quite "worthless" but not nearly as helpful under this design paradigm.I could certainly see publishing (after, say, 5-6 years) a "build your own stuff!" book that lays out the design philosophy and why the designers chose the things they chose. Then, it would lay out rules for doing as you describe, absolute freeform classless design with a "buy-features-for-XP" kind of system (with "level" probably still existing as "how much XP have you spent?" and being used to gate off features). The whole thing plastered with "THIS HAS NOT BEEN TESTED" labels so anyone who gets into it understands that they have entered Terra Incognita and they will not be getting help from the higher-ups.*And this can even happen to someone who is long-enfranchised with one game but brand-new to another. I ended up feeling extremely lost, confused, and frustrated when learning both W:TA and SR5, because those are both pure point-buy systems (or, at least, the latter is often done as pure point-buy, though the default rule is technically chunky point-buy). When literally ᴇ ᴠ ᴇ ʀ ʏ ᴛ ʜ ɪ ɴ ɢ is an option you can pick up, it becomes really hard to make any choices at all, between analysis paralysis and fear of ruining your character with a bad choice. It's only once you have a solid knowledge base that such absolute freedom becomes an asset rather than a liability.</blockquote>

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