NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 8125369" data-attributes="member: 6790260">This was one of the motivating factors for my "aesthetically-pleasing rules are highly overrated" thread. At nearly all levels of design, testing the rules is not treated with nearly as much value as whether the rules look good by whatever metric the reader favors. (And, yes, some of these metrics favor my interests; that doesn't mean I like this happening any more than a serious theist likes bad arguments for the existence of God.) Three years IS plenty of time to iterate on a design until it takes a good shape, but things moved terribly fast for the kind of data that was meant to be gathered. Single sessions are liable to be the primary data set when any actual-play data is collected at all, and those can be terribly swingy (as I suspect everyone in this thread can attest from personal experience).It seems to me that the best use for public playtesting at this point is as an advertising and thematic (rather than mathematic) guidance, with the sole exception of things like "do people ACTUALLY take N short rests every long rest" or "how many fights do people actually run a day?" It seems like integrating public playtesting with a virtual tabletop would actually be a really good idea as a result, as you can watch how many short rests people take, how many encounters they do, how many skill rolls they make, etc. Such data could be incredibly useful for targeting changes to the ruleset to match actual-player interests while keeping the system mathematically rigorous: turn the "white room" (god I'm so naughty word sick of hearing that term) into a play room.Oh absolutely. Many of the surveys bordered heavily on push-polling, with leading questions and phrasing designed to encourage particular kinds of response. Survey design--like statistical analysis--is something that very few game designers have any obvious training in. I once did a lookup, and as far as I could tell, almost none of the named game designers for any WotC edition had a degree outside of the humanities, if the information was available to me at all; the vast majority were Communications or Writing, Heinsoo has a theology degree, and the closest I could find to a degree involving math or science was psychology IIRC (that is, a soft/social science).Now, just because someone doesn't have a degree in something, doesn't mean they have to be bad at it (after all, as noted, Heinsoo has a theology degree and he was at the helm for 4e, the edition [in]famous for its mathematical rigor), but the apparent near-total lack of STEM training among game designers for things that could really use it...isn't encouraging. I get that it's hard to attract people with physics or chemistry degrees to a job like this, but you'd think they could at least hire a survey-design consultant or something.</blockquote>

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