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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Iosue" data-source="post: 6040995" data-attributes="member: 6680772">I essentially agree with DEFCON 1.  WotC has a plan, they have a direction, and they are making purposeful decisions in the playtest.  If it looks messy, that's because the kind of playtest they are attempting is a messy business, and most companies of WotC's size don't open games of this kind of high-profile this early in the process.Take for example, 4e, in <a href="http://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?633648-What-4e-could-have-been-a-look-at-proto-4e-info-(also-Bo9S-was-made-up-of-4e-scraps!" target="_blank">this thread</a> on RPG.net.  They start in June 2005.  Over the course of the next year, they tear everything down and rebuild it several times.  This is the part of the process we are in.  They have a direction, and they maintain it, but that still results in false-starts and dead-ends.  It takes them two full years from the start of the process until they get to "Full-On Playtesting", with "all designers and developers and many other WotC employees [doing] nothing but playtest D&D 4E for three solid weeks," leading to "ongoing playtesting using in-house groups and the personal game groups of most of the R&D staff that continues to the end of the year."  We're basically a little over a year from the start of design.That said, I do think people are picking up on adjustments WotC has made as they've navigated through this unprecedented process.  Mearls originally expressed plans to move very slowly and deliberately -- to first just test the core mechanics with pre-gens, starting with levels 1-3, then 1-5, and finally getting up to level 10 before introducing character creation rules and going through the whole process again.  They've introduced chargen a lot earlier than planned.  I also believe their original intention was to just let the core fighter be the Basic D&D fighter, and introduce new options for him when they introduced the tactical and narrative combat rules.  Fan outcry led them to beefing up the core fighter before introducing the extra combat modules.My speculation is that WotC expected to be able to have a more structured, deliberate pace, doing focused testing on new and/or different components with each iteration.  But fans/playtesters haven't been on board with that.  There's been a lot impatience, a lot of focus brought onto things WotC wasn't particularly interested in testing at the moment.  So I think they've added a bit of a marketing/customer satisfaction aspect to the playtest.  Partly as a way to maintain interest over the long haul, and partly because if you say, "Don't worry about class balance, or monster math right now, just tell us how these core resolution mechanics feel," and you get a craptonne of responses saying, "Fighters are boring and the monster math is off," then you might as well throw some design at those folks and see what comes of it, while still focusing on the things you want to focus on.  That's very much what the Warlock/Sorcerer, Rogue expertise dice, and the monster adjustments feel like to me.  I don't think at the moment they are especially concerned with the specifics of fighter maneuvers, damage vs healing, monsters to-hit, or truly introducing Warlocks and Sorcerers.  They take and appreciate the feedback on those, but I think what they were looking at in the May playtest was how people liked the advantage mechanic, how they liked ability/skill rolls, how people enjoyed specialties and themes as a feat and skill delivery system.  What they were looking at in the August playtest was if the chargen was appealing to those who want fast chargen as well as those who like customization.  The October playtest is about magic items and getting a feel for level progression.When Mearls says, "The core is set," he's not saying that the core game as it is now in the playtest (or in whatever iteration they are playing in-house) is the locked-down game.  He's saying that they've got the broadstrokes of the core down pat.  People like advantage.  They like the modular chargen.  Expertise dice and maneuvers provide a simple way to provide potential complexity in the core game for those who want it.  Things like that.  They'll continue to tweak and riff, and now they'll start throwing in more options and seeing how people respond to those.</blockquote>

Verification