Public Playtests Should Be Fully Playable

[Reynard]

I know I have mentioned this in a couple threads but I wanted to highlight it:

You can't playtest a system unless the system is complete (ie fully playable). It is one thing to ask the public to playtest a new class or race or whatever within the context of an existing system, but it is inefficient and counter productive to playtest discrete changes inside a system a couple Olathe a time.

To companies looking for playtest feedback from the public:

Put out a complete, stand alone playtest document and then give us the time needed to actually run it long enough to give useful feedback.

 

[Retreater]

Yeah, you can tell when a company has its stuff together enough to make a proper playtest period and can get decent feedback.
With regards to the playtest for a certain new 5e compatible game, it's not like they have to get this ready in months. They have at least 6 months to put together a nice playtest packet and get ready for some great products before 6E releases.
The impetus of making a new 5E "immediately" is gone now that it's in the Creative Commons. Take your time, make it right.
This one is coming across as half-hearted as the D&D one.

 

[Reynard]

Yeah, you can tell when a company has its stuff together enough to make a proper playtest period and can get decent feedback.
With regards to the playtest for a certain new 5e compatible game, it's not like they have to get this ready in months. They have at least 6 months to put together a nice playtest packet and get ready for some great products before 6E releases.
The impetus of making a new 5E "immediately" is gone now that it's in the Creative Commons. Take your time, make it right.
This one is coming across as half-hearted as the D&D one.

For the record, I put this in TTRPGs because I expect the same thing out of MCDM's game and any others that are really looking for public input.

One mechanism I think is really useful is to give KS backers access tpo an alpha or beta version and make them your playtest community.

 

[TheSword]

Doing it in parcels allows them to refine things over time and also give a digestible set of changes. If you change 20 things (as each parcel seems to do) you can come to terms with them and properly consider each change. If you change 500 things only the most controversial with gain attention.

I like the chance to slowly influence changes over the course of the playtest and see how they refine things at each stage.

 

[Nijay]

Paraphrasing from a KP livestream/AMA that's going now (for PBF):

• it was a conscious decision to do smaller playtest packets
• releasing the whole thing is just too much to digest
• people can be less inclined to propose changes - everything can seem set in stone (with bigger, more complete playtest packets)
• We have to do bite-sized so that we (KP) can digest the feedback

There's some good points in favor of this approach that I didn't consider. From my perspective, I am new to TPP - trying to support creators of 5e content in the wake of the OGL debacle - and also looking at many new systems to explore what's out there, enjoying doing so within the context of all the feedback for One D&D and PBF which references other systems and YouTube content creators exploring other systems, too. I hadn't looked outside of the TTRPG's I'm familiar with for a long time, and I didn't even learn 5e until about a year ago. There's a cluster of new and existing systems to consider.

So I guess on one hand, the bite-size approach makes sense. I can tend to be reductive when looking at something big like a complete TTRPG system, like oh, I don't like how magic is handled or oh, I don't like those character options/advancement. Which can unfairly shortchange a system that may have a lot of good ideas in a quest for my perfect TTRPG. Maybe with the smaller packets this is less likely to happen?

I do agree though that there is a certain minimum amount needed to start. I think providing a couple of encounters to guide the testing could be very useful, too. People often complain that people who aren't actually playing are giving feedback, but the games vary so much from table to table that standardizing something about the playtesting could yield dividends imo. Like an adventure module / "playtest challenge" - run a party of 3 clones of the same character of this class and subclass against this group of monsters that behave like so. Something like this could help enable solo testing.

 

[Reynard]

Complex systems are more than the sum of their parts so you can get misleading results when looking at particular subsystems in isolation. Moreover, doing it this way is more likely to create a linear progression where it is much harder to bo back and revise previous material when something later breaks it.

 

[Sacrosanct]

I think the hardest part is getting people willing to actually playtest, even if you have the entire rules in place

 

[Reynard]

I think the hardest part is getting people willing to actually playtest, even if you have the entire rules in place

Give them free stuff?

 

[doctorbadwolf]

I know I have mentioned this in a couple threads but I wanted to highlight it:

You can't playtest a system unless the system is complete (ie fully playable). It is one thing to ask the public to playtest a new class or race or whatever within the context of an existing system, but it is inefficient and counter productive to playtest discrete changes inside a system a couple Olathe a time.

To companies looking for playtest feedback from the public:

Put out a complete, stand alone playtest document and then give us the time needed to actually run it long enough to give useful feedback.

very strongly disagree.

Especially in the case of a playtest that is iterating on an existing game, rather than building a wholly new game with a major goal of compatibility. Why would I need to see the changes to classes to give a preliminary “feel check” on the races? If the races don’t work with the SRD classes, then they aren’t meeting the stated goals of the new system, obviously.

What’s more, you can just tune out for 6 months and check it out when the feel checks are done and we have a complete system to check out in more detail.

 

[Sacrosanct]

Give them free stuff?

They are already getting the full rules early? What do you have in mind?