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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Reynard" data-source="post: 8939389" data-attributes="member: 467">To pull this away from Kobold and 1D&D a little bit, the purpose of a playtest is to see how parts interact. Game design is art and science. It is inherently iterative. There are certainly parts you can do in isolation -- core mechanics, as an example -- but the farther along you get the more broad the playtest needs to be. And (trad) RPGs are probably the hardest types of games to playtest because they inherently lean on GMs. That's hard to quantify, and equally difficult to account for in design.All that is why it is relatively rare to see truly innovative design in RPGs. Most of the time, someone is iterating on someone else's work. And, chances are, designing by feel more than anything else. The 80s is littered with the corpses of games that were conceived of in isolation and never tested.So I am not saying public playtest is bad. I am saying that if the goal really is a game that works over the time scales RPGs are typically intended to work, longer and more complete playtests are necessary.</blockquote>