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: 8852729" data-attributes="member: 6790260">Certainly. And it's even more of a challenge because portions of TTRPGs, snippets and chunks and sometimes entire subsystems--have found nearly universal acceptance in video games, which makes it extremely difficult to find robust playtester groups that truly don't know anything RPG-like. It's a difficult thing.Yet, by that same token, many are quite keen to note that D&D is and remain a niche within an niche, and any other game is a niche within that niche-in-a-niche. The Nintendo Wii sold over 100 million units. Even if we give a favorable exaggeration of D&D's playerbase, that's larger by an order of magnitude (the most optimistic estimates of D&D 5e's playerbase are at 8 million, IIRC.) Even if we only consider the North American sales, and even if 100% of D&D players are Unitedstatesians, you'd still be looking at roughly 4x-5x difference. If the Nintendo Wii could be tested on, and marketed for, an audience that had little to no intersection with gaming, one of its famous and extremely successful design goals, then it does not seem that unreasonable that one could achieve something similar in other contexts.It would, of course, likely require a very different approach to playtesting. But I'm actually pretty confident that it could be done. Further, it's not even strictly necessary to perform such testing "live," as it were; one can leverage knowledge from academic research on education, human reasoning processes, etc. Such theory-based resources are not the end-all, be-all (e.g., it's mostly theory that drives the "Target 20" design, without concern for the practical limitations, hence my skepticism of that particular approach), but they provide useful starting points so that we don't have to begin from first principles. We can tune the initial approach based on independent research, and then iterate on the resulting structures.If any game can achieve it, that game is D&D. And if it succeeds, well, other systems can build on such concepts from there, because most of the ground work will have been done already, and the rules themselves cannot be copyrighted.</blockquote>

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