I have been thinking about playtesting the last few days. While I was on my vacation to the American West Coast, one of the things that I had an opportunity to do was playtest a dungeon-based adventure that a friend is working on for an upcoming Kickstarter. Playtesting is something that should be a cornerstone of good game design, but often isn’t. Solid design should be backed up with actual play, at the very least by the designer but (in a perfect world) also with playtesting from groups outside of the designer’s play group.
When I say “backed with actual play,” I don’t mean that games can’t come from intellectual exercises, or simply asking the question “Why isn’t there a game that does X, or is about Y?” But once it passes this stage, I think that there should be play to determine the viability of the system, how it interacts with the setting or genre, and if the experience of playing the game is the experience that the designer wishes to convey.
While I am being all “pie in the sky,” I would like to also add that I would like to see more actual play reports in Kickstarters, particularly for first time Kickstarters. I think that it could help sell a game if people better understood how the game was intended to be played by the creator, as well as how others interacted with the game in their play. Seeing these sorts of things could go a lot further in helping to sell the unknown quantity of a new game.
Playtesting, for the purposes of this column, boil down into one of two categories: designer playtests and outside playtests. Designer playtests are those run by the designer or the game, or perhaps the publisher, and are either a part of their home play group, or done at conventions or stores. Outside playtests are those done by groups that the designer is not a part of, although the designer may observe the play while it is occurring. Neither of these are more important than the other, but I think that both need to occur for a designer to get an idea of how their game works.
I’ve taken part in both kinds of these before. Designer playtests are always interesting for me, because I get to see how the designer thinks that the game should be run, and what sort of experience it should give. As a GM, getting this sort look into the creator’s brain can be helpful in knowing how to run a game. No matter how well spelled out a designer may think that things are, there are always those things that may look like they are well-explained, but a group trips over them. Obviously having a designer run each and every first game for groups is impractical, so having this information some place is an immense resource for a game’s potential GM. This is why I suggested this for Kickstarters. I think having a play example from a designer would ratchet up my interest in a game that I’m not familiar with.
When it comes to outside playtest, many people seem to think that their job is to try to “break” the game. This usually means that they try to make the most outrageous combinations of powers and abilities to try to overpower the rules of the game. Surprisingly, this isn’t as helpful as people might think. Ultimately there is little that can be done about powergaming, regardless of the level of complexity of the game. Even Over The Edge talks about one of the playtesters trying to powergame their character in early adventures. If someone can try to powergame Over The Edge, they will try to powergame anything.
Now, helpful playtests mean peeling away house rules and going to the rules as written, to make sure that any issues encountered are due to the rules rather than a houserule having an unexpected consequence. A few years ago, our group was a part of the playtests for A Red and Pleasant Land, and one of our main goals was to determine the survivability of the adventure. It was a lot more lethal when we ran through part of it with our group, so obviously something comes from playtesting. We used our regular characters for the playtest, rather than create some new ones, and this might have been our one flaw. It wasn’t a huge stretch for the characters to end up in someplace weird and different, but their experiences did color their reactions to the world, and the adventure. I would suggest coming at any playtest with fresh characters and approaches.
It is important to give an accurate report of your play experience in a playtest. Not only do you need to talk about the good things, and the things that the players enjoyed, but you need to talk about the bad things, the things that you as a GM or that the group had a problem with. Talk about the things that could have been better worded, or better explained. If there are monsters, be sure to talk about whether or not they were well described in the text. Flashing a picture from a game book isn’t always the best case, so it is good to have a solid description of any monsters, or other creatures, that are encountered during the course of play.
Play the adventure like you would normally play it with your group. The designer may have an ideal in their head of the type of person who is playing their game, and the assumptions that they may make during play, so it is a good thing to let them know how someone outside of that platonic ideal may play their stuff.
Playtesting a new system, or a new use for an old system, is probably not going to happen as often as the preceding, but it is important to talk about as well. Always, always, always use the rules as written when you’re playtesting a new system, or a system being used in a new way. This is particularly important in games that “enforce” a particular style of play. The idea behind a system playtest is to make sure that the system as written works, and not just your idea of how that system should be played.
How can a group be attractive to designers and publishers looking for playtesters? One of the first things is to have an eclectic mix of games that your group plays. It may come as a surprise, but having a dedicated system that your group always uses may not always be the most attractive to people looking for playtesters. Most of the time, playtesting means that the group has to look at things from outside of the box sometimes, and playing a handful of games can demonstrate that better than having played the same game for a long time. System mastery can be an important thing for a group to bring to a table, but in a successful playtest that system mastery sometimes needs to be leavened with an equal measure of flexibility.
Having a regular schedule is also helpful, because a fast turnaround can be useful to a publisher or designer who is on a deadline. Also be responsible and responsive. There probably aren’t as many other groups playtesting as you might think, so playing through the material and giving your feedback is important to the whole process.
Give constructive feedback. “This sucked” and “This was awesome” aren’t as useful as explaining why your group had a problem with the material, or why the group really had a good time. Detail your experiences, and talk about the positive and the negative constructively. They might not be happy about it, but designers do want to know when something they’ve written doesn’t work in the way that they think that it does. Just don’t be a dick about it.
Publishers and designers should be aggressive in finding people to playtest their games. With the importance of social media to tabletop RPGs finding fans shouldn’t be hard to do, and finding fresh eyes shouldn’t be difficult either. Sites like EN World here can even be a valuable resource for finding people to playtest their games or other materials.
In order to have playtest materials for outside groups, there has to be a certain level of completion to what has been written. You can certainly have a bit more wiggle room in playtesting adventures, but if you are going to test an adventure in sections then you need to have those parts of the adventure completed. To use the Red and Pleasant Land playtest as an example again, we only played through a section of the castle’s dungeon, but all of the encounters and creatures in that section were completed. We did a couple of weeks running through that section of the dungeon, killing monsters and working out puzzles (to make sure the answers weren’t too esoteric). I received a nice Word document with write-ups for all the rooms that we would go through. It was helpful to our playtest.
If you are having outside groups playtest a system, it is even more important that you have things to a fairly far level of completion. Character creation should be complete, and the basic resolution system needs to be as well. Any important subsystems that characters may have to interact with during a game need to be finished as well. Basically, if it could be important during a session then it should probably be ready for playtesters.
Honestly, there is nothing as frustrating as getting a playtest package and it not having enough in it so that you can effectively run it. I have had that happen more than once as a playtester.
Playtesting is an important part of the process of creating a game, and it needs to be at the forefront of the design process. The more effort that is put into playtesting, the more viable games that we all end up with…and the more fun that we can have with our gaming groups.
