Jester David
Hero
TL;DR
In order to properly balance the game before its release, we need content finalized as soon as possible.
Full Version
It takes six months to get a finished book into stores. There is a half a year between WotC sending the final proofs to China for production and getting the actual product on the shelves. This is also after the book is finished, after all the writing, editing, ordering art and doing the layout.
Easy money says WotC wants 5e ready for GenCon 2014 if not earlier so they can show off more content and release expansion books - much like how 4e launched in June so people would be familiar with the rules before the Con. There’s also a built-in safety in aiming for before GenCon, as this means they can still delay the books a month to fix serious problems and still have them available for the convention.
GenCon 2014 is fifteen months (and change) away, and late June ‘14 is fourteen months. Doing the math, this means the Core Rules/Basic set needs to be ready in under eight months, for the end of December. With a few months needed to actually write the books, they need to start working on the books in September or October. And late September... that’s five months from now.
So they need to call it. Or at the very least call the base game: classes, races, specialities, skills, and backgrounds. They need to stop revising and overhauling the game and start working on fine-tuning and balancing as soon as possible, while they still have time to respond to problems. Not just testing classes but individual feats and spells, seeing which work and which do not.
The catch is, as long as classes keep changing and changing no one will settle into playing a single class and really look at the rest of the game. Learning and relearning a class focuses the attention. And it’s only when the game is stable and people are used to their characters and thinking of the game like a campaign that they get creative and start trying abusive things or creative solutions to survive and save a beloved character.
While they can do some fixing when actually writing the rules and rely on internal playtesting, this is only good for small balancing: they need the game to be as polished as possible prior to the start of writing. Late in the playtest they cannot make major changes without running them through a playtest process or they risk overcompensating with a fix (which is common problem).
Comments that the game isn’t finished are unfounded. The designers could fiddle with the classes and races endlessly, continually finding small problems and revising which creates new problems. The entire history of all editions of D&D could be seen as designers tweaking classes and races in different ways as tastes and philosophies of game design come and go. The game will never be "finished" only "finished for now".
The playtest is a great example of this. We’ve had five major playtest packages and the fighter has looked fairly radically different in four of them. Each a response to feedback and trying a different idea. There’s no reason they couldn’t rebuild the fight again and again, each time responding to feedback and making valid revisions that invariably create new subtle problems requiring revision in response to the new feedback.
With the core game finished and the focus on fine balancing, they can continue to release new updates to the packages in the months leading up to the release of the game. They can spend the intervening time getting other options ready for the Advanced versions of the game, and balancing modules that might be released in books a couple months after the Core Rulebook(s). Or testing new options for distant variants. The Tactical Combat module totally needs some extensive testing, as does several of the modules that make heavy changes to the rules.
Furthermore, it’s time to actually playtest and not concept-test. A lot of the content in the playtest packages is less a test of how balanced the content is and more a test of how it feels and how people react to the design. Which is good, up to a point, but we’re rapidly reaching the point where concept has to surrender to balancing and testing.
We need the full Basic Game as close to its final form as possible. We need to test the crap out of that so it can be adjusted and tweaked, to see how it actually handles in a larger game-space. Because we haven't see it. We've seen a weird combination of the Basic and Standard game with bits of Advanced poking through. So it's harder to judge how Basic will actually handle on its own. And that’s something that needs to actually be tested.
Otherwise, they’ll have wasted the public playtest and spent a year-and-a-half in a massive design-by-committee for an unbalanced game.
Or am I completely wrong?
In order to properly balance the game before its release, we need content finalized as soon as possible.
Full Version
It takes six months to get a finished book into stores. There is a half a year between WotC sending the final proofs to China for production and getting the actual product on the shelves. This is also after the book is finished, after all the writing, editing, ordering art and doing the layout.
Easy money says WotC wants 5e ready for GenCon 2014 if not earlier so they can show off more content and release expansion books - much like how 4e launched in June so people would be familiar with the rules before the Con. There’s also a built-in safety in aiming for before GenCon, as this means they can still delay the books a month to fix serious problems and still have them available for the convention.
GenCon 2014 is fifteen months (and change) away, and late June ‘14 is fourteen months. Doing the math, this means the Core Rules/Basic set needs to be ready in under eight months, for the end of December. With a few months needed to actually write the books, they need to start working on the books in September or October. And late September... that’s five months from now.
So they need to call it. Or at the very least call the base game: classes, races, specialities, skills, and backgrounds. They need to stop revising and overhauling the game and start working on fine-tuning and balancing as soon as possible, while they still have time to respond to problems. Not just testing classes but individual feats and spells, seeing which work and which do not.
The catch is, as long as classes keep changing and changing no one will settle into playing a single class and really look at the rest of the game. Learning and relearning a class focuses the attention. And it’s only when the game is stable and people are used to their characters and thinking of the game like a campaign that they get creative and start trying abusive things or creative solutions to survive and save a beloved character.
While they can do some fixing when actually writing the rules and rely on internal playtesting, this is only good for small balancing: they need the game to be as polished as possible prior to the start of writing. Late in the playtest they cannot make major changes without running them through a playtest process or they risk overcompensating with a fix (which is common problem).
Comments that the game isn’t finished are unfounded. The designers could fiddle with the classes and races endlessly, continually finding small problems and revising which creates new problems. The entire history of all editions of D&D could be seen as designers tweaking classes and races in different ways as tastes and philosophies of game design come and go. The game will never be "finished" only "finished for now".
The playtest is a great example of this. We’ve had five major playtest packages and the fighter has looked fairly radically different in four of them. Each a response to feedback and trying a different idea. There’s no reason they couldn’t rebuild the fight again and again, each time responding to feedback and making valid revisions that invariably create new subtle problems requiring revision in response to the new feedback.
With the core game finished and the focus on fine balancing, they can continue to release new updates to the packages in the months leading up to the release of the game. They can spend the intervening time getting other options ready for the Advanced versions of the game, and balancing modules that might be released in books a couple months after the Core Rulebook(s). Or testing new options for distant variants. The Tactical Combat module totally needs some extensive testing, as does several of the modules that make heavy changes to the rules.
Furthermore, it’s time to actually playtest and not concept-test. A lot of the content in the playtest packages is less a test of how balanced the content is and more a test of how it feels and how people react to the design. Which is good, up to a point, but we’re rapidly reaching the point where concept has to surrender to balancing and testing.
We need the full Basic Game as close to its final form as possible. We need to test the crap out of that so it can be adjusted and tweaked, to see how it actually handles in a larger game-space. Because we haven't see it. We've seen a weird combination of the Basic and Standard game with bits of Advanced poking through. So it's harder to judge how Basic will actually handle on its own. And that’s something that needs to actually be tested.
Otherwise, they’ll have wasted the public playtest and spent a year-and-a-half in a massive design-by-committee for an unbalanced game.
Or am I completely wrong?
