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Message: <blockquote data-quote="DEFCON 1" data-source="post: 7709420" data-attributes="member: 7006">Nope.  Doesn't answer my question at all.You said "I know that UA is for testing things but there needs to be a base level of quality in place."Why?  Why does there have to be a "base level of quality"?  Seems to me they're getting exactly what they wanted... a whole mass of people number-crunching the crap out of these rules.  It's probably saved Mike hours of time of him having to do it himself.Everybody here seems to think that the guys over at the D&D department have nothing better to do with their day than just brainstorm ideas and then spend their afternoons detailing every single thing out.  My guess is that they have just a little bit more to do that that.  Meetings.  Meetings.  More meetings.  Meetings with editors.  Meetings with art departments.  Meetings with company honchos.  Meetings with PR.My wife is a manager at a market research firm, and she tells me quite clearly that she spends most of her days stuck in meetings and very little doing the actual work.  So with the (lack of) size of the D&D design and development department... Mike, Jeremy and company probably brainstorm when they can (I think Mike even said that he came up with these Mass Combat ideas on a trip or vacation or something), put things together as simple as possible... and then throws it out to all of us or their alpha playtest teams to cull through the data and tell them what does and doesn't work.Which is EXACTLY what all of you are doing as playtesters.  And thus, you are performing your jobs admirably and you should be commended for that.But to think that it's their job to only give us things that are 50% or 75% or 90% polished and then hand them over to all of us to put a spit shine on them is kind of silly in my opinion.  Playtesting isn't "Early Adoption".  The idea that because you go to their website they're gonna give you a "Preview" of new rules before anyone else will get in when the book gets published.  Playtesting is just that... TESTING stuff.  Stuff that might be polished... as well as stuff that might be just a fleeting idea that one of them had and he wants a quick rundown from some players to tell him whether he's on the right track.But if you personally have an issue with that... then it's obvious to me that you shouldn't be a playtester.  Because being a playtester isn't just about getting "all the good stuff early."  It's about doing actual grunt work.  And you do it because you want to help shape the game.</blockquote>

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