I have recently been indoctrinated into the world of playtesting for various items. Okay, I shouldn’t say “recently” because I have playtested before. There is just a different order of magnitude between the two versions.
When I was in college, I regularly participated in playtest games that were Gamemaster playtests. By that I mean the GM was playtesting an adventure he’d designed for running at conventions. This was based on a system that we happened to be playing (that already existed) and none of us had any real connections with other than the “Rabid Fan” connection. I playtested a Star Trek adventure, a Champions adventure, a Shadowrun adventure, but my favorite was a time-traveling Star Wars adventure. Hey, don’t scoff. Time travel and Star Wars may not seem to go together, but it was a fun excuse to do some pre-Empire running around with post-Empire characters. And I played an Ewok, with one of the other players doing a 12-year-old tech whiz.
Do I really need to tell you how that one went down?
When playtesting adventures, the idea is to make sure that the NPCs aren’t too overpowered or too underpowered. To verify that the lines of the plot are clear, leaving room for the characters to discover the clues while doing Their Own Thing (like a certain Ewok & kid). To clarify differences between what the GM expects and what the players can or will do to ruin an adventure. And finally, to make sure the adventure is not too short or too long for convention running times. Usually, you get a four hour slot at a convention.
You don’t want people to be done at the 2 hour mark, nor do you want the adventure running over and preventing them from making the other games they have scheduled. This makes adventure playtesting an essential tool in the GM arsenal. If you have players you can trust to be honest with you, players who won’t game the adventure for the sake of screwing you over, and you can take the criticism, I strongly advise all GMs to playtest their adventures before going to a con. And yes, I even advise GMs to playtest off-the-shelf adventures. You never know when someone is going to come up with something unexpected and the playtest is a better place to discover problems than in the middle of a con when all the pressure is on.
The good thing about adventure playtesting is it normally doesn’t require anything but a group of friends and some munchies. No NDAs signing your life away, no complicated rituals for finding a private place to game. Unfortunately, when doing Official Company Playtesting, both are things to consider. Companies are notoriously protective over their IP (all companies). So grabbing a table at the local game shop is not a consideration when playtesting the top secret material from any roleplaying company.
Official playtesting is one of those rare badges of honor that geek gamers love to wear on their shoulders. (Badges? I don’t need no stickin’ badges! @=). To see your name inside the cover of a book, listed under the Playtester label is the holy grail of gaming fandom. The only thing that ranks higher is being a creator / artist / writer who is paid to produce the material everyone else is slobbering over. And yes, we gaming geeks do slobber. Anyone who says otherwise is neither a geek nor a gamer. (So say we all!)
In the official playtesting, we find a cozy private place to game, swear on Aunt Hilda’s non-existent grave that we guard all company secrets with the lives of our favorite pets, then proceed on a rant fest of why the changes are ruining the Best Thing Since Sliced Bread (even though we hated the last 7 editions of the game). We scream about how the rules are screwed up, how the new writers don’t have a clue (even though we sometimes are those writers) and how We Could Do Better. Then we proceed to find ways to min-max the new rules (or screw up the adventure) to Prove That We Can. And then we complain again when the playtesting notes cause the writers to fix the system so we can’t break it in our own special little ways that we have grown to know and love.
And far down underneath the rants and complaints come the praises no one really wants to voice because to admit that XYZ change was a good one invalidates the Min-Maxing we want to do with our characters, and the Power Gaming we intend to do with the system. Playtesting isn’t about praise. It’s about tearing apart a game to find the flaws, exploiting everything we can, then noting down how bad a flaw is and recommending fixes to it.
There are some companies who engage in playtesting with a “We’ll listen to what you have to say and seriously consider implementing your recommended changes.” There are others who playtest just to say their system was playtested, but they don’t want to actually acknowledge the feedback. I know several gamers, who playtested for various companies in years past, that have given me earfuls about how they worked so hard to better a game and were ultimately ignored because the company didn’t care about feedback. Many of those systems failed. Though a few, inexplicably, succeeded for a few years before ordinary gamers actually found all the bugs.
I’m of the belief that it doesn’t matter how well a system is playtested. RPGs leave so much open to interpretation that eventually a Min-Maxer will come along and deliberately create flaws that favor them. If they can brow-beat the GM into agreeing with them, all the better.
Still, playtesting on an official level, having to think about my feedback, has been a fascinating experience. Notes like “This is ridiculous!” or “This rule is nonsense” just don’t cut it. Playtesting requires a certain methodical thinking. Of not just reading a rule and scoffing, but of putting it into practice and actually walking through the steps to see how it works, several times walking through the steps if necessary. And I know our group’s feedback is being taken seriously because we’ve seen some changes come through the pipes based on things that we said. Well, okay. We don’t have proof it was just our comments. But the fact that we commented on the flexibility of space shuttles fitting through a gastronomical wormwhole and seeing that the actual description of the whole thing got changed in the next set of documents… Well, that felt pretty cool.
So, wanna be a playtester? Look up the website of your favorite RPG company. If they are looking for playtesters, they’ll probably have a blurb you can easily find or a comment on their FAQ. If the info doesn’t exist in either place, consider checking out the Contacts page for a general query email address. It doesn’t hurt to ask, after all. The worse they can do is say “no.”
So what are you waiting for? Aunt Zelda to come out of the closet with the toaster? Go do some playtesting!
