thread: 2011-02-17 : Ben Lehman: Playtesting: Stop
On 2011-05-26, isildur wrote:
(Context: I get paid to design computer games, and design RPGs as a way to think about games outside of the aggravation of my day job. Take from that what you will; I have no real ambitions to publish what I write because I have no real motivation to do so.)
I was running Mongoose's Traveller, and I didn't like the ship combat system. It seemed to be a system that gave one or two players a lot of interesting stuff to do, and everyone else nothing to do.
I rewrote the whole thing from scratch into a resource management game, in which players were able to spend currency to affect the action, or trade currency with each other according to some constrained pathways.
I used this for a major ship battle, then debriefed people on the new system. I took their experiences, added them to my observations about how well the system accomplished its overall goal (to give every player a stake in the scene and the ability to influence it), and also how well the specific resource-flow pathways functioned (did everyone have some resources at all times? were people given incentive to move resources to each other as well as spending them? did resources back up in a glut anywhere?).
The system featured problems in all these areas, so I revised the specific mechanics that seemed to cause the problems, and used the revised system in the next major ship combat, a week or so later. Part of that revision was proposing my changes to each sub-component to the person who'd been using that sub-component, and getting their reaction. This was usually in the form of 'Do you think it would have been more interesting to do X?' and then 'Would you be willing to try X next week to see if it works better?'
I eventually got the system to a point where I felt like it was sufficient to continue using for play, although it almost certainly had a few more problems that could have been rooted out.
This is a playtest.
Step one: build a game or game component, until you believe it is done and working properly.
Step two: use it yourself, with a group of players who are amenable to being the front line of a potentially broken system.
Step three: revise based on your observations in step two, and those of your players.
It's possible that there's some other kind of 'playtest' of which I am not aware, but I can't imagine what would happen in that sort of playtest.
As an aside, this:
"The right thing to do about rules holes is to take your rules set, once it's finished being written and modified and so on, and critically evaluate every possible rules interaction, looking for holes. Use a pencil and paper, if you're like me, or a blank text file, or even just your own head and the shower..."
made me laugh and laugh and laugh. I shared it with my design team, and they laughed too. In the MMO world, we assume that even a few thousand players become a genetic algorithm dedicated to 'solving' your game. MMO players will, as a mass, find something as tiny as a two percent variance in power between character A and character B. The idea that a pencil and paper could possibly keep ahead of them is absurd.
