thread: 2012-04-30 : Updates!
On 2012-05-01, Vincent wrote:
Peter, good question.
At this stage of development, an internal playtest just means grabbing a couple of friends for half an hour and trying a thing out. I "go to playtesting" when I need confirmation that what I'm designing will, in fact, work, before I move on to creating dependent systems.
It starts very small, just testing tiny system interactions: "hey Meg, pretend you're trying to push me off a wall. Roll these dice. Say I dunno, something about pushing me off the wall, okay? ... Huh. Okay, thanks!"
Or "hey Meg, you're creating a character, a dragon slayer. I'm going to ask you a couple of questions, choose the answers from these lists here, okay? ... Huh. Okay, thanks!"
When I have a complete subsystem I need to test, that's when I ask friends to sit down with me for half an hour and give it a try. This was the case with The Dragon - I needed to test character creation, to (a) make sure that it made interesting characters, (b) see whether it gave me everything I needed as GM to launch into play, and (c) if not (which I expected), clarify what it was missing, so I could go about creating it with some experience to build on.
Eventually there's no way to see what works and what doesn't without just sitting down to play the game, so that's what you do.
It's crucial when you run an internal playtest that you have a crystal-clear (if not necessarily articulate) idea of what play should ultimately be like. If you feel a sinking, grasping feeling, like something's not quite going right, you're allowed to press on anyway for a strict maximum of 5 minutes more. That feeling is correct! That feeling is always correct.
Also, you can ask your playtesters questions if you want to, but their opinions about how it went and whether it worked and was fun don't count. That feeling is ALWAYS correct.
I'm happy to answer more questions about it, or if you want to say more about what you're trying to figure out, please do.
Troy, not that I know of. I don't have recordings myself, so I don't know when or whether any will be available.
