Playtest Guidelines

[Rob Donoghue]

Ok, so my search fu has failed me.  If there's already a decent thread on this, I'd be glad to go absorb it.

Here's the situation.  We just started the initial round of playtesting for the Dresden RPG, and hope to be sending it out to other groups for further playtesting once we've done an initial sweep.  I'm pleased as punch to be doing a solid amount of playtesting, but I'm now starting to get concerned about our level of rigor.  

Basically, for our local playtest, we're doing it primarily be feel.  That might work out fine to a point, but I'm concerned about being blinded by existing assumptions.  What's more, that's absolutely no guideline for other groups.

So I'm wondering if anyone has any good ideas, examples or suggestions of good playtesting guidelines - the kinds of things you want to let peopel know before hand and the kind of questiosn you should make sure to ask to get a sense of what really worked and didn't work.  Are some methodologies (like, questionnaire's vs. interviews or numeric vs. open-ended questions) more or less useful than others?  In short - what should we know to make this as useful a playtest as possible?

Thanks much,

Rob D.

[buddha]

Hey Rob,

Well, I'm sure others here have a lot more experience than myself, having only playtested one RPG, but I'd say you probably want to ask the crunchy stuff in questionnaire form, but leave a lot of room for personal comments and feelings of the playtesters.  

Now, I'm assuming you guys have specific questions you'd want answered, and I'd be sure to include those for the playtesters to answer.  Stuff like; "Did the X mechanic work smoothly during play, or did you feel that you had to refer to the main rules too often?".  Maybe there's stuff you guys are vacillating on, and playtesters will help by actually using, abusing and probably misunderstanding the rules.  

I think that's one thing you might want to get- what stuff was misunderstood, but later corrected, what stuff was houseruled right away, and why?  For me, there was a simple mechanic in the RPG I playtesed that, when flipped, fit well with the rest of the game, but as it was, was kinda counterintuitive to the rest of the game.  

Hmm, I'm looking back at the actual question, about playtesting guidelines, and I don't think I really addressed the question you were asking- "How can I make this as useful a playtest as possible".  I guess my answer to that would be to make it as easy as possible for people to respond to you, let 'em send in letters, e-mails, whatever, and pester them, very gently, to get responses, even if they are very general.  Maybe have them fill in the blank, "I liked it, but..."

Hope this helps at all!  

buddha

PS- I'm guessing you're asking this question on the yahoo group, too?

[Rob Donoghue]

PS- I'm guessing you're asking this question on the yahoo group, too?

Not yet, but I probably should. :)

-Rob D.

[Rob Donoghue]

On the off chance that this is something anyone who is not me is looking for, I bounced the same question off Chad Underkoffler, and he was kind enough to put the answer in his livejournal.

http://www.livejournal.com/users/chadu/266335.html

-Rob D.

[Ben Lehman]

My approach with playtesters has been to take a very free hand.

I give people my draft of the game, and tell them what I expect (I would like to you play at least one session vs. I would like you to read the draft and tell me if it makes sense vs. I would like to see an extended playtest report.)  About half do it.  I pretty much just get Forge Actual Play reports from them, which is a lot of work for them, and maybe decreases my return, but is totally invaluable in terms of both giving me information about how the game is used in play and building interest for the game.

The questions I try to focus on are things like "What went wrong?  How did you handle it?" and "Were there any rules that were unclear?  How did you interpret them?"  Very focused on the interaction between the rules and the players.  Likewise, I try to avoid anything formula or numerical, like "rate your fun with this game on a scale of 1-10."  I find such information totally useless.

yrs--
--Ben

[Spooky Fanboy]

Simple answer: list your general areas of concern in the questions. Make those questions essay style, instead of scale-of-1-to-whatever. Ask for examples of play (a biggie in my book.)

1) What kind of characters did your group make? What kind of scenarios did you run? Did the game, in your opinion, lend itself easily to your enjoyment and ideas? Whether yes or no, why do you think so? (Please list some examples.)

2) What did the mechanics do to constrict/free up your playtest? Please list examples.

3) What mechanics/setting information was unclear?

4) Did any of your players try to break the system, or make a character that couldn't be fit into the setting/system we provided? Please list the character as an example.

ETc.