Feasability of Forums in Alpha Testing

[Inner Circle Inc]

We haven't been posting on these forums lately, and for that I deeply appologize, though in brighter news, we've been hard at work on Strife and have finaly finished formatting the Alpha product.  On the eve of Strife's completion, I was struck with a question that I wish to pose to you to get your responces, that being, can a roleplaying game be tested on an internet forum in a play by post format?  The current system is a hidden and locked forum to keep all testing confidential, Alpha tester are commited to posting at least once daily and combat rules will be run in the same format as if we were all sitting together in the same room.  Moderated roleplaying can, and does work in strictly enforced and regulated environments, which is what we have created.  The thrust of my question lies in wether or not a forum will be conductive to testing and the gathering of data.  Do you think it will run too slowly to be effective?  Do you have personal experience with it that you would like to share?

[TonyLB]

When I was playtesting Capes, I found face-to-face playtest useful in very different ways from IRC playtest.  Face-to-face let me really see where the bumps were in the system... the confusion on the faces of other players is hard to miss, once you start looking out for it.

I'd say that Play-by-Post, being even further away from people's immediate, gut, reaction to the rules system is likely to give you even less useful feedback.  I strongly recommend getting people together face-to-face.  There's just no substitute.

[Inner Circle Inc]

We have done a bit of face to face playtesting, and I agree with you that nothing beats the face to face, vicreal reaction that your players give you through body language.  The largest single reason we choose to do a forum based Alpha test, is the fact that the game is designed to be playable in a Forum based evironmeny.  We are hoping that this will show some of the flaws and problems that will occure in the unique environment.  Thank you for your input, we'll definatly keep this in mind.