I announced my project in First Thoughts with an eye toward cultivating that wonderful fruit, "general feedback".  I also had some questions concerning how to maximize the benefit of play-testing in my own sessions and it was suggested that on this latter point I might do better posting in this forum.  For reference, my system is here:

http://www.chaosphere.com/genesys/

Although I'm pretty sure my questions are generic enough to not be system-dependent.  What I'm looking for are your tips for making each play-testing session count.  We've got rules and we've got players.  How can we use these players to vet the rules of our systems in a way that:

1.  Maximizes our coverage.  In other words, makes it more likely that we'll hit every rule and/or many, many rules combinations.

2.  Does not conflict with the overall goal of making the game fun.  I think part of play-testing should be to test whether the basic function of a game is satisfied (is everyone having a good time).

I'm searching for any advice from the trenches, so to speak, or even thoughts along the lines of "One thing I've always wanted to try in my play-test sessions is..."

Any help would be much appreciated.

When the goal is playtesting, take fun off the list of priorities.

If the game is fun, fun will happen. But that's not the motive at this point. Making sure it all does what it's supposed to is what's important.

When you sit down to playtest, think about what your specific goals are for that session. Make those goals explicit, up front, so that everyone is on the same page. If you want to test the subsystem that handles sentient yam wrangling, make sure everyone is on board with that.

Also make sure you schedule time for talking about what happened in the game. What went right, what went wrong, and why, for both. If the game isn't fun, but you get some good insightful feedback, then that was a successful session. If you had a rockin' time, but none of your goals were met, then you've failed. If you can manage both good feedback and fun, then awesome.

Wolfen wrote:
When the goal is playtesting, take fun off the list of priorities.

If the game is fun, fun will happen. But that's not the motive at this point. Making sure it all does what it's supposed to is what's important.

When you sit down to playtest, think about what your specific goals are for that session. Make those goals explicit, up front, so that everyone is on the same page. If you want to test the subsystem that handles sentient yam wrangling, make sure everyone is on board with that.

Also make sure you schedule time for talking about what happened in the game. What went right, what went wrong, and why, for both. If the game isn't fun, but you get some good insightful feedback, then that was a successful session. If you had a rockin' time, but none of your goals were met, then you've failed. If you can manage both good feedback and fun, then awesome.

I've found that it's best to approach it in layers. If you try to work out several things at once (dropping the characters into a combat situation where they get to use a number of unique options), and it doesn't work, you can never be quite sure WHY it fell apart. If you are still working out the rudiments of the basic resolution mechanics, then it's tough to also play and have fun. If your players are willing to play test, they probably already understand that fun is going to be a secondary concern. I've found that if I start off by saying it may be a few hours of bouncing ideas, everyone is cool about it and is willing to help out. My problem now is that people ask "are we play testing tonight"? and I usually say, "uh, no... just playing!" They are so used to the rules being a work in progress (for the last five years or so) that they can't quite get the concept yet that we can play just for fun. For them, the fun has come out of the social interactions at the table, and the interspersed fun moment in game (which got more and more frequent the better the system got). I think that during play testing (especially early on), I was a lot more lenient with outside of game speak and tangents at the table. I knew that the guy playing the gnome illusionist had fifteen minutes of stuff to tell me, and if the others got off to talking about school or work or whatever, it was all cool. Eventually, we'd get back to the game.

Make sure that your players understand not to fall too in love with their characters, either. It's hard to tell someone who loves her arcane archer that you've changed the rules for arcane magic... and archery... and that the cool thing she could do last session is now balanced so she can no longer wipe out hordes of orks without having to roll any dice.

You definitely want to work out fundamentals first, and get those settled as you add more layers. For instance, in a fantasy game, make sure the basic fundamentals of the magic system work BEFORE you work out lists of hundreds of spells. You don't want to create a situation where you hesitate to fix something because of all the time you've already invested into a section... "gee, I know that the fundamental magic rules are broken, but I've written 30 pages of cool spells using that system, and darn it all, I'm keeping it!" That's never a good rationale for a design choice.

Good luck!

Mike

Michael wrote:
You definitely want to work out fundamentals first, and get those settled as you add more layers. For instance, in a fantasy game, make sure the basic fundamentals of the magic system work BEFORE you work out lists of hundreds of spells. You don't want to create a situation where you hesitate to fix something because of all the time you've already invested into a section... "gee, I know that the fundamental magic rules are broken, but I've written 30 pages of cool spells using that system, and darn it all, I'm keeping it!" That's never a good rationale for a design choice.

Michael has posted most of what I'd have answered, and probably said it better in the bargain.

To add a little something: Once the fundamentals work reliably, and produce the effects you're looking for, choose the features that have had the least contact during the foundational play, the ones that seem questionable to you, or the ones that you think are really cool features of the system. The first, because it's the least tested thus far, the second for obvious reasons, and the third because if you think it's really a cool feature, then it definitely needs to work right so that other people will think it's cool too.

To double-highlight something he said as well: DON'T be attached to your mechanics. If it doesn't work, it doesn't work; Change it. If it almost works, you can fiddle around with options to make it work, but if it simply doesn't work no matter what you try, you may want to try something else entirely.

Once you're pretty sure the game works as intended when you run it, then try to get one of your friends to run it. That will reveal whole new areas to improve upon.

Wolfen wrote:
To double-highlight something he said as well: DON'T be attached to your mechanics. If it doesn't work, it doesn't work; Change it. If it almost works, you can fiddle around with options to make it work, but if it simply doesn't work no matter what you try, you may want to try something else entirely.