Topic: When playtesting, please ask your players to break your game.
Started by: Daemonworks
Started on: 9/1/2010
Board: Playtesting
On 9/1/2010 at 10:07am, Daemonworks wrote:
When playtesting, please ask your players to break your game.
In other words, ask them to abuse the game mechanics in the worst ways they can come up with. It's usually annoying to play a game and discover that one of the players has built a character that is effectively a god because the designer didn't think something through. [I'm speaking as somebody who's currently playing one such god, and decided years ago to never use most of the abilities he's entitled to use because he wants the game to actually be fun for everyone]
At the least:
1: Make sure there's no game mechanics that allow a character to become effectively unable to fail. If this happens, you really don't have a game anymore.
2: If there's a rule in place for balance, make it non-trivial to bypass that rule.
On 9/1/2010 at 11:34am, Jason Pitre wrote:
Re: When playtesting, please ask your players to break your game.
As a corollary to this, ask your blind playtesters to give this instruction. We all self-correct flaws like this when we run our own games and we need the fresh opportunistic eyes to find many of the exploits.
On 9/1/2010 at 2:04pm, David Artman wrote:
RE: Re: When playtesting, please ask your players to break your game.
I've asked for that repeatedly. Getting folks to take the time to do it is the hard part.
On 9/1/2010 at 3:19pm, Graham Walmsley wrote:
RE: Re: When playtesting, please ask your players to break your game.
I only partly agree with this. Often, I want people to have fun with the game, rather than meticulously analysing every rule for ways to break it.
There's a member of our group who plays to break games. It's not always useful in early playtests.
On 9/1/2010 at 8:09pm, Ron Edwards wrote:
RE: Re: When playtesting, please ask your players to break your game.
It would be excellent to learn about the specific features of the game that came under question, or should have come under question, through playtesting.
Best, Ron
On 9/2/2010 at 9:05am, Anders Gabrielsson wrote:
RE: Re: When playtesting, please ask your players to break your game.
Graham wrote:
I only partly agree with this. Often, I want people to have fun with the game, rather than meticulously analysing every rule for ways to break it.
There's a member of our group who plays to break games. It's not always useful in early playtests.
I agree with this. I think it's important to separate constructive playtesting (playing the game as intended to see if the mechanics work and are conducive to an enjoyable experience) and destructive playtesting (looking for flaws). Both are necessary, but trying to do both at the same time can lead to frustration.
As always, communicating what you want is key.