Somehow in the last several weeks my brain managed to push through getting some rules together for a game I’m working on, and I’ve started playtesting with some friends. We’re still at the “proof-of-concept” stage where you’re not sure if you’re going to stick with the ideas you have or have to abandon them altogether.
One of the pitfalls I’ve seen a lot of folks do, early in playtesting, is trying to run full games if you don’t have enough locked in for a full game to make sense. In my case, I’m just running 1 hour playtests – “let’s make a character” “let’s do 2-3 scenes testing these (specific subset) of rules”.
And the reason is that when people play full 3+ hour sessions, they are used to “angling for fun”. If you are having a hard time with the rules, or something is a pain point, you probably have developed a lot of skills as a group to navigating around them. Or falling back into techniques you’re familiar with. Then you don’t actually test the new rules, you just play the way you always do anyway. The new rules become the hurdle to jump past, instead of a thing to understand (and then to redesign).
If you see something is not working, do you need 3 hours of watching it not work over and over? No. But if the solution is to retreat to known patterns, you don’t actually get anything new, either. So, short tests, revise, etc. until there’s enough that I feel the general systems are locked in, and then we’re doing refinement on details. Then you do full sessions, because then you’re looking for the sorts of problems you only see over longer play or small rough points you might have missed.
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