Playtesting has always been intimidating to me.

Not for other people’s games – I’ll playtest those until the end of time, no matter how rough or finished they might be. It’s only my own games that seem like insurmountably difficult beasts to wrestle.

I think this is in large part because of how vulnerable showing my work to others can feel. The easy part is over by the time I’ve gotten to playtesting! I’ve talked about the game, I’ve thought about the game, I’ve written the easy bits down, but now? Now I have to play the thing? What if it doesn’t hold up to scrutiny? What if all this talk I’ve been doing is for nothing?

The thing is, all that talk IS for nothing, in many ways. The game in my head only exists there, in my head. No matter how much I talk with friends and colleagues about it, no matter how much I declare my intentions for further writing, the game is still only in my head until we try to play it.

My primary experience with playtesting, being on the side of the designer, has been with 5e content, which was largely focused around numerical/mechanical balance. That felt so easy comparatively! The content wasn’t really going to change, and the structure of the rules wasn’t going to change, because my collaborator and I had built the game off of an existing game.

That’s what I thought I was doing with this most recent game, using an existing framework and building something genre-new on top. But in reality, I’ve changed, or contemplated changing so much of the structure of the game that it only barely shares a skeleton with the game that inspired it.

Maybe it’s that I’m being wishy-washy about my design. In prior games I’ve written, I had very clear and certain mechanics that were simple enough to hold up without playtesting (theoretically). With this game, there’s a lot more moving parts and a lot of questions that are key to the core gameplay experience, to say nothing of the specific details that I’ll need to refine later. So playtesting is both incredibly necessary and incredibly daunting; I am throwing myself and my playtesters onto shaky ground at best, with so many central questions unanswered.

And yet, last night’s playtest started giving me answers almost immediately. Purely by having to explain the rules I’d already written to players, not designers, and purely by building a character in the game, I locked in some key elements of the game (it’s definitely doable as GM-less, it’s definitely workable with a default scenario, but that default scenario needs to still help players propel plot). Even with all the questions that arose and the work ahead of me, I feel confident that this game has good bones, and even more, I feel confident that I can be the one to make this game.

All the talk in the world about this game has not given me even a fraction of the certainty granted to me by playtesting.

I hope that if you, like me, get knots of anxiety at the thought of letting others play your game (not just read it), you go ahead and schedule a playtest. Don’t wait for the game to be “ready” for playtesting. Stop thinking about it and talking about it and make it happen.

Cheers, LT