So my friend Tracy admitted over on twitter that he wasn’t sure what a playtest is supposed to do other than answer the question “is this horribly broken?”
I shot him a couple quick tweets in response of other questions that I think a playtest process should try to answer. I’m not going to embellish them (much) here, but I thought the list might be useful to some folks.
- Is the game producing the effects and story trends you want to see in play?
- What excites folks about the game?
- What bores (or frustrates) them?
- What’s extraneous?
- Does the game work like it should when I am not in the room? (If it doesn’t, what am I doing when I am in the room that I need to put in the text?)
- What assumptions about play am I making that aren’t in the text?
So, what’s on your playtest list?
