Playtest Advice?

#1

Hey fellow game designers!

I am in the midst of developing Ravenous, a PbtA game about horror, vampires and family, and I’m just at a stage where I find myself playtesting it (and touring it around), very often.

I’m running a lot of one off sessions at a local rpg club, but I also find that I’m running it a pretty good deal at cons.

With a couple of big regional cons coming up for me soon (Gateway and RinCon) what advice do you have about playtesting games in those environments and getting the most out of it?

What have you learned? What were some valuable experiences you had? What would you tell yourself if you could go back in time?

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#2

I’ve done one playtest at a con in a specific area built for playtesting, for a card game. It was a great experience, because my game sorely needed a playtest. It’s a good opportunity to get fresh eyes on your game, to see perspectives that you might otherwise miss. Take as many notes as you can, focusing on the ways players respond to different aspects of your game. Ahead of time, make notes on areas you’re interested in checking, things you want to test. Are there areas you’re not sure about?

Beyond that, just be open to players finding holes in your game, like normal. Use them to identify problems, so that you can devise solutions.

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#3

Make sure people booking the game know it’s a Playtest in advance otherwise they may come expecting a more polished experience than you can provide.
Also make it clear you are hoping for constructive feedback and how long at the end if the session you are going to build in for feedback … They may be annoyed if they think they are getting 4 hrs of play and you deliver 3 + 1 he for feedback, for instance.
Tell then which bits you are particularly interested in feedback on, rather than offering a very open questions which might not focus on the aspect you particularly wanted to test.
Ask them if you can record the feedback - the alternative will be loss of eye contact during feedback as you scribble notes … which testers can misinterpret. Make it as much like a conversation as you can.
The other advantage of recording us that you’ll be able to process it in Bute sized pieces later … we often hear negatives and miss the positives in the moment.

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#4

Pay most attention to when players describe how they feel rather than their impressions of the mechanics. “Balanced” systems often feel unbalanced because 99% of the time humans are not rational actors.

Try to have players approach from as blind a position as possible. If they can Intuit your vision without you explicitly telling it to them you’re on the right track.

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#5

“Remember: when people tell you something’s wrong or doesn’t work for them, they are almost always right. When they tell you exactly what they think is wrong and how to fix it, they are almost always wrong.” --Neil Gaiman

This applies to playtesting as well as in writing. If someone has an unpleasant experience playing your game, that experience is valid and should have attention paid to it. But the players are not the right people to suggest fixes and solutions. Often the actual problem is something more subtle, more low-level underlying aspects of the game, that won’t be obvious to someone playing the game the first time.

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#6

From a different angle, try to get someone ELSE to run your game. This will tell you what is missing from the rules, both from a “what does a GM need to know to run this game?” perspective, and also from a “What information am I conveying to people that’s not actually in the rules, because I just KNOW it about my game?” perspective.

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