**Advanced Class Guide Playtest Feedback**


Pathfinder First Edition General Discussion

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Paizo Employee Lead Designer

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Hey there all,

First off, thank you for taking part in the Advanced Class Guide Playtest. It has been a wild month and the design team has spent much of that time pouring through feedback and posts. I think you will find that when the final book comes out in August, all of the hard work has been well worth it.

This thread is here for folks to post up their comments and thoughts on the playtest process itself. We are continually looking for ways to improve our playtest process, and just like the playtest itself, we want your thoughts. Please let us know how the playtest process went for you and if there is anything we could improve in the future, let us know about that too.

Please note: this thread is NOT for discussing the classes themselves. That period is now closed as we move forward on our final designs. Posts that are talking about classes will be removed to keep this thread on topic.

So, now that playtest is wrapped up. How did we do?

Jason Bulmahn
Lead Designer


Thanks for the opportunity to influence a game I love so much.

Dark Archive

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I think you all did very well. You got back to us in as timely a manner as you could despite all the work I'm sure you all had lumped on you already. A few people tossing insults aside, it seemed allowing open discussion also went splendidly. You guys were quick in your class adjustments, willing to entertain the ideas you'd asked your players to put forth (that already set this apart from a lot of other companies' "playtests"), and managed to work through all the chaos to find overall very favorable results.

Honestly, I think my only complaint would be how short of a playtest it was. Now, I understand time constraints and all that, but it just seems like we didn't get to test some of the more heavily reworked classes (arcanist aside) at length. But again, time constraints aren't an easy thing to overcome. So yeah, I got nothin' bad to say. Getting your players to actually test the products before sending them live is a far better idea than picking a select few people to test'em. You can get a lot more feedback a lot more quickly with the method employed here.


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Liked:

*Multiple iterations

*The edits to the first posts between iterations were AWESOME

*Staff engagement was great! Cheers to Sean, Jason, and Stephen for that.

Disliked/Suggestions:

*The survey questions, while certainly concise, were chosen in such a way and vague enough that the results are going to be pretty arbitrary at best, and lead to incorrect assumptions at worst, often asking to compare apples and oranges or to simplify a complicated situation into a single number. It would have been nice if the questions were laser-targeted (ask to compare martials to martials, so you don't get noise from the "caster supremacists" rating all martials low when compared to "all the other classes") and allowed for level by level comparison (for instance, the latest iteration of the Swashbuckler is noticably overpowered at mid-to-high levels but quite weak at low levels. How do you rate that, then? I chose to always rate class power based on how the class did at level 10-12, right smack in the middle). Also comparing to parent classes without asking how one felt about the parent class will skew data too. All the people who think rogues and monks are useless will obviously rate the children classes at '5' and not think that means it needs rebalancing. Meanwhile, the people whose games were ruined by a gunslinger will rate Swashbuckler '1' compared to gunslinger and not think that means Swashbuckler is too weak.

Another solution is to ditch the survey--I think the current one is going to lead to flawed assumptions

*Timing wasn't the best it could be, particularly with regards to the final iteration. It was significantly too short. This was clearly when it had to stop given holidays and RPG Superstar, so it should have been released earlier, which was also probably outside of your hands. However, we really didn't have time to playtest the last iteration very much.

*PFS playtest usability--many of the new classes, being hybrids, were hardly different from their parents until level 3 or so. For instance, Hunter is extremely similar to Druid until about level 3 (and 1st iteration Hunter even moreso). Given the nature of PFS, it was very difficult to playtest the new classes at levels above 1, which is by far where they needed the playtests more than level 1. I dutifully reported playtest data for two level 1 games, but the dice were far more important than the class features, and the new classes hadn't diversified themselves yet. Solution? Pregens of 1, 4, and 7 for the new classes would have been superb. Especially if the pregens represented the baseline of how the PDT expected the new classes to perform

I will post more as I think of it.


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Something I noticed was, because all discussion about each class was limited to a its single thread, it was at times difficult for less popular topics to rise above the noise. Without sub threads or anything it was at times hard to keep track of discussions or see if someone responded to a comment without going through pages and pages of text about the "hot" topics of each class. There were many times I'd see an interesting comment that hadn't been brought up before, but see it get little traction. I would think having more than one thread would have made it easier for these other topics to get more examination.

Obviously this case was a bit unique with ten classes to deal with, and I can understand wanting to keep discussion from exploding into a thousand threads mixed around the playtest forum. It is just that after spending a lot of time on forums with subthreads/comment chains/whatever you call it all the voices contained in single threads felt like a cacophony to me, and made it a bit more difficult to participate in that aspect of things.


Are the playtest discussion threads still visible? I can't find them

Sovereign Court

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Pathfinder Rulebook Subscriber
mbauers wrote:
Are the playtest discussion threads still visible? I can't find them

I think they have all been removed, or maybe it was just a dream and they were never there at all...


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Liked:

-Lots of dev feedback during the process (though some were more active in some threads than others)

-The fact that much of the feedback given in the threads was taken to heart, even some specific suggestions it seemed (rather than a general "I get where you're coming from, here's my take on it" thing like many companies like to do).

-A "living document" made by the editing of the first posts for teh class threads.

Disliked:

-Survey questions were a bit too vague. Questions like "How does it stack up to each of the parent classes?" felt misleading, since it's hard to get across that "I think this class is in a really good place balance-wise" when "How does it stack up to parent class A" is answered with a 1 or 2 (much less powerful) and "How does it stack up to parent class B?" is answered with a 4 or 5 (much more powerful).

-There were only two rounds of playtesting. A third round would have been very helpful in smoothing out the remaining kinks. IMO it should have been:

Weeks 1 and 2: Initial offering
Week 3: First Revision
Week 4: Second revision

Instead of Week 1-3 being the initial offering and Week 4 being scrambling to look over the revised classes.

-That apparently the class threads have been removed. I'd like to be able to look over them more, especially the opening post for those that were revised, because those FAQ/Errata-esque changes are important to know, and I would like to continue using the Playtest classes until the actual book comes out.

Please bring back the threads. Unless I'm a dummy and they were just moved somewhere.

Paizo Employee Lead Designer

Knight_Druid wrote:
mbauers wrote:
Are the playtest discussion threads still visible? I can't find them
I think they have all been removed, or maybe it was just a dream and they were never there at all...

They have been moved, but that process is currently happening. As soon as I know, I will post up a link.

Jason Bulmahn
Lead Designer

Sczarni

mbauers wrote:
Are the playtest discussion threads still visible? I can't find them

They seem to be taken down/invisible, sadly. If they need to be unavailable, I understand, but could there at least be a sticky post available listing the official rules changes to the classes that came out after the release of the Revised ACG? For anyone using the new classes in PFS, they need to have access to those changes if they didn't print them yet.

Paizo Employee Lead Designer

Hey there folks,

Concerning the survey questions. I appreciate the feedback, as a note, we were going for something a little different with these. Our hope was to use them as a metric to measure the impact of our changes. As a result, the questions were kept a bit vague so as to avoid them getting to bogged down in particulars. They really did help us gauge the overall opinion, even if we did not use those numbers as an indicator of what needed change.

Jason Bulmahn
Lead Designer

Paizo Employee Lead Designer

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So, for those of you who want to peruse the playtest threads, they can be found HERE

Jason Bulmahn
Lead Designer


I would like to be able to view an archive of the discussions, just because there was so much I didn't yet get to read, since my sole focus during this month was on the warpriest. I do have to say, I really liked being able to influence the development of a game I enjoy, especially since one of the new classes is pretty much what I've always wanted to play for a really long time.

I wish the test was longer, since I feel as though there wasn't much time to test the revised classes. It also would have been nice if there was an easy to find area to post up in detailed test reports, since I feel the survey didn't really let me give as accurate of feedback as I would have liked. I might have an opinion on how powerful a class is, but there wasn't really the ability to mention why or what made a class strong.

Good job guys, I look forward to seeing the final version of the guide in August!


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It was great! I got to see the results of feedback.

It was a little disappointing when some classes didn't get dev comments on the boards, though. A comment now and then from somebody official is really encouraging! Even with ten classes, a little in each would be nice. That was more second round, though. First round was better on that.

Thanks for all your hard work, guys! I look forward to seeing the final product.

Shadow Lodge

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This Playtest felt a lot different than the others I've been part of. For a few different reasons. This one felt particularly rushed. Incomplete. Even outside of the timeline, particularly for the updated version, I had two games get cancelled and missed out on the opportunity to DM for the classes as much as I had hoped.

One particular sticking point about this one, one that really seemed to be different than any others I had been part of (and I could just be remembering things incorrectly), but there seemed to be next to no actually designer/official feedback. There had been a lot of questions, pertinent to the classes and playtesting of them that seemed to get ignored. Worse, when people would go off and create new thread to ask them, fearing that they had been drowned out in the threads, rather than getting answered the new thread just gets locked, unanswered. In the past, Paizo has been known for it's openness and customer service, and that just seemed to vanish, here. Read this less as complaint or whining and more as an observation.

The surveys, as someone noted, felt extremely weak. Pigeonholed. There was no way to explain what an issue was, who, how, or to really put any of the 1-5 answers into any sort of perspective. I had heard multiple times that the surveys where to give you all some understanding of the flow of things, but honestly, if another playtest utilized them, I would probably refrain from using them again. Less scaling answers and more either this or that I think would also work better.

A lot of the issues that I kept seeing mentioned, many almost unanimously, never once seemed to get any sort of response or clarification. It also really felt like there where a few classes/threads that the Devs played favorites to from the start (Arcanist and Brawler), and (at least to a point), ignored the others. May not be true, but it did feel that way, where all of the classes seemed to have relatively similar amounts of issues and questions.

One other issue I had with the playtest is that there seemed to be a lot of misleading information, particularly on what the intention of things where, and what a particular classes role and design philosophy was supposed to be. As an example, just before the updated answered that the role of the Warpriest was to fill the place of the often requested Battle Cleric and Divine Magus concepts, and then it turns out that we get some sort of mashup between Cleric/Fighter/Monk/Oracle/Paladin. <just an example I'm not trying to throw anyone under the bus>

Now, with most of that out of the way, I would like to thank both the Devs and Paizo crew, as well as everyone that contributed to the playtests and the threads, (giving me plenty of sides to consider and things to think about, even when I hated them (Shaman-> Druid Spell list) :). Thanks for the opportunity to take part once again, and I can't wait to see what and how it all turns out.


Jason Bulmahn wrote:

Hey there folks,

Concerning the survey questions. I appreciate the feedback, as a note, we were going for something a little different with these. Our hope was to use them as a metric to measure the impact of our changes. As a result, the questions were kept a bit vague so as to avoid them getting to bogged down in particulars. They really did help us gauge the overall opinion, even if we did not use those numbers as an indicator of what needed change.

Jason Bulmahn
Lead Designer

Hey Jason,

Thanks for cluing us in on the survey rationale. As someone taking the survey, there were some times when I felt like I could have just as easily picked four or even all five of the choices depending on how I decided to answer your question. Almost all of them (except Arcanist, since with some of the new exploits, particularly the School and Bloodline ones, I found it stronger than every class in the game, which was easy to rate on the survey) left me feeling bad about what I had said because I felt I was giving bad or misleading data when faced with how I made my choices. If I use myself as an exemplar, I think there will be a lot of noise. Having not seen the survey myself, still I urge caution in drawing trends from it too much.

To give another direct example--at the level range I decided to use for comparison, I think the Swashbuckler is actually rather strong for a martial class. I also rated classes in comparison to their roles whenever asked to compare to "all non playtest classes" (so martial vs martial). However, I also rated the Swashbuckler a 1 compared to Gunslinger because the Gunslinger class, firearms, and archetypes presented in Ultimate Combat have mechanics that promote builds making the Gunslinger class potentially problematically overpowered in games. The '1' from me vs Gunslinger is not a sign of disapproval. In fact, anything that you found me rating a '3' when compared to the Gunslinger is something that I desperately would want weakened before it entered the game. Someone else might have rated Swashbuckler as '1' on all counts due to deciding to use level 1 as their metric or even comparing the class to a god wizard in one of those dreadful "Tier" comparisons that is framed to make casters always win. Their '1' might be a '1' of disapproval, thinking it needed to be stronger.

But the survey's math will sometimes put my numbers together with that other person at the same value for different reasons for the '1' vs Gunslinger and sometimes just give us different values with no information as to why.

Bottom Line: I know you guys are going to be careful with this data because you have a track record of being careful, listening to us, and coming out with awesome product. But even if the data doesn't mislead, I think it could have been more helpful with the questions framed a bit differently.


I want to second what Rogue Eidolon said about the surveys.

The nature and format of the questions was a bit too broad. SOme fo the questions like: "How likely are you to play this class" were fine as they were... that is a totally subjective question that really only speaks to one variable, "desirability".

Many of the others were really difficult to give a reasonable answer for. I have been playing for quite a long time, but when I thought about the comparison questions as a numerical value... I was a bit stumped. How powerful is a rogue on a scale of 1 to 10 compared to all of the other options? I can't really say. And maybe that is just me, seeing what was meant to be a subjective question about intuition as an objective question.

This is also the sort of thing that is hard to pin down until serious playtesting (by which I mean playing any of these classes through a full on campaign, taking them from level 1 to 15 or so). After a book is released, you know that some of us will make it a point to "break" things, and often it can be easy for the power level of certain classes to be miscalculated by experimentation in a vacuum or within only a small slice of levels.

Anywho, I think that setting up the questionnaire to go feature by feature through each class might be a better. Favorite thing, least favorite thing.

I understand that there is a volume issue, so written answers may not be the best option. I am not sure that there is necessarily a better approach than what was provided, but I know that it felt very hard to answer the questions.

The rest of the playtest went swimmingly I think. I appreciated the developer feedback in particular. There was some very open discussion in the "revised investigator" thread, and it was great to get the quick changes in the initial Posts.

I think there may have been cause to take a bit of a deeper look at the other things that will be packaged in this book, new feats etc. But those, ultimately, are less important than the classes themselves. I think from the first draft to the revision, there were some great changes and pretty much every class moved in a positive direction to whatever degree.

I also just want to say that the community was overall, really excellent throughout this process. Lots of system masters were putting these classes through their paces and providing really great feedback. There was a great deal of productive discussion and some wonderful ideas.

I look forward to seeing the book when it is printed.


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Liked:

Items were updated every few days since release and a second document came up with major updates leaving most of the classes in a strong spot.

Disliked:

Felt like the design team stretched too thin during the entire thing. Playtest was run right in the holidays and felt like we had a dead week in the middle of the playtest. Also there were some classes that felt ignored for a large portion time because other classes were taking priority.

Surveys were really vague.


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The main thing I found missing with the survey questions was demographic info on what levels you played something at and under what conditions. If only as a way to really guilt people into trying it, but also to see if there were any level ranges that got glossed over.

A little more moderation on the discussion threads would be nice too. Just fork it out to a new thread when people get off on this crazy tangent about "but how are studying magic and studying spells different concepts?" and so forth.

Past that, the only real gripe I had is the huge disparity there was from thread to thread with how much the design team was responding to issues being raised. With some there was constant feedback- "Yeah, that's an error we're correcting, don't worry about it" "what if we worked this like this?" And of course arcanist got that early preview revision which caught a couple things in time to be fixed in the second PDF. Other threads though were just completely hands off, leading to a lot of guesswork on some of the more fuzzily worded rules, which caused a lot of deviation in what different people were getting out of things.

That said though, with how fast all these discussions were moving and how much each designer had on their plate, I suppose it's a miracle you managed to keep up as well as you did. I'd hate to have been in any of your shoes for all that. Had to get maddening on a few fronts.


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I thought Paizo staff handled things really well. There was a huge backlash to the play test right at the start, and the Paizo response was classy (no pun intended). I particularly enjoyed the Devs responding in the threads, as they made me feel like I was really being heard (if not always ageed with).

I would have liked to see a third update wave as well. I feel our feedback could have been more focused if we had a better idea of which ideas were being taken and which were being dropped. The last several days have had us all repeating ourselves. After we responded to the second wave of updates, there wasn't much else to say.

I also want to add that I was very impressed with your posts specifically, Mr. Bulmahn. They were restrained, positive, and (most of all) polite during the entire process. There were clearly some times, such as the beginning of the play test and in certain threads, when we posters were getting on the very last nerve of the Paizo employees. During these times, your positive, results oriented posts really shown through. I find that kind of personal restraint to be worth a great deal of respect.

Scarab Sages

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wish there was a wizard thief type person. felt all the other combos where kinda ehhh and expected.

Paizo Employee Lead Designer

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As a note,

As designers, I think we would love to give more feedback and more interaction, but that is a very difficult thing to accomplish, especially considering the fact that there are thousands of playtesters and only three of us. We do make sure to read just about all the posts though and we tend to take copious notes, but responding heavily is tricky. We do as much as time allows.

Jason Bulmahn
Lead Designer

Shadow Lodge

What might have worked well for this Playtest's Surveys might have been questions more like:

How important do you feel the Class Feature: ________ is to this concept?

How well is it being handled (on it's own) in it's current form?

What would improve that? A.) Boost it, B.) Nerf it, C.) Replace it, or D.) its not really important enough to the class concept to matter.

Paizo Employee Lead Designer

DM Beckett wrote:

What might have worked well for this Playtest's Surveys might have been questions more like:

How important do you feel the Class Feature: ________ is to this concept?

How well is it being handled (on it's own) in it's current form?

What would improve that? A.) Boost it, B.) Nerf it, C.) Replace it, or D.) its not really important enough to the class concept to matter.

We considered questions like this but ran into a number of problems. First off, using a survey to get as specific class issues is not very time effective. We did not want the surveys to end up being 30 questions per class. Second, that sort of data does not end up giving us a very clear picture, especially when you get 20 for A, 32 for B, 15 for C, and 19 for D. Its better to work with numeric scales that you can apply values to and get averages. We watched the moving averages to tell us more about the process itself and the general direction. We used actual feedback and posts to guide our overall process. The surveys were really used more as a "canary in the coalmine".

Not sure that is the best approach for the future, but it worked well for us internally this time around.

Jason Bulmahn
Lead Designer

Shadow Lodge

Jason Bulmahn wrote:

As a note,

As designers, I think we would love to give more feedback and more interaction, but that is a very difficult thing to accomplish, especially considering the fact that there are thousands of playtesters and only three of us. We do make sure to read just about all the posts though and we tend to take copious notes, but responding heavily is tricky. We do as much as time allows.

Jason Bulmahn
Lead Designer

Which is perfectly understandable and reasonable. For my part at least, I was just wanting to point out why it felt rushed and incomplete, for example, and making observations rather than accusations.


Jason Bulmahn wrote:
DM Beckett wrote:

What might have worked well for this Playtest's Surveys might have been questions more like:

How important do you feel the Class Feature: ________ is to this concept?

How well is it being handled (on it's own) in it's current form?

What would improve that? A.) Boost it, B.) Nerf it, C.) Replace it, or D.) its not really important enough to the class concept to matter.

We considered questions like this but ran into a number of problems. First off, using a survey to get as specific class issues is not very time effective. We did not want the surveys to end up being 30 questions per class. Second, that sort of data does not end up giving us a very clear picture, especially when you get 20 for A, 32 for B, 15 for C, and 19 for D. Its better to work with numeric scales that you can apply values to and get averages. We watched the moving averages to tell us more about the process itself and the general direction. We used actual feedback and posts to guide our overall process. The surveys were really used more as a "canary in the coalmine".

Not sure that is the best approach for the future, but it worked well for us internally this time around.

Jason Bulmahn
Lead Designer

Despite what I said above, I can recommend some machine learning algorithms to try on the data that might be interesting (multidimensional clustering algorithms would be good, to see if there are any clusters in the feature space created by using each question as a dimension and whether those correspond to any particular flavors of opinion).

That said, averages are going to be particularly dangerous. If I run a high level playtest on Swashbuckler and rate it a '5' for power and another forumite runs a 1st-level playtest and rates it a '1', and the process happens a bunch more times, we're all going to average out to '3', or "It's just about right", even when all the survey-takers are actually hoping for change.


Jason Bulmahn wrote:

As a note,

As designers, I think we would love to give more feedback and more interaction, but that is a very difficult thing to accomplish, especially considering the fact that there are thousands of playtesters and only three of us. We do make sure to read just about all the posts though and we tend to take copious notes, but responding heavily is tricky. We do as much as time allows.

Jason Bulmahn
Lead Designer

Yeah, the sheer volume of feedback here and the window for testing everything really made it impossible for you to have responded to more than you did. It was hard enough keeping up on this side of the fence. If you ever end up doing a playtest with this much diversity of scope again, the way to go might just be to throw an intern or two at the boards, charged solely with combing through, filter out key points of confusion/contrition, get a quickly shouted response from a designer when it seemed called for, and pass it along.


I do wish there had been 2 threads for each class, one for each person to post once and only once, with their thoughts on the class, and another thread to devolve into a 1000+ post argument with maybe 20 people continuing the arguments over and over.

Honestly having a text box with the class surveys would have been all I needed, but as it is I know several of my players who did the playtest felt it wasn't worth posting their thoughts on the classes they played because it would be lost in the crowd of arguments.


I thought it was handled well, but I have no previous play test to measure it against - I din not participate in the Mythic Playtest.

Just as a note, while there are comments in this thread that some classes seemed to be more moderated/had dev posts in, I'm sure the reason I thought was given for this was the perception of the development team that certain classes were more polished/nearer to "completion" than others and that was the reason in disparity between moderation across the classes.

My only gripe here is that perhaps the perception of which classes were polished/nearer to "completion" may not have been the same perception as held by the consumers.

* I would have liked to see each class get a post by more than one of the devs, even discussing things for the benefit of the readers (consumers). Sometimes it felt like only one dev was handling each class.

* As much as Paizo is lauded as being open, there still must necessarily be a closed shop somewhere along the development line, and that is ok. A few peeks inside that closed shop from time to time, and maybe even back and forth between the dev team where they don't just toe a party line (like when Erik Mona talked about disagreeing at first on the "Bloodrager" name with Jason Bulmahn).

* I think the names of each class being settled and set in stone was a misstep. But I feel I understand the reasons why this was done.

Paizo Employee Publisher, Chief Creative Officer

Thanks for the feedback, everyone. We're constantly thinking of ways to improve programs like our playtesting, so your comments are very, very helpful and most appreciated.

Dark Archive

For a quick clarification: are the classes still playable? As per the additional resources say? Or do the characters we have "ow need to be updated to not have the classes or put them on hold untill it officially comes out?

Grand Lodge

thank you it was great being part of the process and seeing our comments listened to was great. i too thought i was a little rushed. I am requesting a final play test revision for us to play with until August (most importantly) for PFS. clearing up some of the minor mistakes. like forgotten weapon proficiencies etc.


I think the only really problematic questions on the survey where the ones asking you to compare the classes to other classes. The idea of rating power & effectiveness of one class to all others. It's just really hard to compare something like the swashbuckler to both a Wizard and a Fighter at the same time. The rest of the questions were pretty easy to answer.

The amount of time the developers spent on the forums, actually responding to everybody, was pretty impressive. It's very rare to see that level of interaction from any game company, and it was pretty similar to the kind of interaction I expect out of Blizzard. Well done overall.

I think many of us would have liked additional time to play test the second document. I've got a 5 class play test I'm still working on (Investigator, Warpriest, Shaman, Arcanist and Hunter) but I just didn't have time to get everything typed up and participate in the forum conversations. It might be beneficial to maintain a forum specifically for playtest posts (no discussion, just post your on-going playtests).

I'd like to second Oceanshieldwolf's desire to see more than one developer in each thread. I'm guessing y'all divided up the work a fair bit, but I do think that some of the combativeness that cropped up in some threads could have been lessened with more voices in the discussion. Keeping in mind of course that this is the internet, so somebody is always going to be unhappy.

On the whole though, it was fun and I'm looking forward to buying the book in August. And hey, this'll be one where I actually buy the hardcover ;).


Others already said it but the amount of feedback given for the classes was too different. This sometimes gave the impression that some get more love than others. Same with the final words in the class threads. Some gave an insight into what might change (thanks for that) and others did not.

The next point partly ties in with the first: There have been some changes in the revision that were difficult to understand for the playtesters. For some we got some kind of explanation, for some we did not. And some of us are still wondering about certain decisions.

For some classes it was hard to test them because we don't know the talents/feats etc we will be seeing in the new book.


If you need to do another playtest like this again I think a better option might be to release the classes in batches of 3 (one class for each designer) for shorter play tests instead of unleashing all 10 at once. I think a great many posters didn't have time to read, let alone playtest all of the classes.

It was painfully noticeable in the Warpriest thread (which was the thread I was paying most attention to) that Jason was very busy with the Arcanist revision in the first week. When the revised version of the Warpriest came out there were still some important questions that were to the best of my knowledge never answered: "Do Warpriests qualify for Weapon Specialization"; "Can you use Fervor Swift spellcasting with spontaneously converted spells"; "does the Good blessing qualify as Good for the purposes of damage reduction" and so on.

Looking over at the Investigator thread or even the Brawler thread I feel like the Warpriest feedback thread could have been much more productive with a little more two-way dialogue. As it stands I believe the two Warpriest threads has the highest combined post count of any of the classes, but the majority of those posts are only dealing with two or three topics. If those topics had been addressed, the thread might have been shorter but would probably also have covered more areas of the class.

Disclaimer: I'm not trying to call anyone out here, I'm using the WP thread as an example because that was the one I participated most actively in - the revised Warpriest version showed clearly that Jason read and understood the biggest concerns the playtesters had for the WP's initial draft.


As The Beard said upthread, I was a bit disappointed in how short the playtest was. I understand the time constraints though. It is just that this is a busy time of year with the holidays, and as such I had to push back my planned playtest session to the beginning of next month.


Personally I think there should be a limited 3rd round of playtest for the classes that were still far away, even after round two. The classes that are closest wouldn't need it, but those that need major rebuilding (shaman) or that playtesters are least happy with (swashbuckler) look like they could really use another round of playtest. Those that only need a minor bit of polish don't really need another round.

Liberty's Edge

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A lot of playtesting tine was wasted because so many or us were taking issue with certain classes or the entire notion from a conceptual point of view. I really think you should have put up 15-20 class concepts up back in August and used feedback to whittle down the number to ten and get feedback on things like the class names.

That way when the playtest started we coukd focus all our attention on the nuts and bolts. I will say I feel like the interaction was a lot stronger, though Jason you could have been more involved in the classes you were lead on. Sean and Stephen were fantastic.

Silver Crusade

Pathfinder Adventure Path, Starfinder Adventure Path Subscriber
Coridan wrote:

A lot of playtesting tine was wasted because so many or us were taking issue with certain classes or the entire notion from a conceptual point of view. I really think you should have put up 15-20 class concepts up back in August and used feedback to whittle down the number to ten and get feedback on things like the class names.

That way when the playtest started we coukd focus all our attention on the nuts and bolts. I will say I feel like the interaction was a lot stronger, though Jason you could have been more involved in the classes you were lead on. Sean and Stephen were fantastic.

That's not playtesting, that's group design. That's a whole different animal and would be a nightmare.


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I must say that participating in the play test was very informative and somewhat fun. That said, I certainly think it was too short. Seriously, the play test could benefit a lot from being one or two months longer.


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Rogue Eidolon wrote:
Given the nature of PFS, it was very difficult to playtest the new classes at levels above 1, which is by far where they needed the playtests more than level 1. I dutifully reported playtest data for two level 1 games, but the dice were far more important than the class features, and the new classes hadn't diversified themselves yet. Solution? Pregens of 1, 4, and 7 for the new classes would have been superb. Especially if the pregens represented the baseline of how the PDT expected the new classes to perform

+1

I agree with the whole statement, especially the last sentence.

Also, this playtest felt rushed. I think this is due in part to the holidays, end of November though December is a inconvenient time to playtest. Personally, my group doesn't get together much in the month of December, making playtesting hard. As I would wager a lot of groups slow down due to family functions taking precedence.


Yeah, I was pretty dissapointed I didnt get to playtest at all; between finals, work, & everything else, it was impossible to get organized with other people to test the classes. At a certain point I got pretty disheartened because you guys clearly didnt want any more "theoretical" analysis and that's the only thing I could fit in my schedule.

Silver Crusade

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Folks here have already covered what stood out to me the most, but just to add my +1. Overall I was very impressed by the playtest. Here are some particular points:

- PFS Pregens would have been hugely, hugely helpful. Lots of games occurring regularly (no need to schedule special playtest games). Lots of experienced players and GMs playing in a controlled environment that we're familiar with so we'd have a clear baseline against which to evaluate the playtest classes.

- Only a week on the revision was too short, and I'll agree with what someone (maybe DM Beckett?) said upthread that it felt like we had a "dead week" in the middle while y'all worked on the revision and we waited for it. Felt like 3 weeks' worth of playtesting instead of 4. Even just one more week with the revised document would have made a difference.

- The top of the thread updates were great

- In-thread updates were great (where they came); something as simple as "yes we're aware of this issue and thinking about it, keep up the good discussion" helps (Sean, your "points acknowledged" posts were exemplary)

- Going further and indicating a "we're currently leaning in this direction" is even better but not as important as the acknowledgement itself

- Active engagement beyond that (Sean re the brawler, Stephen the investigator) was nice but a luxury understandably short in supply

- All that said, some threads did feel quite neglected, like we were spinning our wheels uselessly. Since I trust that y'all were reading the threads as best you could, this is a problem with perception from our end, easily solved by a bit more checking-in

- The example of the previous that stands out to me is the question of whether the Warpriest qualifies for Fighter feats. It's a question that kept coming up (which is no surprise) and that's pretty important to how the Warpriest plays. But I don't recall the question ever being acknowledged, much less answered. If there's am easy yes/no answer, that would have been great to see. If it's an open question that would have been good to hear

- Wrap-up posts. Sean, your wrap-up posts for your classes were again exemplary. It would have been nice to get something like that for each class just to get some "closure" on the playtest.

[Phone post; please forgive any infelicities in composition]


First off, thanks for all your hard work and I cant wait for the ACG in august.

Like others I felt it was rushed. I understand you guys have timelines, but perhaps it might have been possible like with the Advanced players guide to release a few classes at a time as I have to imagine some of the early playtest versions were more polished then others running up to the start of the playtest, so a few of those that were ready earlier could have been released in separate documents to get things started while you guys worked out the others. It just felt like there was alot in a very short time and even with significant effort it wasnt possible to participate as broadly as I wanted to.

In terms of the structure of the forums, I liked that each class had a discussion thread, but I think things need to be divided up a bit next time. Specifically the discussions got swallowed up fast on conversations of the relative strengths, potential changes, likes dislikes etc. I certainly understand that you cant provide excessive feedback, but I think a separate thread for each class about specific clarification/questions on how things were supposed to work that was given priority on dev responses would have been really helpful.

There were a few things in the various classes that remained unclear for a fair amount of time, making it difficult to accurately playtest some classes. Given the short duration of the playtest, clearing up any questions of the as written classes (in my opinion) should have had priority over the discussion of the classes as a whole, and in particular in terms of dev feedback.


I think a thread to ask "how does this class mechanic/feature/whatever work" is a fantastic idea. You could gather up the questions and do a daily "today in X class" post answering questions and maybe talking a little bit about the reasoning behind the class features.

If we know what a class feature is meant to do it's a lot easier to give feedback on how well it accomplishes that goal.

Grand Lodge RPG Superstar 2012 Top 32

This was my first time being involved in a playtest, and overall I liked it.

One thing that's been (and still is) frustrating, however, is trying to figure out what rulesets to use in PFS.

I mean, PFS players were sent an email encouraging them to use these classes. Then on the Additional Resources page, it specifically instructs players to keep up-to-date with messageboard clarifications and adjust their PCs accordingly. But then the most recent playtest blog contradicts this, saying to use the playtest PDF.

I now have no idea whether (for instance) a PFS slayer needs to meet prereqs for his Combat Style talents or if a PFS brawler needs 13 INT for Combat Expertise for the next eight months.

A little more clarity on how to do something that players were encouraged en masse to do would be really nice.

RPG Superstar 2015 Top 8

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I think the issue with it being rushed was that we were trying to do 10 classes -- almost as many as were in core, which got a year's playtest -- in the same amount of time the other, relatively much smaller playtests. Magus, Gunslinger, Ninja, Samurai got roughly the same amount of time, IIRC, and the 8 APG classes got a MUCH longer playtest (November 13-Jan 31, and I think they even extended that a little into the beginning of February), where only two classes were addressed for a few weeks before moving onto the next.

This playtest should have been much like the APG one, both in terms of length and in doing a handful of classes at a time, to let people focus on them. I understand that some of the class abilities of the ACG classes are preexisting and may need less time to test than brand new class features, but the classes and the combinations of abilities were still relatively "new" enough they needed more time. The APG classes were very well done, and the time put into them open playtesting reflects on that. I fear the lack of time put into the ACG will likewise reflect upon the end result.

On a brighter note I DID think the surveys were a great idea and I hope it helps crystallize a lot of information for you.

I also appreciate the rapid work to get out a revised document -- the revisions helped us both see the process going and see the in progress work the team was doing.


I really liked how responsive the dev team was throughout the process. Really, really incredible. I know that in an ideal world they'd be able to process and respond to even more stuff, but the rate of response was really great.

I also liked feeling like the playtest feedback was actually making a difference in the final forms of the classes.

By far the biggest thing that I felt was difficult was the very short period of real time covered by the playtest, especially considering the revision in the middle. Compounded by the fact that the playtest overlapped American Thanksgiving and the end of an academic term (I know those are things that don't affect every player, but they affect a lot of players), even if my groups wanted to do nothing but playtest ACG classes during our game time during the playtest, it would have been hard to fit much in, especially post-revision. I realize that both the timing and the length of the playtest were probably mandated by other factors, but I not only felt like I didn't have time to get a reasonable feel for all of the classes, I didn't feel like had time to get a reasonable feel for any of the classes. I didn't feel like I could comment first-hand on how even the classes I DID get a chance to try changed with the revision, because the post-revision period was so short and so busy that I didn't get a real chance to play with them again.

The only other thing that might have been nice would have been maybe just a little more direction in terms of what the intent behind some of the classes was. This is particularly true for classes with severe name/theme mismatches, like the Hunter, and for classes where the marquee feature and the main feature are different things, like the Skald or, again, the Hunter. I know it's more work, but I would have appreciated a bit more behind-the-curtain about the design intent.

Shadow Lodge

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Rogue Eidolon wrote:
Especially if the pregens represented the baseline of how the PDT expected the new classes to perform

+1

Slacker2010 wrote:
I agree with the whole statement, especially the last sentence.

While I agree to a point, on one hand, I think on the other giving pregens might have actually been worse over all. A lot of the issues that I (and I am sure most others) noticed came from actually rolling up different characters and builds (and also actually playing them). Having pregens would have cut down on that I think, and might also lead to incorrect assumptions ("Hey this Warpriest has no Fighter only Feats listed, so I guess that means they do not qualify"), and might have led to more people studying the pregens than the actual classes themselves.


I thought this Playtest went very well. I was glad to be part of it. I learned quite a bit as well.

I would add my voice to a 3rd round for some of the classes that had major changes.

I also think the level of developer interaction was much higher than some posts here seem to indicate. I have done playtests for other companies where your first and last post was from the developer an the rest were all from the fans. There was a lot of gratitude expressed and feedback/answers given in this playtest by the development team.

Overall though, well done.

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