As the Playtest gets closer, and I am setting up my Playtest games, I realize that I don't think I've seen anywhere that it has been explicitly stated how many players the PF2 Playtest is supposed to be for. I would assume that it is for four PCs and a DM, but is that correct? Will playing with three or five PCs make a huge difference?
I can only imagine that a group's perception of the challenge level of the adventure or power level of a character is going to be skewed by adding in 25% more or working with 33% less PC power than intended. It's hard to gauge the validity of feedback when everybody is playing in a different way while, at the same time, it could be hard to see certain glaring weaknesses that might only be exposed when you add or subtract a player, like so many of us do in our regular games.
I guess it will all come down to the feedback form. If a DM runs a group of six halfling barbarians, that seems like something Paizo should consider when evaluating their feedback.
Paizo staff: How structured are you making the playtest and feedback?
Other players: How many people are going to be in the group you are going to playtest with? Do you already know that your group is going to be weird in some way? Does your group have (as mine did in college) that player that is going to take one level of every class? Are you going to have nobody playing a rogue?
Classical four character group, considering that I have only 2 players I fill in with 2 npcs
I would guess the setup of the game is rather irrelevant - but one should state it in feedback if you got a rather irregular group
and i would guess adventures are also the regular 4-1
Do we actually know how many sessions the playtest is expected to last for?
There's some info here:
http://paizo.com/community/blog/v5748dyo5lkxl?Pathfinder-Society-3-Organize d-Playtest
It seems to imply that each of the 7 adventures takes roughly 8-10 hours to get through.
And there's a little bit of info in the comments of the Doomsday Dawn Product Page, saying that some parts of the playtest require 4-6 PCs and that it would be better for small groups to control multiple PCs rather than scale down encounters.
I have a suspicion that building and playing multiple PCs at higher levels will be extra taxing, because PF2's offering you both modular character creation and interesting turn-by-turn valuation decisions in combat.
I wonder how possible it will be to build characters that are strong but simple to control.
I was expecting each of the 7 parts to be shorter, before that blog post came out. The bi-weekly focused "please run/report" on this part of the campaign to me suggested that a single play session would be sufficient per adventure, since I assumed they weren't going to assume weekly play.
Its going to be much harder for most of the groups I play with to stay current with the pace of the feedback/surveys now.