Playtesting the Game

You'll excuse my excitement to get ahold of these rules as soon as possible.
but.
what rough time can we expect to have these rules ready to download? (Central Standard Time, I mean)
follow up, a couple of buddies and myself are going to make a podcast out of our experiences with the game. Is there any additional information or regulations I should be aware of while doing so?

So... I have a game going on currently, that will probably take about a month to wrap up. I really want to run Doomsday Dawn, but I won't be able to start until my current game ends. Will my group still be able to provide feedback on the playtest if our surveys are in a month or so late? Or will the devs already have moved on to the next round of surveys by the time we get ours for the previous period in?

I guess what I'm asking is, how strict are these two-ish week windows? If we start doing the 1st-level character segment 9/3, will our feedback still be taken into account, or will the devs already be focused on the surveys for the 8/27 4th level character segment?

Staff have said that the PDFs will be available for download at 9 am EDT Thursday

Eek squeel yay! I'll be overseas and away from my group for Oct Nov, buuut that just means we'll be playtesting the PF for 1 player version. Of that exists, it's one lucky player with 5 sheets to enjoy.

Much happys.

Dun dun dun!

Very excited for this.

I didn't know there would be PFS scenarios too. Very cool.

Holy cats, this is happening tomorrow. At around 10 am EDT, someone please take a picture of the smoking crater where Paizo's servers once stood.

You'll excuse my excitement to get ahold of these rules as soon as possible.

but.
what rough time can we expect to have these rules ready to download? (Central Standard Time, I mean)
follow up, a couple of buddies and myself are going to make a podcast out of our experiences with the game. Is there any additional information or regulations I should be aware of while doing so?

I believe that since it would be 9AM Eastern, that would make it so that the rules are available at 8AM Central.

And yes, that means 7AM Mountain, and 6 AM Pacific.

I think that means it would be around 11 AM in London.

GrayGriffon wrote:

You'll excuse my excitement to get ahold of these rules as soon as possible.

but.
what rough time can we expect to have these rules ready to download? (Central Standard Time, I mean)
follow up, a couple of buddies and myself are going to make a podcast out of our experiences with the game. Is there any additional information or regulations I should be aware of while doing so?

I believe that since it would be 9AM Eastern, that would make it so that the rules are available at 8AM Central.

And yes, that means 7AM Mountain, and 6 AM Pacific.

I think that means it would be around 11 AM in London.

For some reason I cannot seem to edit my post, that was supposed to be 1PM in London...not 11 AM.

Aaaagh.

Oh good. I only run my own campaigns. However, this set up is very much in tune with plans I have made in the past....so I am looking forward to downloading the playtest stuff in a week, after Paizo has it's servers fixed.

Is there any chance that we will get to see the criteria that we are supposed to playtest the game against? Or are we to playtest it to try and find out which parts are fun and which ones aren't?

For some reason I cannot seem to edit my post, that was supposed to be 1PM in London...not 11 AM.

Aaaagh.

Close 2 Pm

GreyWolfLord wrote:

For some reason I cannot seem to edit my post, that was supposed to be 1PM in London...not 11 AM.

Aaaagh.

Close 2 Pm

I thought that would be in winter months rather than summer in the US. Weird Daylight saving time things tossing timing off.

In order to schedule players, I need an estimate of how many 2 or 4 hour sessions are required for each Part of Doomsday Dawn. Can we do one 4-hour session every 3 weeks, or will we need weekly play of our typical 3-hour sessions?

I mean, hopefully this info will be in the PDF tomorrow, but getting a group together and scheduling is hard - I can use all the time I can get. Anyone have a good sense for the timing?

Is there any chance that we will get to see the criteria that we are supposed to playtest the game against? Or are we to playtest it to try and find out which parts are fun and which ones aren't?

That can technically be gleaned from the surveys. I do, however, seem to recall that they actually wanted people NOT to look at the surveys beforehand (players anyway, I believe it was quite OK for the GM), so as to not "taint" the result too much.

In order to schedule players, I need an estimate of how many 2 or 4 hour sessions are required for each Part of Doomsday Dawn. Can we do one 4-hour session every 3 weeks, or will we need weekly play of our typical 3-hour sessions?

I mean, hopefully this info will be in the PDF tomorrow, but getting a group together and scheduling is hard - I can use all the time I can get. Anyone have a good sense for the timing?

I think each section is meant to be roughly 8 hours or less total playtime, so 2 4-hour sessions during each two week schedule.

EDIT:
I'll continue searching (although I'm afraid that it might have been in one of the Friday live shows it was mentioned), meanwhile here's something to give an idea:

Shadrayl of the Mountain wrote:

Mark Seifter wrote:

Shadrayl of the Mountain wrote:

It's been mentioned that we'll have about two weeks for each segment of Doomsday Dawn in the playtest. Is there going to be maybe an extra week at the start to allow GMs time to read the adventure 1st?

Personally, I plan on running playtests for several different groups if possible, but I like to read adventures at least 3 times before I run them, in order to really do it justice.

Ah, I didn't remember the two week thing had been mentioned, and that was what I was dancing around before. It's not a hard limit by any means; it's sort of Jason's best guess for a good pacing to give most weekly groups time to run it and then we all (by which I mean the designers as well as all of you) talk about how that chapter went in particular as a group, but if your group marches to the beat of a different drummer (either faster or slower), you will absolutely still be able to do your thing and send in your survey results, you just might be off-synch with our most direct discussion focus or videos.

Thanks for the clarification, Mark! I was wondering if it was going to be a "pencils down!" situation. Now it sounds like that won't be the case, which is likely to make my scheduling much easier!

Not in any way a pencils down situation. Now, if your group can manage to do some of them in the windows, we're hoping we can make it sort of a cool shared experience situation where it's even more fun because of the feeling of doing something simultaneously with so many other people, but if not, no problem! You will still have the same ability to participate in surveys and other feedback as the groups that do :)

Also:

Catharsis wrote:

So apparently Paizo will «focus» on one of the seven playtest scenarios every 3 weeks... are we supposed to play the scenario during that window, or is that only important for the feedback and discussion?

I'm having enough trouble drumming my players together over the summer months without an external schedule on top... :Þ

In particular, is it OK to play through the scenarios more quickly than that 3-week rhythm?

Should a scenario correspond more or less to a single session?

We'll have a LOT of info about how to do this by this time next week. Just a few more days and all will be revealed!

The short preview version is: Playtest as much as you want/can. Even if you only play a few parts overall that's important info for us to know, not only in the category of what feedback you can give us but meta-feedback on how long it takes groups to play through various types of encounters.

Full details will be out in a week though, so stay tuned!

This isn't the exact quote, but I think the estimate was deduced from this piece of information:

Pathfinder Playtest Adventure: Doomsday Dawn (August 2nd): The biggest playtest adventure resource by far is this series of 7 adventures that span a wide range of levels. Some of these are "traditional" adventures, whereas others are designed to stress-test different parts of the game. A common estimate is that each of these adventures runs about twice the length of a Pathfinder Society scenario, though it will vary by your group, play style, and familiarity with the rules.

Found in this blog post.

I didn't know there would be PFS scenarios too. Very cool.

Holy cats, this is happening tomorrow. At around 10 am EDT, someone please take a picture of the smoking crater where Paizo's servers once stood.

Not to worry! Eager pugwampis are volunteering to "help"!

where I need to go to download the playtest?? I can´t find it :(

Will be available Thursday 02/08/2018 @ 09:00 EDT on paizo.com or paizo.com/pathfinderplaytest pages.

I am hype even if I really don't care for running adventure paths.

kogarou wrote:

In order to schedule players, I need an estimate of how many 2 or 4 hour sessions are required for each Part of Doomsday Dawn. Can we do one 4-hour session every 3 weeks, or will we need weekly play of our typical 3-hour sessions?

I mean, hopefully this info will be in the PDF tomorrow, but getting a group together and scheduling is hard - I can use all the time I can get. Anyone have a good sense for the timing?

I think each section is meant to be roughly 8 hours or less total playtime, so 2 4-hour sessions during each two week schedule.

I'll see if I can scrounge up the quote.

EDIT:
I'll continue searching (although I'm afraid that it might have been in one of the Friday live shows it was mentioned), meanwhile here's something to give an idea:

Mark Seifter wrote:

Shadrayl of the Mountain wrote:

Mark Seifter wrote:

Shadrayl of the Mountain wrote:

It's been mentioned that we'll have about two weeks for each segment of Doomsday Dawn in the playtest. Is there going to be maybe an extra week at the start to allow GMs time to read the adventure 1st?

Personally, I plan on running playtests for several different groups if possible, but I like to read adventures at least 3 times before I run them, in order to really do it justice.

Ah, I didn't remember the two week thing had been mentioned, and that was what I was dancing around before. It's not a hard limit by any means; it's sort of Jason's best guess for a good pacing to give most weekly groups time to run it and then we all (by which I mean the designers as well as all of you) talk about how that chapter went in particular as a group, but if your group marches to the beat of a different drummer (either faster or slower), you will absolutely still be able to do your thing and send in your survey results, you just might be off-synch with our most direct discussion focus or videos.

Thanks for the clarification, Mark! I was wondering if it was going to be a "pencils down!"

...

Thank you so much! This is extremely helpful information, and very much puts my mind at ease.

Joe Wells wrote:

I didn't know there would be PFS scenarios too. Very cool.

Holy cats, this is happening tomorrow. At around 10 am EDT, someone please take a picture of the smoking crater where Paizo's servers once stood.

Not to worry! Eager pugwampis are volunteering to "help"!

One option, if Paizo planned ahead (and budgeted for it), is if they have a short-term contract with a cloud service provider* to provide an extension of their front-end web servers (and possibly some other resources) that can auto scale and load balance to handle the increased demand. Seriously, this is one of the reasons for cloud computing in the first place: to be able to bring up resources quickly and on-demand in an automated fashion.

Sorry for the tech speak, but this is something that I need to be aware of in my job as an IT professional.

*- such as, say, Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure, to name two big ones that are active in the Seattle area.

Oh hey, it's working. Hello!

I'm glad to have a jumpstart on this with a borrowed book! Once the servers 'rise from the dead' I'll download everything. ;)

I ordered Doomsday Dawn, but my PFS group only meets every two weeks for five hours. We will do some playtesting, but will my players be able to get any credit if I have to run parts of Doomsday Dawn after the playtest? (Our greatest limitation in my area is lack of playing space.)

If they don't need to personalize each one, they could store the actual files on a CDN (content delivery network) like Akamai, and just provide links via paizo.com, which would speed things up immensely.

If they don't need to personalize each one,

They are personalizing each one, and staff have specifically asked that you not make copies for other people.

As of yesterday's website roll, all of our watermarking and downloads are being done via AWS.

It begins!

Now as much of a downer I've been, I do hope people have a level of fun with this.

First thing I'm probably going to do is grab the DMs in my circle and compare notes on what we think about the book then start running some scenarios.

Yeah I assume they want to track how many get downloaded!

Nice of a CTO to be communicating with on this. Thanks Vic!

Drops overnight for me. Hopefully the initial peak flurry of downloads will have passed and the servers are less taxed by the time I come to download it.

I ordered Doomsday Dawn, but my PFS group only meets every two weeks for five hours. We will do some playtesting, but will my players be able to get any credit if I have to run parts of Doomsday Dawn after the playtest? (Our greatest limitation in my area is lack of playing space.)

Try looking through this blog post and thread to see if it's answered there. It's specifically about PFS and the playtest.

Excited!

Will the PFS modules be available with the rest of the stuff?

The PFS scenarios release on the 7th, after GenCon, iirc.

Download at 11pm here. I'm wondering if I should wait to the next morning. Probably be a lot of traffic then.

One option, if Paizo planned ahead (and budgeted for it), is if they have a short-term contract with a cloud service provider* to provide an extension of their front-end web servers (and possibly some other resources) that can auto scale and load balance to handle the increased demand...............*- such as, say, Amazon Web Services

Here's hoping they didn't given how well working with Amazon has worked thus far ;)

That's a much faster schedule than I was expecting. That's actually a problem. I had been hoping to do the playtest proper, but it looks like I will have to settle for a home game.

Would it be possible to mix the two? Or does Doomsday make assumptions about the characters, that not fulfilling would be problematic?

Kevin Mack wrote:

GreyWolfLord wrote:

For some reason I cannot seem to edit my post, that was supposed to be 1PM in London...not 11 AM.

Aaaagh.

Close 2 Pm

I thought that would be in winter months rather than summer in the US. Weird Daylight saving time things tossing timing off.

You’re right that it will be 1pm Greenwich Mean Time, but London currently isn’t on Greenwich Mean Time, we’re on British Summer Time which is our equivalent of Daylight Saving Time

Sounds good. Should work for my group, with character creation for Doomsday Dawn this Saturday, and then the game starting next week. We scheduled for this, taking a break from our Reign of Winter game to do it.

Is there a way to find groups in a given area (say Paris, France or Evreux, Normandy, France) that will playtest and would be open to a new player for this ?

A map would be perfect ;-)

My (online) FLGS has just informed me that although they have the Playtest Rulebook, they don't have the adventure book. I would have thought that both products would have been shipped together to stores.

Hope this doesn't mean that I will miss the first stage of the playtest.

I hope that Paizo can use a network disk like Google Drive, otherwise your potato server will explode in an instant.

I hope that Paizo can use a network disk like Google Drive, otherwise your potato server will explode in an instant.

Vic already posted upthread that they'll be using AWS for downloads.

As of yesterday's website roll, all of our watermarking and downloads are being done via AWS.

Only a few hours left but it's such a long wait!

About 80 minutes left!

This last half hour will be hard to wait.

It's my birthday and I want the playtest book NOW! What better present?

Happy birthday! Hope you have fun today ^w^

sorry but it seems that the bestiary file isn't good the unzipped file is 0 k

Aaaarghlblrlgbl... too much information! Brain overload! oO

I has its!