The Pathfinder Playtest is live!
I know that it's hard to believe, but the Pathfinder Playtest Rulebook is less than 2 weeks old, and we've already learned so much about the game. Feedback for the first part of Doomsday Dawn and the three Pathfinder Society adventures is pouring in through our surveys and the paizo.com forums. While there are some interesting early trends in the data that point at a few things that are going to need some work, we want to avoid getting into any of the fine details until the first part of the playtest is over (in just about 2 weeks). Until then, we'd like to talk about a number of other things.
Rules Updates
Starting today, you're going to begin seeing some rules updates from the team to clarify or fix issues with the current draft of the playtest. Rather than focusing on typos or other small errors, we're going to try and keep the updates restricted to things that we think are problematic to the gameplay if left as-is. In the coming weeks, you might also see us replace entire subsystems of the game, if warranted by playtest feedback.
The updates themselves are broken into two categories. The first is critical updates. These are issues that distort the game heavily and should be fixed immediately. The second category, just called updates, refers to rules that are important enough to warrant a fix, but that have a relatively limited impact at the game table. There are plenty of other changes we're noting as well, but most of these will have little to no impact on the current state of the game.
You can find the current updates by going to the downloads section on PathfinderPlaytest.com. After you download the PDF, you'll get an email notifying you of additional changes whenever we post an update!
Playtest Surveys
As mentioned above, some of the playtest surveys are now live! If you have completed your playthrough of Part 1 of Doomsday Dawn or of any of the three Pathfinder Society playtest scenarios, then we have some surveys for you! For those of you who have not, I have a couple of reminders.
- If you are playing Doomsday Dawn, make sure your group has the playtest tracking forms, which are located at PathfinderPlaytest.com. These will help GMs and players track a few vital statistics during play that you might otherwise forget when it comes time to take the surveys.
- The surveys are only for people who have completed Part 1 of Doomsday Dawn or one of the three available Pathfinder Society playtest scenarios. Each adventure has a survey for Game Masters and a survey for players. Doomsday Dawn also has an open response survey, allowing you to give more descriptive feedback of your experience.
- General surveys asking about classes, ancestries, and other mechanics will come out next month (giving everyone a chance to get in some play time first).
- The surveys are each a few pages long (usually 4 main sections) and most should take you no more than about 10-15 minutes to complete. Please make sure you go all the way to the end of the survey!
- Here are the links for the surveys:
Doomsday Dawn Part 1, The Lost Star
Player Survey | Game Master Survey | Open SurveyPathfinder Society Playtest Scenario #1: The Rose Street Revenge
Player Survey | Game Master SurveyPathfinder Society Playtest Scenario #2: Raiders of Shrieking Peak
Player Survey | Game Master SurveyPathfinder Society Playtest Scenario #3: Arclord's Envy
Player Survey | Game Master Survey
What's Next
For the remainder of the playtest, you can expect to see a blog from the design team once per week looking at the playtest, talking about where we're at, what we've learned, and where we're going. In addition, you can find us livestreaming Doomsday Dawn as we play through the adventure in the office with staff. Finally, after each part of the playtest is over, you will find us on the Twitch stream talking about what we've learned from the playtest and taking questions from the room and from the forums. It's sure to be a lot of fun, and you will be able to watch it all live over at twitch.tv/officialpaizo.
Until next time, keep playing and sending us that feedback. We've only just begun on our journey to make a better Pathfinder, and we need your help to see it through! Will you join our noble quest?
Jason Bulmahn
Director of Game Design
Join the Pathfinder Playtest designers every Friday throughout the playtest on our Twitch Channel to hear all about the process and chat directly with the team.
