I've always wanted to know, what kind of play testing goes into an AP? Or, I guess, more accurately, how do you know how well the adventure will flow?
Do you use some kind of "Player Odd's" program? Is it playtested by multiple groups? Or is it just by the DMG?
Considering the audience for the magazines, and now book, it seems that there would be a lot of thought into how this will work for a wide range of PCs.
Creative Director
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As a general rule, it's the adventure author's responsibility to get an adventure playtested. But even then, it's not quite a requirement as much as it was in previous editions of the game. 3rd Edition has so many rules that work so well together that it actually covers a lot of stuff already, and what isn't covered is generally pretty easy to extrapolate based on existing rules. Plus: After running and playing in adventrues for 25 years or so, and after editing and developing about 150 adventures over the last four years, I know that I've gotten pretty good at catching a lot of the plot holes and rules problems that playtesting would otherwise have caught.
We don't have an out-of-house playtesting program, though. We just don't have the time or resources to integrate somethng of this magnitude for a monthly product, which already has quite enoguh deadlines that are in constant danger of being blown.
Kobold Press
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As a general rule, it's the adventure author's responsibility to get an adventure playtested.
I've been delighted that ASEO and his group have playtested many of my adventures before they go to James and the gang. They often find logic problems, balance issues, or other strange quirks of a manuscript, and the feedback is always well-written and logical.
So, I'm a big believer in the value of a playtest, even (or especially) in crunch-heavy 3rd Edition. As the author, I usually can't see my own errors, because I'm much too close to them. And whenever possible, I'd like to make sure that James doesn't have to deal with fixing more than is absolutely necessary.
For some large adventures, I even ask 3 or 4 groups to playtest, using different level PCs or focusing on particularly troublesome encounters to see how different play styles handle them.
I usually playtest everything I've written within my own gaming group. They are really good at giving me constructive criticism (they also enjoy seeing their names in print).
I have on occasion, gone outside of my group and had other DMs playtest stuff for me with their groups. It's a very important part of writing adventures, to me. I'm grounded in game balance, but even then, sometimes something will slip through that still needed a bit more tweaking.
Contributor
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I've only had two adventures published, so I'm not an expert. But in both cases I had my adventures read over and examined by other DMs, but not playtested. Unfortunately time constraints and deadlines simply did not allow me to have this happen.
This may be a symptom of the fact that I didn't write the adventures until I got the greenlight for my query, rather than querying adventures I had already written/run.
Mind you, in each case I had other limitations. For my first I had just moved to a new country and had no game group. Back then, everything went to Paizo snail mail too, so shipping the documents back and forth from New Zealand cut into my timeline.
The second time I parcelled myself a chunk of time for writing, and then my employer cancelled my vacation with no notice. I ended up scrambling to get it done with an extension. I'm so glad I don't work there anymore.
I consider myself to be a pretty good judge of how tough an encounter is, although sometimes I'm fooled. I would say that I tend to fall into the 'my party could handle that' camp, since I generally have to beef up most adventures to make them challenging enough. Mind you, I like to make every fight tough on my players too, so it's probably just a style issue. I try to follow the DMG guidelines more carefully when writing for someone else.
Craig Shackleton,
The Rambling Scribe
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So, I'm a big believer in the value of a playtest, even (or especially) in crunch-heavy 3rd Edition. As the author, I usually can't see my own errors, because I'm much too close to them. And whenever possible, I'd like to make sure that James doesn't have to deal with fixing more than is absolutely necessary.For some large adventures, I even ask 3 or 4 groups to playtest, using different level PCs or focusing on particularly troublesome encounters to see how different play styles handle them.
I didn't publish any adventure, but I see your reasoning.
Especially if you introduce new monsters... even the core rules state that the only sure way to find out challenge ratings is to play test your critters - just too many combinations to take into account.Greetings,
Günther