| 8 people marked this as a favorite. |
Channeling Cheapy and Sean, I wanted to remind people what makes for good playtest feedback.
I've updated Cheapy's ACG post for Occult Adventures.
I’m not the end-all-be-all for what Paizo wants from this, but here are my thoughts on the topic.
- You are not the lead designer. Jason is.
- Ignore typos and grammatical errors. That’s not what they want to playtest. They want you to test the rules.
- Give feedback, not opinions. If you don’t like the idea of the new classes, then don’t just say that. It’s not too helpful as that ship has sailed long ago.
- You’re still not the lead designer. Jason is still the lead designer. That’s his job.
- Don’t make houserules for it and then give feedback with those rules influencing your perceptions. Think of it like a recipe site. You go there to find a recipe, and you see a 1 star review for a pasta recipe you’re looking at. The review states that the cook substituted ice cream for butter, and marmite for pesto sauce. Surprisingly, the cook found the recipe to be absolutely horrible. But this review isn’t helpful. It’s helpful for a pasta recipe that includes ice cream instead of butter and marmite instead of pesto sauce. But that’s not the recipe they were reviewing. At all. The recipe they were reviewing had butter and pesto.
- Remember that the point of the playtest is to work out all the kinks so that you don’t have to make houserules about the classes.
- Play the game, see what happens. A lot of problems seem like they’ll exist in pure theorycrafting, but don’t really show up in actual play. Keep this in mind. (There was a time when the Summoner was considered underpowered.)
- If you can, try to playtest multiple different power-levels of the game. How these new, advanced classes work out could be a lot different between a group consisting of synthesist god-tank-pouncers, zen archers, optimized God wizards, and AM BARBARIAN and a group consisting of a sword and board paladin, a rogue rapier-duelist, a cleric of healing and love, and a sorcerer focusing on illusions.
- Core! Core is great because it sets the base-line level of power. It’s fine if you play some tengu with 5 natural attacks at first level or some aasimar that through various rules hoops has some feats meant for tieflings, but if you find that with the new classes you’re making a completely ridiculous character, consider how much of that is due to the new classes versus the non-core rules. In fact, keep that in mind with core rules as well.
- I believe that the default assumption in the game is 15 point buy with the core races and the balanced option for wealth by level. Testing at this point is a great way to test.
- These classes aren't going to be perfect. They might have serious flaws. But that’s what the playtest is for. Designing is hard, doubly so for a base class.
- Positive feedback, or at least constructive feedback, is immensely preferred to negative feedback. See Sean’s post here for a bit on that. But suffice to say, positive feedback is more helpful because it fosters a helpful environment. It’s the difference between working together and stand-offishly stating your “factpinions” as gospel. If you ever start a sentence that follows this form, you’re doing it wrong: "<feature X> is the worst thing I've ever seen and here’s how I would change it to make it <(balanced, useful, cool, English)>."
- Despite saying that positive feedback fosters an environment of working together, we aren't working together to make the classes. Jason is still the lead designer of Pathfinder. The odds are probable that you aren’t. Our job, insomuch as it can be called that, is to playtest and report in an unbiased fashion to let them sift through the results.
- PFS play is useful because it provides a set, known standard of rules. It’s a great environment for testing, as theoretically it’s run the same everywhere. But that doesn't mean that home games aren't useful. In fact, home games can provide very useful information, as sometimes restricting options is a great way to see how these classes do. Core and APG only, no Golarion line crunch? That’s going to present a vastly different playtest result than if done in PFS. Keep this in mind, and try to list your playtest parameters out at the beginning of any playtest reports you give. If someone were to come up with a basic form for all playtest feedback, that’d be solid, and I would recommend everyone use it, just to make sifting through information easier.
- Try to keep track of die rolls in your playtest report. There's a difference between power and luck. Did your kinesicist kick ass because it's overpowered, or because you didn't roll below a 12 all session? Are too many foes immune to your Mesmerist, or did they just all make their Will saves? I've had encounters that would appear to prove that a Sorcerer makes a great crossbowman: die rolls are important.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
...Now I want butter and pesto pasta. Dammit.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
There was a time when the Summoner was considered underpowered.surely you jest
When the APG was released, people were pretty upset at the nerfs that made the summoner "useless". And remember, this was 2010. 4 pages back then was like 8 pages these days :) See post 23 for Jason's post on the topic, as well as the last post before he locked the thread.
Thanks for posting this Ross, I completely forgot to!