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This is something I care about a lot, and I feel the official stance, as I understand it, is terrible.
I homebrew... most things in my games. I houserule several things in every campaign I've ever run. To me, one of the biggest values of a system is how well it adapts to homebrew and houserules. Does a system require my players know about my homebrew items and monsters ahead of time somehow? Then it's not supporting it as well. Do classes get so few features that I'm pressed for space to introduce a new class that is different but not overpowered? Then it's not supporting it as well.
But my understanding of the official stance is "Run everything as written and give feedback on that, otherwise it's not useful." Rubbish. To me, that feels like saying, "Intentionally do not have fun, then tell us you didn't have fun. That's more useful than using the content in the way you usually do, which involves homebrew, and telling us if the content is good/valuable to you in the way it's actually used."
Between races, spells, items, and monsters I've already got over 50 items of 2E homebrew content and am aiming to maintain a 2-items-per-day rate at the minimum. This is what Pathfinder is to me, 1E or 2E, and how the system supports that matters.
Additionally, houserules like 'start with 2 Ancestry Feats' should not be discouraged. If everyone plays with 1 Ancestry Feat and rates their Ancestry-Feat experience a 6-out-of-10, it might seem right to give 2, but if those of us testing with 2 find it overloading and rate it a 4-out-of-10, we can avoid the playtest changing 2E for the worst.
Of course, this all comes with one huge Caveat: All playtest posts need to say what was actually happening. What houserules were in play, what homebrew was in play, what the GM's style was, how closely to the module things were run, if encumbrance was used, were rations tracked, how often players had to roll vs doing things free-form RP for a while, etc. Anything that you're giving feedback on, give context for.
I don't know if I've ever seen someone actually run a d20 system fully as-written, even if they tried to. There's too many rules for that, you miss bits. Asking us to do this isn't asking us to playtest the product, it's asking us to playtest some theoretical product we don't actually care about. And I want to make 2E the best it can be. The actual 2E. Not the theoretical 2E no one actually plays.
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Asking us to do this isn't asking us to playtest the product, it's asking us to playtest some theoretical product we don't actually care about.
<snip> The actual 2E. Not the theoretical 2E no one actually plays.
First, you're not being asked to playtest "the product". You're being asked to playtest a subset of the rules, not the entire rulebook.
And they're asking for feedback on specific sections of the rules that they are still making decisions on. Testing how specific rules mechanics work in a wide variety of situations, where all else is equal.
So, no, this was never meant to be a playtest of the full game, under all conditions and all different ways people might use the rules. That's not the information they're looking for.
Their feedback forms will be specific to the rules being tested. They want to take a deep look into small parts of the rules.
They've said they will read through more generalized feedback, but remember that the Playtest Rulebook won't include some parts of the game that might be relevant to your playstyle.
As for the "theoretical" playstyle, I suspect that PFS is pretty close, and that one of the things they're attempting is to create a ruleset that allows more of the rules to be used in PFS.
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Paizo- "Please test these rules we made."
Playtester - "I didn't try those. I tested my rules instead."
This might be of interest, but it is not as useful to the question actually asked.
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Between races, spells, items, and monsters I've already got over 50 items of 2E homebrew content
How are you creating homebrew content when we haven't even seen how the system works yet? We've seen maybe 10% of the total rules content in the playtest, likely less, how do you know that your homebrews are balanced and fit with the design of the system?
I still wonder what in Nessus those 50 pieces of homebrewed stuff are...
Thank you for more info. I hadn't heard the details on the 2-week playtest periods for specific sections, and that sounds workable.
Still, I'll be homebrewing it all and giving feedback on it all. Hopefully data on how well each system they're testing interacts with homebrew will be useful to them.
I definitely think they'll want some mostly-RAW feedback to make the core of the data, but I believe that some homebrew & houseruled feedback, indicated as such, will server as good reference points, contrast, and ideas for what alternatives might be worth using.
As for the homebrew content, it's a lot easier than you'd think! We have two example monster stat-blocks. Simply editing the numbers there, adding some subtypes, will give you a variety of monsters. Start adding in conditions and effects mentioned in other blogs, that opens up a lot. Take safe guesses that things like flight still exist? A bunch more monsters open up. Same story for items, spells, races. They might not be perfectly balanced before getting the full rules for reference, but numbers are easy to tweak.
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I feel like feedback of the form "I didn't like x, so I changed it" is not helpful.
On the other hand "We had trouble with x for these reasons, and it wasn't working well, but we changed it in this way and it was better because of these other reasons" is.
Which is to say rejecting things out of hand is bad, but changing them based on experience with them is not.
I feel like feedback of the form "I didn't like x, so I changed it" is not helpful.
On the other hand "We had trouble with x for these reasons, and it wasn't working well, but we changed it in this way and it was better because of these other reasons" is.
Which is to say rejecting things out of hand is bad, but changing them based on experience with them is not.
I agree that just saying you changed something isn't helpful but, for example:
"We didn't feel we were getting enough from our races at level 1, so we ruled that players get 2 Ancestry Feats at first level. This did not make anything feel overloaded or overcomplicated, and really helped us feel like the races were impactful" can be useful feedback.
Do we know much of what the form is yet?
It would be nice to help out, but I doubt we're going to be able to make the Doomsday Dawn deadline for intensive testing. If I end up going homebrew setting, it's good to have an idea for how much stuff might compromise the feedback.
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I feel like feedback of the form "I didn't like x, so I changed it" is not helpful.
On the other hand "We had trouble with x for these reasons, and it wasn't working well, but we changed it in this way and it was better because of these other reasons" is.
Which is to say rejecting things out of hand is bad, but changing them based on experience with them is not.
I agree that just saying you changed something isn't helpful but, for example:
"We didn't feel we were getting enough from our races at level 1, so we ruled that players get 2 Ancestry Feats at first level. This did not make anything feel overloaded or overcomplicated, and really helped us feel like the races were impactful" can be useful feedback.
This is not helpful unless you try it first as written. That doesn't mean play it for 9 months that way. That means play an evening that way first. Probably a couple evenings with a leveled up version of the character using their playtest module.
Chief Technical Officer
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A very important goal for this playtest is receiving real experiential feedback on specific game systems that the designers wish to test. To do this efficiently, the playtest adventure sets up specific situations and asks you to answer specific questions via a series of surveys. (For example, we might ask about whether characters survived particular hazards, or met particular goals, or ran out of resonance, or felt a particular challenge was too easy.)
If you are introducing additional variables to those situations, then your answers to any of those questions will potentially be misleading. I'll just say it flat out: If you're using house rules, do not provide feedback via those surveys.
You're still welcome to provide feedback in the forums, of course, but please ensure that you contextualize it, and realize that your feedback will be more difficult for us to use than feedback from people who are working within the test environment we have defined.
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Chief Technical Officer
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But my understanding of the official stance is "Run everything as written and give feedback on that, otherwise it's not useful." Rubbish. To me, that feels like saying, "Intentionally do not have fun, then tell us you didn't have fun."
Actually, the first goal of a playtest is to test, not to have fun. Of course, the ultimate goal is to make a fun game, but to do that, you often have to figure out where the fun fails. So quality playtesting is routinely very much the opposite of fun. Professionals testing game systems frequently have to do things over and over and over, in slightly different ways, long past the point of fun.
Since you're not playtesting this professionally, you are completely welcome to prioritize fun over testing, but realize that in doing so, you are inevitably diminishing the usefulness of your feedback to us.
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Chief Technical Officer
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To further enlighten my last point, here's a conversation from a Pathfinder Adventure Card Game playtest discussion a few years back:
Mike Selinker (Designer): [Playtesting is] not like playing the game for fun. It's seeing what doesn't work and addressing it in the final product.
Name Redacted (Playtester): Look, I've play-tested several games so I knew what I was getting into, but to say that you shouldn't be having fun isn't true.
Me: Mike wasn't saying it shouldn't be fun. He's saying you shouldn't be playing the game for fun—you should be playing the game to help us find places where it's not fun. Sometimes, that means throughly getting to know the unfun parts, and deliberately choosing to have less fun than you would if you were not playtesting.
Fun is very much a word we want you to use. It's a game, and the goal of any game should pretty much be summed up with the word "fun." When you're not having fun, tell us where that's happening and what you think might be the specific cause.
Chad Brown (Developer): This is a statement that we really should be singing from the rafters. When we hear from playtesters that some people think it's very fun and some people think it's no fun... That's good to know, but what we really want to learn is *why* it's no fun for those people. That's why we put such an emphasis on experience.
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Lyee, think of it almost like Algebra. If all constants are known except for one variable, then it’s much easier to solve for that variable, and find its value. Introduce a second variable? It makes solving the first variable much more difficult.
In Information Technology troubleshooting, the technician wants a user to have the best experience possible. However, figuring out why they aren’t having the best experience means trying a set of methodical steps to determine what is failing. So if you changed a setting in a configuration file like the IT tech asked, but at the same time you deleted another key file and replaced it with a custom file because you thought it would help, and at the same time you rebooted the computer also, when your computer still doesn’t work, how is the tech supposed to know which change is responsible for the computer not working? It might not be fun, following a rote set of steps, but it leads to having a MUCH better experience later on.
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Paizo- "Please test these rules we made."
Playtester - "I didn't try those. I tested my rules instead."
This might be of interest, but it is not as useful to the question actually asked.
Even if they provide useful feedback, that doesn't mean it won't be taken into proper consideration. I won't expect anything more than "Yes or No" questions when it comes to the Playtest Feedback data, since if they didn't, it might go down like this:
Paizo: Please test these rules we made.
Playtester: We tested it. We didn't like it. We houseruled X rule instead to see if it was an improvement, and our players like X rule better than what was originally provided.
Paizo: We don't care about houserule X, we only care what you said about the rule we made, so we'll go back to the drawing board and do something else that might also help with people who made houserules Y or Z instead, because there's a more palatable solution available than these houserules.
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Thank you very much for the insight Vic, and it seems forum-based feedback will be the best outlet for most of what I'm doing. That said:
... the playtest adventure sets up specific situations and asks you to answer specific questions via a series of surveys. (For example, we might ask about whether characters survived particular hazards, or met particular goals, or ran out of resonance, or felt a particular challenge was too easy.)...
If this is applied onto to an exact situation, isn't it likely that the feedback is too narrow to get useful information on hazards or resonance as a whole, reflecting more on some nuance of the adventure situation than the nuances of the systems being explored? (Hard to be certain without the adventure and survey, but wanting to make sure everything is smooth here).
Thank you very much for the insight Vic, and it seems forum-based feedback will be the best outlet for most of what I'm doing. That said:
If this is applied onto to an exact situation, isn't it likely that the feedback is too narrow to get useful information on hazards or resonance as a whole, reflecting more on some nuance of the adventure situation than the nuances of the systems being explored? (Hard to be certain without the adventure and survey, but wanting to make sure everything is smooth here).... the playtest adventure sets up specific situations and asks you to answer specific questions via a series of surveys. (For example, we might ask about whether characters survived particular hazards, or met particular goals, or ran out of resonance, or felt a particular challenge was too easy.)...
Nah. Different players will handle things differently. I might go really all out spending resonance, but you may find playing the same scenario that you hoarded it and never ran out or used any non-healing items.
One imagines Paizo's internal testing has included running smaller groups of people through a much larger variety of adventures. Since it is impractical to run an open playtest over such a sweeping amount of content, this going to be the inverse. Run lots of people through the same situation and see how their results differ and what patterns emerge.
I mean, there's a danger that they will miss something that skews the results as you elude to, but we are just gonna have to hope they don't. Running different people through different adventures is going to be less effective than running different people through the same adventures here.
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If you have a choice between running playtest games with houserules and not playtesting at all, then by all means playtest with houserules. But know that your feedback will be weighted less as a result and you're locked out of certain polls. Some feedback is better than no feedback. However if you can play with the rules as written then definitely do so. Even if you don't intend to play with the rules as written once the playtest is published, doing so during the playtest will make sure your feedback has the most weight possible.
I haven't been shy about saying I have issues with a lot of what's been revealed so far. I want everyone who feels like I do to sing from the rafters how much they dislike the rules and why they dislike them. And I want your feedback to be given the full weight it deserves. Unfortunately the only way to do that is play by the guidelines Paizo has presented. That is our best chance at getting the final product looking like what we want. And you might find the longer you play with a rule the less of a problem it becomes. So it is important to give the rules a fair chance.
An interesting question is: What feedback does Paizo want?
1. Do they want to know what the problems are?
2. Do they want to know why those are problems?
3. Do they want to know what would be a good compromise or solution to the problem?
I expect the answer to questions #1 and #2 are yes. I will be interested to hear if question 3 is something they want to hear and whether it will be done through the forums, polls or both?
I feel one factor that could have led to my opinion would be that I might be very wrong about the expected sample size. The RAW-style makes absoloute sense for smaller sample sizes, where a few more unique games might really skew things, but with a large sample size those unique games go from muddying results to bringing it more in line with 'what people actually play'.
Are there any numbers available on how many people actually give feedback to these surveys?
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What people actually play is way too broad a category to actually suss out conclusive results from, though.
Also, one thing Paizo has been clear about ever since pathfinder 1 was created is that they are trying to make the best game possible for telling the sorts of stories they want to tell. This is remaining true for second edition. The pathfinder chassis can be modified to make all kinds of other stuff work but the intention is to get it as perfect as possible for Paizo's brand of adventure. So using that as a baseline makes a lot of sense.
Get that baseline right first, and then people can do whatever they want with it afterwards.
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As someone that does a lot of home brew adaptions to PFe1 stuff I will give my take on the official play test feedback process.
Unfortunately, I do not have time to run the whole play test scenario. What I am going to do it adapt the level 7-8ish scenario. It is going to be mechanically identical to the play test scenario, but it will be a totally different story (so far as is possible with identical mechanics).
So, it will be my story, in my game world, my fluff and flavour, only with identical encounters, skill tests, traps etc.
That way I can run (kind of) what I want to, but still give useful and relevant feedback to Paizo.
I will also be giving a fair amount of general feedback. I hope it will be insightful enough to warrant Paizo's attention.
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Even if they provide useful feedback, that doesn't mean it won't be taken into proper consideration. I won't expect anything more than "Yes or No" questions when it comes to the Playtest Feedback data, since if they didn't, it might go down like this: ...Paizo- "Please test these rules we made."
Playtester - "I didn't try those. I tested my rules instead."
This might be of interest, but it is not as useful to the question actually asked.
Another big problem will be unintentional homebrew rules. The GMs and players will have about a week--I plan on 5 days--to read the playtest rulebook before the first game. They will get some rules wrong, often defaulting to PF1 rules or to their familiar PF1 houserules, and occasionally misreading a playtest rule so badly that they create a new rule.
Thus, either the playtest questions should ask for enough detail to detect deviations from the rules, or Paizo must cross their fingers and pray for accurate results despite errors. And one deviation they need to detect is when certain rules are frequently misunderstood. Finding easily misread rules is a main purpose of a blind playtest (a playtest where the game developers give the playtests the game prototype and only silently watch the playtest themselves).
On the other hand, if they use data analytics on the answers to compile statistical results, they need answers that can be turned into numbers, such as "yes or no" or "strongly agree, agree, neutral, disagree, strongly disagree".
They will need a mixture of narrative answers and statistical answers.
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Here's an idea Lyee. Play Doomsday Dawn (and the PFS scenarios if you're doing those) exactly as written (or as close to exact) to get a feel for how PF2 is as written and provide the asked-for feedback. Then, separately (and probably afterward) run a campaign using any house rules & monsters & whatnot, have fun, and provide that feedback to the forums along with any cool house rules that you came up with.
It's my understanding that Doomsday Dawn should only take a few sessions to run, so in the next year you could either run it like a dozen times, or once for your group, and then a 8+ month campaign starting at 1st level.
This is essentially what I'm planning on doing, so I can give the best specific feedback, and also give general "hey, I think these changes worked beautifully and added a lot of fun to the game".
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There will be plenty of time to houserule things and add homebrew content after the playtest is done.
If you've already made 50+ changes to the system being tested, you're not really providing feedback on the system provided.
At least TRY 2E as it is written first. Only houserule if things come up in your group/game, and then make a note of the exact effects that houserule had.
As someone who's run surveys in the past, the typical response to surveys which do their own thing rather than answer what is tested is to throw that entire set of survey responses out. While I image that paizo won't be running the survey as strictly as this, your responses are only comparable to everyone else if you're participating under the same (or at least very similar) conditions as everyone else. Paizo isn't try to make your perfect system or my perfect system, they're trying to make a system which is fun for as much of the community as they can. And to do this, they need feedback from the community on the current iteration of the system, where it runs into problems, and what might be done to address those problems.
I plan on playtesting Age of Worms using 4e rules and I hope Paizo will take my feedback very seriously and include my name in final credits.
My life would be less without regular consumption of The Bag's wit. Thank you.
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Well, I'm not entirely convinced that the method of data collection is perfect for the scale of the playtest, but my main goal here is to make 2E the best it can be and, at the end of the day, distrusting the Paizo Devs isn't going to help that much. Guess I'll be running a Doomsday Dawn group.
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The most useful feedback for a designer is what works, sometimes even beautifully, what does not work and precisely why and how it does not work
Suggesting solutions has value but not that much actually because you can get suggestions from different people that just cannot fit together
This happened to me when I got feedback for items submitted in RPGSS and Blazing 9. Even a few persons giving feedback was tremendously useful. I could instantly see people react the same way to the same things and understand the strengths and weaknesses of my design
This is even more true for professional designers and with a playtest the scope of this one
So if you want to get the best game they can design, strictly follow their guidelines. In the end we will all benefit from your efforts :-)
If you have a choice between running playtest games with houserules and not playtesting at all, then by all means playtest with houserules. But know that your feedback will be weighted less as a result and you're locked out of certain polls. Some feedback is better than no feedback.Yeah, the only house-rule I am planning on is omitting +Level; open up the threat range of monsters.
Why? Setting aside that leveling up and still fighting basic goblins at 20 feels a little boring, you can just add extra levels to creatures and numerically boost them to whatever threat level you want. Or add class levels!
Even without monster creation rules, this looks really easy. Like significantly easier than adjusting every DC in the game. It also provides you with more flexibility with exactly how much of a threat monsters are and increases the relevancy or your data to Paizo.
Don't get me wrong, there are reason to omit +level to everything or at least adjust it, if you want the game to feel less high powered or just hate numbers getting that high. But axing it to make monsters threaten at more ranges seems pretty overkill.
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Here's an idea Lyee. Play Doomsday Dawn (and the PFS scenarios if you're doing those) exactly as written (or as close to exact) to get a feel for how PF2 is as written and provide the asked-for feedback. Then, separately (and probably afterward) run a campaign using any house rules & monsters & whatnot, have fun, and provide that feedback to the forums along with any cool house rules that you came up with.
It's my understanding that Doomsday Dawn should only take a few sessions to run, so in the next year you could either run it like a dozen times, or once for your group, and then a 8+ month campaign starting at 1st level.
This is essentially what I'm planning on doing, so I can give the best specific feedback, and also give general "hey, I think these changes worked beautifully and added a lot of fun to the game".
This is what I plan on doing. The official scenarios will get serious play using rules as written. Then on and off throughout the year I'll be playing my wacky bard-only, tengu and dragon PC, toss out rules I don't like, create adventures using little more than improv campaign.
The latter won't provide much usable information to Paizo, but will give me a good feel for how much I can monkey around with the system for my own amusement when the full rules come out in 2019.
Just to put my money where my mouth is, let's say you need to throw together a session in a hurry for a level 13 party, or are even having to improvise as you go. You decide that there's an ogre army amassing that the PCs must deal with, by slaying a small group of extremely tough ogre leaders. Those leaders would probably be neat with class levels, but you don't have time for all that.
Your party still cuts through the rank and file level 3 ogres like butter, which makes them feel like badasses. To make the leaders an actual fight though, you just increase their level by 10, which is really just adding 10 to most of their numbers.
OGRE CREATURE 13
Chaotic, Evil, Giant, Humanoid, Large
Perception +15, darkvision
Languages Giant
Skills +11; Acrobatics +14, Athletics +19
Str +5, Dex -1, Con +2, Int -2, Wis +0, Cha -2
Items hide armor, 6 javelins, ogre hook
AC 26, TAC 24; Fort +18, Ref +13, Will +15
HP 140
Speed 25 feet
[[A]] Melee ogre hook +20 (deadly 1d10, reach 10 feet, trip), Damage 1d10+7 piercing
[[A]] Ranged javelin +18 (thrown 30 feet), Damage 1d6+7
That took me 30 seconds. This guy won't be as much of a threat to level 13 characters as the 3rd level ogre was to 3rd level characters, because the PCs power has increased in various ways beyond +level to stuff. But you now have achieved the same effect as removing +level without needing to Frankenstein every skill DC or change the narrative structure of the universe. (+Level also says a lot about the word itself and how dangerous certain creatures are to each other within it, see. Ogres in Pathfinder have always been bottom of the giant food chain despite being numerous; in multiple PF1 adventures Ogres are used as the grunts by stone or frost giants. Given the depravity of an ogre, a large number of them would probably overthrow a small group of giants if +level is removed from the equation.)
You can throw a large number of level 13 ogres at PCs to challenge them. You can use a smaller number but increase their level even further. You can add a special action or reaction if you want these guys to feel more nuanced than the basic ogre. You can give them magic weapons or a corresponding damage dice increase. All this stuff is doable whether you add level or not.
Ogresounds
Wrong thread?
OgresoundsWrong thread?
I may be drifting a little off topic, but that was in direct response to Vic saying up above they were going to house rule away +level to make monsters relevant at a greater range of levels. It looks way easier and more flexible to just adjust the level of specific monsters to your needs.
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was a horrible thing to come out of 5e, but whats your point? :P
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Is your goal just to make monsters relevant at higher levels, or is it to change the narrative underpinnings of the game? Because removing the level scaling will do both. If you are going for the latter and want a world where a high level adventurers can still potentially get stabbed in a bar fight by some random plebe, then you are probably on the right track. (Though I'm curious how you will handle Legendary Skills and what not when you get there.)
But if you just want to do the former without the latter it seems like there are maybe better options.
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Chief Technical Officer
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An interesting question is: What feedback does Paizo want?
1. Do they want to know what the problems are?
2. Do they want to know why those are problems?
3. Do they want to know what would be a good compromise or solution to the problem?
I expect the answer to questions #1 and #2 are yes. I will be interested to hear if question 3 is something they want to hear and whether it will be done through the forums, polls or both?
1. Of course—that's the whole point.
2. Yes. If we don't know *why* you think something's a problem, it's hard for us to determine whether it's a real problem or perhaps just a misinterpretation. Knowing why you think something's a problem also helps us understand the scope of that problem, or if there might be related issues in other mechanics that you aren't specifically providing feedback about.
3. Yes, but be aware that your vision of the problem may not be the same as our designers' vision, so your solution may not be the right solution for us. (This sort of feedback will generally need to come via forum posts, as the surveys are largely about data that can easily be collated.)
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Is your goal just to make monsters relevant at higher levels, or is it to change the narrative underpinnings of the game?Both, taking on 30 orcs, solo, is always a problem.
You still need the same number on the d20 to hit that Pit Fiend; I went through all of this with Deadmanwalking and Malk Content, thanks to both for the advice/analyses.
You should be good then. Probably worth running Doomsday Dawn as is but it sounds like you know what you are doing. :)
By the way, are you Weather Report? Change in screen name?
An interesting question is: What feedback does Paizo want?
1. Do they want to know what the problems are?
2. Do they want to know why those are problems?
3. Do they want to know what would be a good compromise or solution to the problem?
I expect the answer to questions #1 and #2 are yes. I will be interested to hear if question 3 is something they want to hear and whether it will be done through the forums, polls or both?
1. Of course—that's the whole point.
2. Yes. If we don't know *why* you think something's a problem, it's hard for us to determine whether it's a real problem or perhaps just a misinterpretation. Knowing why you think something's a problem also helps us understand the scope of that problem, or if there might be related issues in other mechanics that you aren't specifically providing feedback about.
3. Yes, but be aware that your vision of the problem may not be the same as our designers' vision, so your solution may not be the right solution for us. (This sort of feedback will generally need to come via forum posts, as the surveys are largely about data that can easily be collated.)
Thanks Vic. I figured 1 and 2 were definitely YES's for the reasons you said. But I included them anyway because you know what they say about assuming. But #3 is definitely good to hear and useful to know when going into the playtest.
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Why not use the ordinary Pathfinder homebrew forum and just mark it as PF2?
Another big problem will be unintentional homebrew rules. The GMs and players will have about a week--I plan on 5 days--to read the playtest rulebook before the first game. They will get some rules wrong, often defaulting to PF1 rules or to their familiar PF1 houserules, and occasionally misreading a playtest rule so badly that they create a new rule.
...
I don't think unintentional homebrew rules will be that much of a problem. From the previews it looks like PF2 is different enough from 1e/3.x to not as easily reference PF1 rules or familiar PF1 houserules.
The proficiency system and it applying pretty universaly will take care of many things.That power attack / rage / ... now works differently than it did in PF1 is easy enough to grasp even on a cursory read.
(Yeah, I assume that if you take/get a rules element, you read the text at least once.)
Getting some rules wrong because you can't know a new system with only a few days to read the rules is more likely.
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Yeah, the only house-rule I am planning on is omitting +Level; open up the threat range of monsters.
So you're not changing much, only removing the main core feature of the new game engine... You will be playing a completely different game then, and your feedback on that game will not really be relevant to the actual Pathfinder playtest, not even unter the heading "how about this alternative", because this is a concept that is most certainly not getting abandoned, as that would entail a complete redesign of the entire game.