Hey guys, so I finally finished reading the APG and although there are a lot of cool features and had a massive upgrade from playtest, there are some rough edges that would get better with a second playtest.
How inviable would be to have 2 rounds of playtest for the new classes (Magus and Summoners)? I think probably would make final product better.
Hey guys, so I finally finished reading the APG and although there are a lot of cool features and had a massive upgrade from playtest, there are some rough edges that would get better with a second playtest.
How inviable would be to have 2 rounds of playtest for the new classes (Magus and Summoners)? I think probably would make final product better.
Probably it is quite hard to be done. Paizo has a release schedule and that translates into hype and hype translates into sales, fomo is a thing after all, even with AoN and similar sources already existing. Having a second round takes a lot of development and analysis also would probably cause a delay as just making new mechanics take a long time to be able to be released and the second test could result in another rework. Also it could be done that the second rework is probably already what the product is (most classes done that i mean oracle and swashbuckler are basically the same besides a few small changes).
So my opnion is that a second round would be amazing but the cost benefit of doing it don't seem like it's worth for paizo, it's probably better to release an errata in the future instead of two rounds of playtest in a "making money perspective". But even if it's not able to be done maybe we could get an earlier draft(Not even a playtest but really a draft of what the plans are with light rules) in a new book and have two rounds but for this one i doubt it could be done.
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Hey guys, so I finally finished reading the APG and although there are a lot of cool features and had a massive upgrade from playtest, there are some rough edges that would get better with a second playtest.
How inviable would be to have 2 rounds of playtest for the new classes (Magus and Summoners)? I think probably would make final product better.
It may be how you have written it but “some rough edges” does not really translate as being enough to warrant a whole second playtest
If the final is an upgrade and there are no “significant issues” then a second isn’t needed
On top of that it is just not viable from a timeline perspective
Out of interest what do you consider “rough edges”?
This kind of thing comes with a cost. In this case, it definitely would involve a time cost because you're asking for additional playtesting; major releases would either have to happen less often (to fit more time in) or they would have to stop publishing physical books (to reduce lead time).
I don't think they'd get as many sales if they had to charge 25% more, and I don't think people would be happy with the tradeoff of getting 25% fewer releases.
Maybe instead of raising the prices, it would be at the cost of the quality of archetypes and other material. You'd have more polished classes, but Wizard gets an infinite Drain Bonded Item exploit in the APG because the focus was on the new classes.
Or maybe they cut a lot of the art to pay for it.
Etc.
So while it's not "impossible", the cost even for the customers probably wouldn't be worth it.
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One round of open playtest is quite enough to get quality feedback from your audience about what needs to change in your offer.
Another round would bring less value for its buck AND risk muddling the waters of feedback.
Far better to do further rounds of playtest in-house. Which I think Paizo does actually.
