I saw a post, or series of posts, some years back from an interview with Paizo's developers stating that they used the Pathfinder Iconics drawn on the covers and splash age art for adventure paths to do their internal playthroughs/tests of the APs. I can't find it again.
Anybody happen to know where it is?
I know that was a thing that was done with the old Dragon APs, but I hadn't heard that it was the case with Pathfinder iconics.
It might not have been the iconics specifically, just that they represented the classes used by the players in the AP playtest.
Creative Director
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We've used some iconics to playtest things in-house before. I used Merisiel, for example, to playtest Jason's adventure "Curse of the Everflame" back in the day (and this is the source of Merisiel's fear of bats, by the way), while Lisa played Amiri if I remember correctly in that same game.
But we don't actually have a rigorous in-house playtest element for our Adventure Paths. That's the role of the developer—to take the writer's text and put it through a rigorous process to iron out issues and expand and revise to make the adventure better and stronger. A good developer can identify and address problems that a playtest would in a fraction of the time and effort getting a group of players together to playtest an adventure could do.
It's BEST if we do both—have the adventure playtested and then developed, but the reality is that most adventures are not playtested in house—very few are.
We don't require it, but we appreciate it when the writer of an adventure playtests the adventure themselves before they finish the document up and send it on to us. That's more or less my method for the adventures I write, but it's not always an option. I didn't playtest "Ruins of Gauntlight," for example, but I absolutely did playtest "Maleveolence."
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Creative Director
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When you playtest something as an author, do you get a group together to run it, or play encounters solo? I can see the feedback appeal of a group, but the deadline aspect of being able to do it yourself also appeals. (Or does it just depend on when the deadline is?)
I either get a group together and run parts or all of the adventure, or (in theory—I haven't actually done this yet) I give the adventure to a friend for them to run and then get feedback from them.
The "play encounters solo" isn't playtesting in my mind—that's kind of the entire thing a developer does. They don't sit down and roll dice for everything (that CAN happen, though, particularly when we're doing a big new subsystem of rules for an adventure), but they absolutely play through the encounters in their mind as they develop, looking at each one from as many viewpoints and angles of approach as possible to present the encoutner in a way that it works best for as many different games as it can.
Hm, guess I misremembered. Thanks for answering though!
If you don't mind another question, what IS the meaning behind the iconics chosen for use in an AP's art? Just whichever ones seem coolest?
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Creative Director
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Hm, guess I misremembered. Thanks for answering though!
If you don't mind another question, what IS the meaning behind the iconics chosen for use in an AP's art? Just whichever ones seem coolest?
We choose iconics for our artwork as stand ins for your characters, of course, when we illustrate scenes in adventures.
As for making the choice of what iconics get illustrated in an adventure, that's up to the adventure's developer. The choice is made after factoring in what iconics are thematically appropriate for the adventure, which ones haven't had much "screen time" recently, and which ones are favored by the developer in question.
Cool, that explains a lot. So generally thematically appropriate, but sometimes because somebody on the team just really likes that character (which presumably explains a minor niggle I've always had: Seelah being in Skull and Shackles for some reason).