This post is part of a multi-blog review of Open Designs’ Kobold Guide to Game Design: Volume II, see the Hub page of the reviews here.
A few days ago, my good friend Ben McFarland approached me and a few more bloggers to help him get the word out about Wolfgang Baur’s (you know, that guy) newest digest of posts called The Kobold guide to Game Design, Volume 2: How to platest and publish.
Ben’s proposal was to have each chapter of the book be reviewed by different bloggers. I happily agreed.
After having taken a look at the available chapters, I asked Ben to send me the one about playtesting. This is a subject that’s close to my heart since I’ve started doing it for my Kobold Love project. I’ll also start doing some for the Goodman Games adventure I just finished.
All right, this is a 4 page chapter so I need to stay concise and not actually re-write it all. So here goes:
Caspule Review:
Wolfgang Baur covers , in a concise and clearly the crucial points one must keep in mind when doing playtesting for your adventures (and especially when doing it for another publisher). Extremely useful.
Somewhat more detailed review:
The chapter boils down to Wolfgang’s golden rule of playtesting: “Note it and move on”.
He extols the virtues of spending as much time possible actually testing everything in the adventure and not spend more time than necessary doing paperwork or discussing possible alternatives.
He covers various sub-topics such as character creation, the ressource books to use for D&D playtesting, notekeeping, combat, death, the dreaded TPK. He then outlines what to do when problems pop up in an adventure’s crunch (mechanics & balance) and its fluff (story, setting, logic) and addressed how to deal with them.
He concludes the section with a few paragraph on how to succesfully write a playtest report and he has a bonus boxed text on how playtesting in a Convention should go.
In just 4 short pages, Wolfgang Baur manages to touch all the bases of playtesying without getting lost in details and examples. I found the chapter to be enlightning as I learned a few things I had never thought of doing in my previous playtesting.
I do have one small qualm. The chapter specifically addresses playtesting of a D&D (or SRD 3,5) adventure as it was done in late 2008 (i.e. he names very specific books). While you can use most of the chapter for other types of games, the text was written with Baur’s current playtesting experiences. That limits the chapter’s utility somewhat.
Play for fun, keep things moving, note things that don’t work and reset the game when needed to test later scenes, that’s what it all boils down too. Wise words from the West Coast master of Fluff and all things D&D.
So all in all, an excellent part of the book.
Want to read more about The Kobold Guide to Game Design, Volume II? Read on…
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