Aryxbez wrote:
How do you mean in regards to playtest systems finding problems bit? As in ensuring ye come up with problematic scenarios, or ensuring the base elements of the game all get introduced multiple times throughout the playtest? As for "Crowd sourcing", I know someone at one point mentioned that it would be really worth it, just hiring a crew of Optimization forum guys, and having them bend and break the hell out of your game, finding every loop and abuse possible.
There is definitely different quality levels in individuals who you put on finding rules problem duty. K and I are
better than other people at finding edge cases and loop holes in game system rules. I think we established that pretty clearly with The Wish and The Word. But however good we are, we still can't compete against the entire WotC or Pathfinder forum when it comes to finding this shit. Well, scarily enough we can
compete, but the forum as a whole is still going to find more stuff. I didn't
discover the thought bottle, I just wrote the definitive tirade about what it was really capable of. I took it farther than anyone else had, and showed
how bad it was. But someone else still brought it to my attention.
As you'd expect, because once you release books to the forum dwelling populace, you get feedback from thousands of people who are in turn privy to conversations with even more people who aren't even online. Within a day of release, a D&D book has gotten the hairy eyeball from over a hundred thousand hours of critical reading - more playtesting and proofreading than you probably were able to muster in your entire development cycle. At the most basic level, this means that no matter how well you go over your documents, the reading public are still going to find typos in your work. But it also means that no matter how good your staff power gamers are, someone on the internet is going to come up with something you didn't expect or plan for
almost immediately.
You can cut down on the bullshit by having rules guys on hand to proofread your books before they go out.
But you have to fucking listen to them! I found Bloodzilla before release and it went to print anyway. TitaniumDragon apparently found Hurricane of Blades before release and it went to print anyway. That kind of crap is unacceptable. If you bring power gamers on hand to tell you what they can break before you go to print, you need to actually listen to their suggestions and make the changes they say you need to make. But even if you do that, the crowd is still going to find stuff your in-house power gamers didn't - because they outnumber your staff by several orders of magnitude.
From what I see, seems the RPG culture hates on the idea of balancing things, whereas its found much more acceptable with Video Games, where they'll get more flak for a single flaw, opposed to Tabletop (even when it's not a competitive game).
RPG culture likes it when things
are balanced, and likes being told that things
are balanced and hates on people who tell them that things are
not balanced. Frankly, video game culture isn't much better when you look at the howls of rage that swallow WoW forums every time something is or is not nerfed.
I think it's some sort of cult of the auteur. RPG culture as a whole elevates game designers onto a pedestal. In no small part, I think this is something that the game designers and companies cultivate in order to distance themselves from the fact that there really isn't a lot of difference between a game designer and a player. Unlike the NFL or NBA, Mike Mearls really
doesn't play the game at a higher level than anyone else, and his pronouncements about D&D are no deeper than anything said by any person who happens to think about D&D a lot. That essential reality has provoked game designers and companies to put walls up between them and the fans, and the fans are complicit.
K knows D&D better than Jason Bulmahn. That's not a hypothesis, that's not a controversial premise for starting an argument, that's just true. He does. But Jason Bulmahn is the head of Pathfinder and K is not. And so when K says things that are critical of something that Bulmahn proposes, Bulmahn encourages people to take a giant shit over K. He does this in order to preserve his authority as an auteur - someone who is somehow higher up and more worth listening to than a random dude on the internet who has written some house rules. And the fact that he objectively isn't just makes him more desperate.
I don't think it would be hard for a game company to encourage and receive
actual critiques. But I also know that all of them are too thin skinned and insecure to do so. Tom Brady can accept criticism because he
is better at his game than other people. If a random fan yells at him for screwing up a pass, he knows (and everyone else knows) that that fan could never do half the things Tom Brady does on the field every week. But for Jason Bulmahn, that isn't true at all. Anyone else on the forum
could do what he does. He's completely replaceable because he demonstrably has no more skill than any of a thousand fans on the internets. When a random fan chastises him for screwing up a class writeup, he
can't take that criticism graciously. Because he knows that that fan actually
could do any of the things he does every week.
-Username17
