So I actually wrote an rpg last month. It's about 8 pages in Google Docs, and very much a casual mini-rpg. But it's a fully formed rpg, and because I missed the window for releasing it (it's very much a Christmas RPG), I now have a bunch of time to playtest it.
This now raises the question of.... how do you actually properly playtest an RPG? I know there's been a lot of opinions about Certain RPGs not being properly playtested here, so I figured I'd ask.
Proper Playtesting
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Proper Playtesting
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Heaven's Thunder Hammer
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Thaluikhain
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One thing that's very important for playtesting is the difference between testing your mechanics and testing your rules. I've run into this with non-RPG games I've made and tested for fun.
When you're testing your mechanics, you tell everyone how everything works, and you watch them try it out. This can be simple test encounters with premade characters, having people build characters and see what they make, or doing a full adventure. Feel free to get people's reviews and opinions, but also pay attention yourself to points where the game drags or excels. Some of this you can run without playtesters and even without dice--making sure the basic math doesn't give incoherent or awful outputs is something you should check before letting anyone else play the game.
When you're testing the rules, you hand your players a written document and have them read it and play the game without your input. The goal here is to see what's written well, and what's so unclear that people either can't figure it out, or figure out something other than what you meant. You can still take notes on how the mechanics work out, but you'll mostly be watching how clear the rules are--because there are parts that you will have written poorly, and you'd like to know what those are.
This is all alpha testing, though. Beta testing the game on a larger scale, when you're not in the room with the people playing, is a whole different ballgame.
When you're testing your mechanics, you tell everyone how everything works, and you watch them try it out. This can be simple test encounters with premade characters, having people build characters and see what they make, or doing a full adventure. Feel free to get people's reviews and opinions, but also pay attention yourself to points where the game drags or excels. Some of this you can run without playtesters and even without dice--making sure the basic math doesn't give incoherent or awful outputs is something you should check before letting anyone else play the game.
When you're testing the rules, you hand your players a written document and have them read it and play the game without your input. The goal here is to see what's written well, and what's so unclear that people either can't figure it out, or figure out something other than what you meant. You can still take notes on how the mechanics work out, but you'll mostly be watching how clear the rules are--because there are parts that you will have written poorly, and you'd like to know what those are.
This is all alpha testing, though. Beta testing the game on a larger scale, when you're not in the room with the people playing, is a whole different ballgame.