The reason is that in that situation, games become like court precedents and rules are added on top of rules to “remedy” the injustice, but as a rule is already in “the book” it could not be taken out because one player or the other would “lose” his advantage, and therefore it had to be “fixed.” The rules then grow exponentially until everyone says “They’re great” which means they’re all heartily sick of them and want to move on to something else they’ll tell you anything you want to hear to accomplish this. Playtesting IS a process with rules all its own, and it is A LOT OF WORK. More than that– it is a lot of work that is frustrating, boring, repetitive, and which is no fun at all.
I’m already assuming you have a set of rules you designed and that they are REALLY GREAT! Always keep in mind that you are like any proud mother, having produced this little darling, believe him to be the best baby every born, in
fact-–probably the Messiah–-and don’t want to hear that he looks like he’ll have an excellent career in a carnival freak shown. That’s what playtesting will do for you.
The first thing you need are playtesters. You can’t do this yourself – remember you love the little pig-faced boy – and can’t view him rationally. If you try to do it yourself, you will subconsciously smooth over all the rough spots and not go where you’ll run into trouble. Playtesters will do that for you (and make you very miserable in the process) but getting playtesters is going to be more painful for you than the sixteen hour delivery and lil’ Porky’s tusks.
A PLAYTESTER IS A PERSON WHO CAN PLAY THE GAME WITHOUT BEING A PLAYER
That is, he can distance himself from personal involvement with the game such that he can force situations, take direction from you, and carry on, while jumping back and forth between trying to win, studying the rules, and trying to lose, with blinding rapidity. He also has to be a workaholic and a prolific writer. A playtester who is trying to “win” the game is not a playtester and is doing you more harm than good. Remember, you aren’t trying to make a nice game in a playtest, you’re testing out the rules and the structures and how the game goes and flows. A good playtester is a person who looks at a situation and says “OK: I see my infantry is in square and his cavalry is in charge range. My common-sense reading of the rules says that if cavalry charge me he’ll be toasted and that seems to be the case. Therefore I’ll put my infantry in extended skirmish order and have them field-strip their muskets to see if not only are good tactics rewarded, but bad tactics punished.!” Few “gamers” want to experience such gratuitous butchery.
The other key element of playtesters is that they have to always keep clearly in their mind that it is not a game. I have rarely seen this quality in gamers. One of the almost universal mantra is, when something “ fall down go boom,” is – “Well Ok, we’ll keep it that way for this game but change it in the next.” —WRONG!! Playtesting time is too valuable to waste !!!– change it right now and bash on. If you know it doesn’t work, toss it out! There can be no continuity or justice here, only a brutal mania to shake the rules to death. In playtesting you’re always changing things in midstream, and not worrying about continuity.
As far as the playtest itself. Do not simply give the rule-book to the players and start the game. You must carefully decide which rules you will use in each session. This means stripping them down to the barest essentials. For example, the first few times you run a playtest, regardless of period, it is probably better to have simply infantry, cavalry, and artillery, and forget about all the wonderful and exotic troop types you have. What you want to test the first few times through are your The first two are are fairly self explanatory. The third is the most important (and least considered). Of the “unwritten factors” the most important are comfort, convenience, and time.
Get yourself a stop-watch and, like a good IE (Industrial Engineer) keep time studies of how long it takes your players to do things. This means not only figuring out how long a turn takes, but what they are doing in each turn and how long they take to do it. This means breaking down the time to things like “moving troops,” and “rolling dice” and “talking tactics.” which are good and ADD to the value of the game, and other things like “looking up rules,” “fidgeting with troops,” “counting and calculation,” and “arguing about rules” which are bad and must be eliminated completely. (You can’t really completely eliminate them, but you have to have this uncompromising goal, and you have to be ruthless about it , otherwise you’ll compromise your project). “Comfort and Convenience” are things like “Do the rules require a table so huge that the gamers can’t reach the troops in the center?” “ Is the record keeping so complex that players have to juggle a lot of forms and references, or have to constantly fiddle with the stands and the troops?” Another key factor is to watch their eyes. Are they looking at the troops? Are they looking at each other? Are they looking for dice? Are they looking at the rules? Are they looking at your paint jobs? Are they looking at your books? The first two are good, the last three bad, and the final one is a killer! It means that lil’ Petunia is so ugly they’ve lost interest entirely. All of this means of course that you will, during a playtest, be busier than a one-armed paper hanger and you won’t have time to play!
At this stage you will come to the hardest part of all. Some things will be good and some things will be bad. Some bad things you can fix with a few modifications. If you can do this– fine! If you can’t you’re going to get into making more and more complex “patches” to “fix” the rules and eventually you will wind up with this huge monstrosity. Ever wonder why there’s so many “Home-built” systems out there which “fix the problems with this or that commercial set?” Remember my harsh opinion on commercial sets? Now you know why! When you’re at this point– you’re there. For you however, it’s time to simply tear it up and start with a new sheet of paper and a new idea for the basic module or rule you are having problems with. Here we come back to the Playtesters who have to be eager and forthcoming with feedback.
Note I said feedback. Once again, a Playtester who simply complains is no playtester -- he’s another lazy, worthless, whining, complaining’ gamer. And now the REAL hard part! Yourself! Can you take the heat? Can you take the feedback? Or will you resist being told that contrary to what you think, Jo-Jo is NOT housebroken and right now is piddlin’ on the sofa! I was once engaged by a guy who was designing a set of rules for fantasy/historical miniatures, and basically was a “Warhammer” wanna-be. He wanted me to critically review the background information (political information, cultural items, social and economic modules) for the game, which was being set in the Renaissance era (where I have my Phd.) Each time I sent him a critique (which was not just pointing out mistakes, gaffs, and inconsistencies, but had suggestions on how to cure it or get over it, or even completely re-written copy, I received a long, long, detailed argument over each point and how it was “really good the way it was– and wouldn’t cause a problem at all -– and that I didn’t really understand what he was trying to do– and that I really didn’t understand the period well -– Or that I should go back and re-read Burckhardt because I really didn’t understand him...
Needless to say I soon simply dropped out.. This is hard for anyone to do and I am no exception, but you have to do it. Consider this– who’s your better friend, the guy who tells you in private that you have bad breath, or the guy who acts like your friend, but says nothing, and let’s you be ill thought of by others?
Testing one thing at a time is also extremely important. If you built a car, you wouldn’t just hop in and turn on the key, you’d test each system as you added it, bench testing it, then testing it in situ, and then moving on. Same with a computer program. You modularize it and run test data through to see if it works in all paths. Same with a set of rules. After you get past the basics you might test the effect of different types of cavalry, different types of infantry etc. Once you get past that, and you want to get into things like advanced firing considerations, you take out all the special troop types and put in the different firing types and see what they do, or if the two are inextricably linked you try out ONE different troop type per game, and here again you need players who will test that troop type many, many times, perhaps even bringing it back if eliminated. Once done, you take out the stuff you just tested and go on to the next part.
You remember when I told you about the stop watch? Here’s another piece of equipment you’ll need -- a scale. Well, kind of. You have to make for yourself very stringent restrictions on the total package. My own standard is simple.
Single-spaced, 12 pt. Times Roman Bold. If it’s longer than 10 pages, get out the red pencil and the scissors! If you can’t fit all the rules you need to run a battle in 10 and be a fast enjoyable game, your rules are way too complex and you’ll NEVER be able to run them successfully at a CON where you have a lot of gamers who will not know them. This “weight” factor, as it were, is also important for your playtesting. Take a look at your rules when you begin. Generally, you can figure you’ll need at least two playtest “meetings” and two months of work time PER PAGE! So if you’ve got a 65 page rule book– plan on publishing it posthumously!
Conventions and Playtests -- great together! Once you have all the playtesting done at your home or with your group, and they say it’s fine, and have played a few real games with it, if it works well, there is no better place to REALLY test them out than at a convention, BUT ONLY IF YOU’VE USED THE ABOVE METHOD RELIGIOUSLY. Treat the con games like playtests in the sense of stripping down the rules to the bare bones stuff and ad a few bells and whistles that you know work well. Putting this on at a CON will be like “testing to destruction” in industrial quality control. You will have a rack of gamers completely unaffected by your own, and your playtesters emotional attachment, and they will be ignorant of the rules, difficult, and probably think they know more than you. They will be crude, opinionated, greedy, ungrateful, and un-caring. If your rules survive them, you probably have a pretty good thing there!
Playtesting is one of the least understood, and most bungled aspects of war gaming. Almost all of the major, glossy, commercially printed sets today have glaring errors because they have not been playtested well – if at all. The reason is simple. Few people really know how to playtest, and fewer still who are good playtesters.
Playtesting IS NOT simply running a lot of games. That’s probably the worst way to playtest and it will make a good set of rules bad, and a bad set of rules worse.
a) Your sequence of action,
b) your RELATIVE troop relationships above,
c) The unwritten factors.
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