Playtesting forum and Actual Play forum
Ron Edwards:
Hello,
That's not a bad breakdown, David, and although I can't see adopting it exactly, your offering is stated as "something like" and indeed, something like it may be a good thing to consider.
However, one thing will not change: the distinction and usage of the Playtesting forum. I consider your use of First Thoughts to be breaking the social contract of the community here. I consider your reason for it - which amounts merely to clamoring for attention - to be beneath discussion.
If you have playtested your game at all, then all discussion of it goes into the Playtesting forum. Dropping this point by accident is one thing; defying it is another. Furthermore, any objections or concerns you have with Playtesting - primarily number of views and so on - are easily repaired by posting your topics there, contributing to other threads there, and generally helping to make it into a productive forum.
I expect anyone and everyone with a game which has entered playtesting to be doing this. Or rather, anyone and everyone who is serious even to a little extent about his or her game.
Everyone: you may take this post as a clear signal that the First Thoughts forum is off limits to playtested games, period. I'll be more attentive to this from now on. If you'd like to help, then please report posts which clearly violate it to me. I will not punish or shame the violators, but I will move the threads. It is likely that merely doing this will jack up the Playtesting forum because a lot of content is probably currently hiding in First Thoughts.
I also ask that people pay more attention to games in Playtesting, as those thread authors are clearly braving some fear and demonstrating some seriousness, and they should not be ignored.
Thunder_God:
To pick up on Ron's last line, I don't think it's surprising that Playtesting has less posts than First Thoughts:
1. Many designs don't make it to playtesting.
2. They make it, and then are left alone, and off the designer goes to try something different.
3. Some people don't feel the need to get help on the Playtesting forum, and tweak on their own and discussing with the playtesters directly.
4. Some stuff in First Thoughts is not actually a game, but a game-component idea.
All in all, I for one am not surprised at the disparity.
Patrice:
To back part of what Thunder said, I'd say that the relative depletion of the Playtest forum comes more from design constraints and habits than from site-abuse behaviour. Very few First Thoughts ever make it to Playtest and if they do, they might change and evolve so much that their author feels justified into breaking a new First Thoughts rather than going on with Playtest. From the "you have a game, play it and let's discuss and play again until you publish/share it in some way" point of view, going back into First Thoughts doesn't make sense but it seems that what happens is more "I have an idea, play it, dump it, shape another, start a new game, play it, take back the first one, play it, dump it, start afresh again" in serendipity mode.
On the other hand, Actual Play allows you to talk about the games other people designed. No wonder it's big and fat since it doesn't involve the "creation" process as such. It's what we play, and we play.
There's a side risk here: enforcing First Thoughts would be enforcing the staged vision derivated from the "you have a game, play it" point of view and I don't think Playtest will get any benefit from that. I like that, it's challenging and compels us lurkers/posters into framing a sensible and straightforward game design, but I'd like us to be aware of what that means: that means that if we drop an idea, this idea is supposed to evolve into a game, be tested and shared in such a way that Actual Play will happen afterwards. It's the ideal pattern. Thing is most of us aren't fitting this ideal. Most designers need to muse a long while at design before becoming actual designers and it so happens that The Forge is also a good place to muse at the moment.
I think most of us (well, I do anyway) consider Playtest entries with a "waw, she/he did it!". Playtest is glory, it shows you were damn serious about this First Thought and I feel very strange reading that one might feel "dumped" here. This forum sets aside the musers and the fledged (however fledging) designers, if I may say so (and I may because I've never ever opened a Playtest thread).
Ron Edwards:
Those are good points too.
I'd like to distinguish between the necessary self-selection factor, which automatically means less and slower posting in Playtesting, and what I see as under-using that forum. I agree it will never be as rapid and high-reply as First Thoughts or Actual Play, and that seems to me to be a good thing. But I do think it should be more active and better utilized than it is now.
In other words, I would like to see David's criticisms addressed behaviorally and in community terms, not structurally as he suggests (a reversion to Indie Design, effectively).
Best, Ron
Lance D. Allen:
The behavioral aspect of the problem is what I was trying, perhaps less than successfully, to address in my last post. My posting and participation here will always be whim-laden, but as I recently made a point to aim my whims at the First Thoughts forums more, Since this thread, I've made a point to look at the Playtesting forum more. I am especially remiss because playtesting is the part of the process I am having the most trouble with. If I would get past this hump with Rats in the Walls and ReCoil, it would do me some good to spend some time focusing on the playtesting efforts of others.
Playtesting is possibly the most important thing you can do for a game, even moreso than designing it. Anyone can toss together some neat ideas and call it a roleplaying game. These days, anyone can make a physical book or a .pdf of those ideas. You don't get quality without making sure the ideas actually work well.
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