Playtesting forum and Actual Play forum
Patrice:
We should maybe question the behavioural boundary between Actual Play and Playtest instead of the First Thoughts/Playtest one.
Lance D. Allen:
The way I read it (without actually going back and, yanno, reading it) is that Actual Play is for play of published, or otherwise finished, games. If the game's designers considers the game to be unfinished and is providing copies of the game to others for playtesting purposes, or is playing the game themselves under such circumstances, then it's Playtesting.
The border area is where a game might be considered finished, but the designer is following AP threads with an eye toward a revised edition. It's not hard to figure out though, because the official status of the game is "done", so it's Actual Play.
David C:
Sorry, I haven't had time to get back here to make any comments.
Ron, I feel like you've just dismissed everything I've said on the basis of wishful thinking.
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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).
That's like, if I make a gamist game and people play it like a gamist game and I cry and whine they're doing it wrong because I insist it is actuallya narrativist game.
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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.
In what universe is this a good thing? You can't just say something that doesn't make any sense, and not bother to explain it, then expect me to take you seriously. If I didn't want people to respond to my posts, I wouldn't post them! I don't call people on the phone to listen to their voice mail.
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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.
This attitude is why I was hoping to find another board with a less narr attitude. Narr games benefit from being short with few mechanics. That's why you can write out your entire game idea, go play test and be done without having to go back to square one. It's super easy to finish a narr game. Hell, you guys make games that fit in pamphlets! In marathon contests! When writing a game, I've had to play test, go back and revise or add mechanics (First thoughts, new ideas, which are unplaytested!) I've been working on it for years. And as I've said, the game it is now has nothing in common with the game I started on. But I playtested it with my friends about 2 weeks in, before I even visited here. My very first post to first thoughts was against Ron's rules.
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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.
Posting that message here is about as effective as putting up fliers next to the freeway. About the only user you're going to crack down on is me (since you are now aware), and all the posts and happy thoughts you're making here aren't going to do squat to change everyone else's "behavior."
When I was writing the parent, I kept thinking it was a bad idea. I figured you're too stubborn to actually change anything about how you run things unless it's your idea. And you're too comfortable with the way things are to ever want to change anything, regardless of how decrepit it becomes. I was worried the only thing I could accomplish was to garner ill will. I guess I was right. Hopefully I can finish my game without needing to discuss any new mechanics.
Ron Edwards:
I can't possibly take the juvenilia in that post seriously. You're simultaneously asking me to explain myself, deciding upon my reasons (or rather prejudices and hidden agenda) without waiting for an explanation, then criticizing those, and finally writing off the entire discussion. This isn't your reasoning doing the composing; it's your ego, lashing out trying to hurt me for making it feel something-or-other. If, while composing the post, you really wanted to know what I meant or where I'm coming from, you simply would have asked.
Further attention-seeking posts of that sort will go into the Inactive File with the porn and word-salad spam.
Best, Ron
DWeird:
I don't know and I don't care about the thread that started this little spat, but one thing did catch my eye in this thread, i.e.:
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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.
It's the "merely" that I take issue with. Of course Dave wants attention - attention for his game, as there's really no way to get it any better without outside help. It's attention to specific details which you can't get without a large-ish mass of people vading through (or, if you're lucky, just a single person who's on the same wavelength as you are), and not the "wah-ah, I want my lolly!" attention that calls for the same large-ish mass of people as a goal in itself. Specific attention is what I want when I make threads in the Forge, too, and I (think I) can safely assume most people do, too. Deriding that seems to miss the point completelly - and the point is, as Dave both suggests and embodies, is that people are going to migrate from places where they don't get attention to places they do.
Trying to fix that by stronger moderating and shifting anything that has ever been playtested into Playtesting seems dubious to me... Some of the stuff that'd "misplaced" in First Thoughts would "Hey guys, I need an idea for a mechanic of my game that otherwise works" bits. Try as I might, I can't see how such posts would fit into "Playtesting", which seems, from the name itself, to be about playtesting, and not about "amalgated bits that have something to do with games that have been playtested at some point or other." Would stronger policing serve any purpose other than bolstering the Playtest forum's raw stats - post amount and replies gained? If no, why even bother?
And since "yeah, no, stuff you're saying is not gonna work, so why even bother doing anything?" is not too productive in regards to the issue at hand... The reason I rarely post in Playtesting (other than being a complete greenhorn) is that a lot of the stuff in it seems to be "Hey look! I finished my game!". I come in, look at what's posted - which is more often than not a frickin' wall of text or a link to a frickin' wall of text -, my eyes glaze over, and I either close the thread right off (unless it's a playtest to one of Marshall Burns's games. Then, you have a wall of text that reads like a novel), or, more rarely, skim it quickly and look for any questions that the author posed... Sometimes, there are none. Sometimes, they're stuff like "what do you think?"... And then I groan silently and go do something else. Reading a text with an eye out for stuff that could be wrong in it, or stuff that can be unexpectedly good in it is hard enough, and I don't think asking the author to tell me what issues he wants help with is too much.
So what I'm saying is... Maybe some sort of criteria and/or guides to what playtesting is about? What you should do during it, what should you write (and NOT write) in the report, and how you should go around looking for problems, stuff like that. Nothing formal, but rather a sort of a community best practises thing? Because currently, all there is that comes remotelly close to that is the Knizia thing, which amounts to: "Playtesting's pretty useful. Do it lots."
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