1. I wish someone would feed Kevin Seimbeida of palladium a concentrated dose of bean extract that would result in enough pressure building up to blow his head out of his ass and allow official conversions of rifts material to other game systems. (Side wish, I wish that KS would either do something with the goddam mechanoids or let someone else make a new game setting with them.)


2. I wish that SJG would lose the rights to gurps and all gurps material so a new company, possibly ran by sean punch and dave pulver, could take over the rights to all gurps material and begin doing the game as more than just something to kill time while waiting for the latest shipment of munchkin crap to come over on a boat from china.

3. I wish someone would get the rights to the old "Living steel" RPG setting and hook it up to a game system that was suited to the setting and people could actually play, like gurps or EABA.

Now rub the lamp and make your wish.

Not being a 14 year old boy, I don't care what happens to Rifts. I would like to see GURPS - no matter who owns it - push even harder into electronic territory. A lot of really excellent e23 exclusive stuff has come out and I think there's a lot more there to cover. Don't know much about Living Steel.

My main wish is this:

That people forget they ever wanted a game to be "supported" by a constant stream of releases - and focus instead on support in terms of building communities around play, mentoring of players and gamemasters, and table accessories and aids.

Just more time to game, which of course means I wish I was rich. Like filthy, go f your self rich. After that....I barely know a thing about the RPG industry, and don't much really care.

1. I wish game designers would spend as much time playtesting as they do hyping their new games.

2. See 1.

I try. In any case I definitely spend way more time playtesting than hyping.

-clash

Soooo... some number of minutes greater than zero.

(That's a joke. I can tell you test your games by the way you, and others, talk about them. I mostly point my finger at giant game companies with no excuse and other indie designers who rush to get something out to be part of the club and expect gamers to simply intuit how to play/fix their pile of trash.)

That is what I meant, exactly!



I know both of these are true sometimes - certainly more than it should be. OTOH, In Harm's Way: Pigboats has been in suspension for three months so far waiting for beta testers to get back to me. What can I do, put a gun to their heads? At some point I have to release it with whatever meager feedback I have. Luckily the game works fine - alpha testing covers that. What beta testing covers is the expression of the rules - making sure they are completely understandable by the customer. If I don't get feedback, I have no idea if the customers can understand the rules properly.

-clash

After having been in and observed many playtests, I can absolutely understand why designers don't put a lot of reliance on them. Our community's current playtesting practices are unbelievably horrible, haphazard, bad, and fucking awful in every way. Like, I can't find enough negative adjectives to describe it.

In video games, they pay playtesters, and it's a full time job, with set expectations and very firm directions. Here it's just "hay, try this out, tell me what you think, hello, hello?"

Paizo, when play tested the beginner's box, actually set up a room to watch groups discover the game through a one-way mirror. And I know some indie designers (Rob Bohl) for instance, who pushed hard until he got solid play test results from a number of groups. Mostly though, he took it to about two dozen cons and ran games of it to make sure it worked. The outside play testing was to make sure the things HE did to make the game run well were in the book and didn't literally need him to be present to make them work.

So. There are some people out there who manage to get it done.

I can sympathize how hard it is to get playtester feedback. And yet that sympathy means nothing when I drop $30+ on a game, get it to the table, and discover that the mechanics simply don't work as written or are incredibly clunky.

I also recognize that some games need more playtesting than others. Games that follow a tried-and-true system aren't as prone to be lemons as systems that employ some entirely novel mechanics.

I found it very interesting that Margaret Weis Productions just confirmed (on Facebook) that they took on the Smallville and Leverage RPGs with the express intent of only producing three books each...and the three books each combine to make a very complete package (I think the core for each is usable, and the supplements just add icing to the cake). Was a time (and there are still companies today) that would have tried to completely milk a license for every red cent, then wind up leaving a line half-finished when they lost the license in the middle of production delays.