Testing Materials

I am perhaps jumping the gun on this article a bit, since it depends slightly on a concept I haven't discussed yet. The concept is that all game systems are capable of being converted into any other system. That being said, I wanted to talk briefly about a great source of testing materials for the designer with limited time: Published adventures.

A problem that I have, and I suspect many entrepreneurial designers have, is that as much as I enjoy designing and writing, I don't have time for a regular game or group to test with. As a result, I have to find other ways to test the system. There is only so much you can do like this, but the amount you can do is still surprisingly great.

You can test combat and skill checks, skill levels, falling and other world mechanics. You can also test magic, to some degree, all simply by building characters in your system, inventing situations or recalling past situations from games you've run or played and seeing how the cards fall if you roll it out a few times. You can test high level (or "level" if you don't have levels) characters, low level characters and mid-level characters. You can even test encounter scaling and balance.

What is difficult to test is character advancement, xp allotment and game flow. These are things that do not test well in the solo situations that all other points can be tested with. However, if you can figure out how to convert between your system and one used in a published adventure then you can build a party of characters and "play" through the adventure, allocating xp and advancing the character's along the way.

Game flow is not tested well with this because you have all the information, both player and GM. There's not really any role-playing because while you are choosing the actions of the characters all situations are resolved with dice rolls. You aren't likely to hold in-game conversations between the character's you've built or with NPC's. I have found that this is still a great way to test character advancement and xp allotment though.

Additionally, if you can find a PDF of the adventure and you store the characters on a spreadsheet (all on Google Drive or some other similar system) then you can test anytime you have a computer and a few spare minutes.