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Monday, October 13, 2008

Playtesters and Designers

This is Steven Petrick Posting.

One of the problems with getting reports from playtesters (as I have noted before) is that they tend to see things through the prism of their own experiences within their own group. This leads to reports of things that are "obvious" to the playtester, but which have no meaning to the designer, resulting in a breakdown in communications. The playtester cites a specific case (at least it is specific to him), the designer is baffled because there is not enough information to really tell what the playtester is talking about, so the designer falls back on his own experience, which does not jive with what the playtester is indicating.

Sometimes one side of the discussion is, in fact, acting on or producing erroneous data, but note that it could be either side.

Sometimes the error is just obvious.

A case in point a while back was a playtest report received on a scenario. The scenario was unworkable according to the playtesters because they simply sat back at 30 hexes range and bombarded the ground based defense stations with disruptor fire, while the ground based defense stations' weapons were impotent. The attacking force then moved in and was easily able to handle the reinforcements because their ships had sustained little damage.

There were several problems with this.

One was the simple fact that a ground base defense station cannot be engaged by any means outside of five hexes range.

Another was that if you sat at 30 hexes range and fired on anything "landed" on a planet with an atmosphere you would likely be firing through a one shift on your heavy weapons (the target would put up max ECM and gain a point of ECM from the atmosphere forcing the shift even if the attacker had six points of ECCM) and a two shift on your phasers (same EW state, but atmosphere imposes an additional automatic plus one shift to phaser fire on top of the EW state).

In essence, to attack the ground bases the attacking force had to close, which in turn would make the ground defenses more powerful, resulting in at least heavily damaged shields on the attacking force, and influencing their actions versus the defending reinforcements.