Now. . . I only need to get straight answers on the playtest investiture and how many people actually playtested the product and for how many man hours such QC testing actually comprised. Five or six months of four hour game sessions conducted by two play groups isn't going to meet my standards, I'm afraid. I'd consider that to be the bare miniumum for one round of playtesting.
Well, just like for $22 you can't really expect Ptolus-level layouts or art, you also can't really expect WoTC-D&D-level playtesting from a small print company project.
Round 1 of playtesting consisted of me running a series of multiple test games (probably about 24 playing hours in total) in the very initial stage to work out the kinks in the mechanics, followed by a multi-session campaign run in the Wilderlands (about 42 playing hours). This stage had 9 playtesters who participated in total. The playtesting in this round was done at various different levels of power and experience to try to figure out possible difficulties in low, mid and high level play.
Round 2 of playtesting consisted of playtesting run by Settembrini over in germany (including a couple of test runs in gaming Cons, where as I understand it the participants were people he did not personally know before the Con), and independant runs by one of the Round 1 playtesters here in Uruguay that I was not in any way involved with directly. I couldn't accurately tell you how many hours or people where involved with either of these.
Round 3 of playtesting was organized by Clash, and consisted of Clash giving the "Beta" version of the rules (essentially, the rules as I had given them to him at that time, with all the modifications that had been made from the first two rounds of playtesting) to a number of different people, who ran them with their groups. As I understand it there were 7 different people who received these beta rules, not counting Clash himself. We got a number of reports with a number of issues from this round, and this lead to some final changes to the rules. Most of these changes were relatively small cosmetic additions explaining or clarifying some of these existing rules, one of them was a relatively large change that helped make larger individual monsters much more challenging than they'd previously been.
Again, I couldn't tell you specifically how many people or how many hours were involved in total in the third round of playtesting.
I'd say that this probably beats the pants off of most RPGs published at this level of publishing, including most of the stuff done through the Forge, where their "playtesting" is a very insular incestuous affair done by people within the Forge itself (not to say that this is totally worthless, and I'm sure that there are some strong levels of criticism that can be achieved this way, but there is also some objectivity lost by having the only people who try out your rules be your own ideological "fellow travellers").
I'm pretty satisfied that the playtesting was more than thorough enough.
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