Sounds good. I'd keep the designer and group advice together.

How about hosting playtest packs for various games?

I'd also like to see a leaderboard where members gain playtest points based on playtesting and helping the community!

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JoE
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Prince of Darkness Games
Rock N' Role-Play....

What the hell is a playtest pack? Do you mean something along the lines of:

This is my game, please playtest it, here is the stuff?

Are you serious on the second one?

Cheers

Iain

Mob Justice now available!

'The Giant Brain':Small games, big ideas.

My thoughts:

First, forget selling the site to designers. You don't need to. You put up the site and you'll attract designers wanting stuff tested like flies around a turd. You need to attract players and GMs willing to test games. Pitch the site to them. Even if all you have is the people on the CE site looking for testers, there's going to be plenty for each tester to choose from.

So every time you say anything, you need to sell the playtesting process to the testers. To that end, I'm going to do a re-write of your pitch in a moment and you can see what you think.

...and, Joe, please correct me if I'm wrong... just a bunch of files needed to playtest the game.

A bit like a demo pack but for playtesting. I envisage it being a zip file containing PDFs of character shetes, rules documents, hand-outs, feedback sheets and information on what needs tested.

...and I think Joe is serious on the second one.

One of his aims in the pyramid games design competition, for instance, was to get people testing each others games. So I think it's a legit point from Joe's POV.

In the 'Purposes of the Site' the word 'find' should come after the comma in (2). You might also want to add 'of playtests' at the end of (4) to differentiate it from actualplay.com

I agree that getting people with games to be tested will not be a problem. Getting testers might be more difficult. Sort of like a online singles place where (...I am told...) there are 100 men to every woman Maybe you could solve it by getting some 'name' designers* to open beta their latest things there first?

"Playtest Hot War, the new setting for Cold City only here at ..." etc.

Neil

* I know, I know, the cliquey nepotism alarm is going off.

Take the King's shilling at http://www.omnihedron.co.uk/dutyandhonour/

Who exactly is this forum open to? As in, what designers?

Because I can tell you that as soon as someone from Cubicle 7 (for example) posts looking for playtesters for their new Doctor Who RPG, you'll find that there are exactly no people on the site interested in testing anything else.

First of all welcome to the site and I hope we can help you.

Our purpose is to assist people to get involved in the design process of upcoming games. By playtesting a game in development, you're making sure that the game will be the best game it can be when it's released. In a lot of ways, the playtesters are the most important people in a game's design team!

This site exists to help people find a suitable game that they'll enjoy playtesting. It's not just fun though, you'll need to send feedback to the designers and the more detailed you can make this feedback, the more useful it will be. The more useful your feedback, the better the finished game will be. That might sound like hard work, and in some ways it is. But it's also very rewarding and hey, you get to play a game for free before anyone else does!

Purpose of the site
The site has several aims:

1) To help groups who are interested in playtesting find games they want to play
2) To help designers find groups willing to playtest their games
3) To provide advice on the playtesting process
4) To provide a friendly environment to discuss the games you've tested with the designers and to post actual play reports

Using the site

Groups looking for a game
If you're part of a group looking to get involved, please post about your group and say what type of games you want to test. Groups can either reply to directly to requests for a group, or they can post their group credentials and see if any of the games on offer look like a good match. Please make sure you list the types of games you usually play, how many people are in the group and how often you meet when you post. Also include anything else you think might be interesting or useful in your post!

Actual Play
Of course this site is useless without feedback and so teams playtesting games need to post up actual play reports of the games they run. These reports should be useful to the designer, polite and informative. Don’t just say ‘this was bad’ say why as well. Provide as much information as you can as to what you did and didn’t enjoy and what the general play experience was like.

One final thing to playtest groups: If you offer to playtest a game and then fail to do so, please let the designer know you aren't going to get to his game. Everybody has things going on, so we all know that even a group with the best intentions sometimes simply don't get time to test something they volunteer for. There's no shame in it, but it's best not to leave the designer waiting for feedback that's never going to come.

Designer looking for a group
You need understand that the further along the design process you are with your game, the more useful the external playtest process is going to be. When you first design a game and put it together, you need to do some extensive initial playtesting yourself. When you have playtested that version enough, and have written it up in such a way that other people can play your game from your rules, then you are ready to post on this site for external playtesters. Make sure your game makes sense and is complete and written clearly! You will gain nothing from sending out unintelligible game texts and pretty soon you'll gain a reputation among playtesters for being a waste of time.

This site is to help designers playtest late versions of games. When you are in early development, you should visit sites like ‘The Forge’, ‘Story Games’ and ‘The Collective Endeavour’ to help with the design process.

When you decide you are ready for external playtesting, then you should construct a post in the following way:

Name of Game: What is your game called?
Basic overview of theme: What is your game about?
Basic overview of system: How does your game work?
Group size: What size of group would it suit?
Commitment: How many playtest sessions do you need from a group?

Advice
Anyone who wants can post playtesting advice on the site and any which prove to be particularly useful will be stickied at the top of the forum.

I would like to think I could have phrased it better myself on the planned rewrite but that is really good Rich. I am totally pinching it.

As to joe's idea of a scoring system of sorts, I kind of like it. Rating groups according to their reliability, feedback quality, the number of games they have playtested etc. I would like to get the site setup first of all and then put that into place within the first month or so, once I have the details worked out. Joe could you pitch in here, maybe start a new thread and expand on the idea?

Rich, I completely understand your concern regarding high profile games but I wouldn't want to say no to any designer, initially. If we encounter problems then I will address them at the time. Also high profile games will draw more people to the site which is certainly good from a publicity point of view.

Neil, I hope that my designer friends will use the site and draw people in with their projects. I include you here mate.

Hosting for playtest packs sounds good as well.

Cheers

Iain

Mob Justice now available!

'The Giant Brain':Small games, big ideas.

I thank you!

Glad you found it helpful.

I'm sure everything is going to be fine.