It’s incredibly fascinating the pattern of playtesting we have locally, and I think there’s a lesson to be learned there.
We generally do find/make time to playtest games that Will and I come up with. However, we don’t really have time to playtest RPGs that I (or, hypothetically, Will) come up with. I think the reason is pretty simple: time. We got two solid playtest games of “Run, Rabit, Run” (or whatever we’re calling it now) during which we learned a lot and generated a list of things to fix.
All this took about an hour and a half or so. Contrast this with a game like The Suburban Crucible (which I actually got some writing done on today) which is probably a 3 hour game on its own. That in turn implies a 4~4.5 hour playtest session. That’s a lot more time that you’re comitting to something that is likely to be broken significantly in a number of places. And when you roleplay as little as we do these days it gets worse because you burn roleplaying time that could rock everyone’s socks off for a sub-standard (but probably still somewhat rewarding) experience.
This creates an interesting pressure to design simple, short-play games. Trust and Betrayal grew out of that, as did most of Powers That Be. Games that are fun, and can be played in very short amounts of time. This strikes me as an interesting real-world constraint on actual game design. I wonder how the environments surrounding various other designers have impacted their work…
Thomas