Dungeon World Playtesting
How do you guys playtest your material? How do you test all of the class moves or compendium classes?
For CCs i could see just starting with Level 1 characters and giving them all the moves of the class (or just the starting move) and see how they work in the game. For whole classes? Not really possible without a weekly game i think.
I would love to playtest my stuff but
#1 i don’t know how
#2 i don’t have the players for that
So what do you do?
What I did to play test the Necromancer, Grave Knight, Champion, and Summoner was gather a bunch of my regular players and ask if they’d help me play test with a long 1-shot. So yeah, you kind of need to have a weekly group that’s cool with taking a break from the normal game every once in a while.
But is a 1 session thing enough to test 10 levels worth of class moves? How do you do that?
Well, I started them at 1st, then about a third of the way said, “You’re level 6”, then another third of the way through said, “You’re level 10”. It’s kind of a cheap way to do it, but I think it worked well enough.
In addition, you can always start a campaign with the same parameters: “I want to playtest these classes, if that’s alright, so these are the only ones available”. My players, at least, are cool with it.
Hit up people on forums. Regular gaming group. Enlist my sons help. Whatever I can to cobble it together.
Online play often ends up being easier for me to organise than IRL play, so quick online playtesting works. You can also test moves individually by coming up with a fictional situation that triggers a move in a chat room, using a dice bot, or just saying “you rolled a 10+, what happens?” Etc.
SA has a very active DW community, so it’s pretty easy to pick up play testers for a quick 2 or 3 hour game – and people will often voluntarily give new playbooks a spin in whatever new games are naturally popping up.
Find a genius to critique your playbooks, there’s a few on SA and a few here.