RE: [GZG] Beta Playtest Rules

Doug Evans wrote:

 >>I record them as 3 entries: one for the first 2 B2s,
 >>one for the B1s, and one for the last two
 >>B2s firing at the other target.
 >
 >"One for the first 2 B2s, one for the B1s" will mean a change of play
as
 >well as of record keeping, as most players I know just lump all dice
on a
 >target, as long as those dice give the same results with the same
roll,
 >i.e., sixes are two points of damage and reroll...

In my experience rolling beam dice in single-weapon-type groups only
takes 
a few seconds longer than rolling them all in a single batch, and it is 
much faster than trying to find the correct number of dice of a
particular 
colour for colour-coding the dice for different weapon types within a
salvo.

It is writing all the results down which causes most of the slow-down
for 
me and my local opponents; that's why I recommended having a separate 
person as neutral record-keeper.

 >I have to wonder if it wouldn't be almost as easy to declare 4/5's of
any
 >hits for the B2's, and 1/5 for the B1.

If you do this, you have to stick to those exact fractions no matter how

much damage you actually roll. Eg., if you have 4 dice from B2s and 1
die 
from a B1 but only roll 3 pts of damage, you must assign 3*1/5 = 0.6 pts
to 
the B1 and 3*4/5 = 2.4 pts to the B2s; you may *not* round the fractions
to 
1 pt for the B1 and 2 pts for the B2s, since that would almost
inevitably 
bias your data in favour of one weapon type or the other.

Recording fractional hits in this way tends to get very messy when you
add 
up the data after the battle, since not every salvo will have the same 
denominator. If the denominators are more awkward than the fifths used
in 
the above example (eg. sevenths or thirteenths), it also gets messier to

record them *during* the battle - calculating the decimals during the 
battle is a pain, and writing down the denominator for each shot takes
up a 
lot of space on a record sheet which is usually rather cramped already. 
Been there, done that :-/

In addition, if you have any weapons which *don't* use plain beam dice
you 
have to split them out into separate entries anyway. For me it is much 
easier to use the same record-keeping routine for all weapon types than
it 
is to note down everything for some weapon types but take shortcuts with

other weapon types.

Is it *necessary* to use the detailed procedure I described in my
prevous 
post for each and every weapon type used in the battle?

No. You can take shortcuts if you like... but at least for me, the
various 
shortcuts suggested here (and others like them) either speed up the play

itself at the cost of increasing the time and effort spent on recording
the 
data accurately, or risk screwing up the accuracy of the data and thus
risk 
making the playtest less useful or even outright misleading.

***

Allan Goodall wrote:

 >Oerjan's description of what we in the playtest group need is great.
 >However, I think that the playtest group could live with all beam dice
 >lumped together if it's going to speed play for the playtesters, and
 >if slowing down play will _limit the number of playtests_.

Well... any playtests are of course better than no playtests at all, but

feedback where we can't trust that the hard numbers are at least
reasonably 
accurately recorded isn't much better than the "This sucks!"-style of 
reports since it is so easy to accidentally bias the
data unless you're very careful. The "This sucks!"-style reports are at 
least obvious about being subjective :-/

There is one type of playtests where we record no data at all, and that
is 
when we're testing game-*flow* issues. It is rather difficult to
determine 
if a particular game mechanic plays quickly or slowly if you stop the
game 
all the time anyway in order to take notes! However, the vast majority
of 
playtests test game-*balance* rather than game-flow, and for
game-balance 
we do need all the data.

 >We do need to know what weapons did what damage, though.

We also need to know how many shots each weapon type fired during the
game 
at what ranges. Knowing that we can work backwards to see how many dice 
were thrown.

 >We need to know if, for instance, a new weapon is overpowered/
 >underpowered. And, to stress something Oerjan said, we need to
 >know by way of hard numbers. We've seen a number of people stress
 >that such-and-such a weapon is way overpowered, when in fact it
 >does massive amounts of damage when it hits but misses most of the
 >time.

As TomB pointed out, having all the hard numbers on record also helps us
to 
see if the die rolls were particularly hot or cold. I vividly remember a

particular weapon type which due to flukey dice averaged more than 1
point 
per beam die in some of my own FB2 playtest battles rather than the 0.8 
expected... if I hadn't tracked both the damage that weapon type
inflicted 
*and* the number of beam dice it had fired at various ranges in those 
battles, I wouldn't have noticed that the dice were so hot and thus 
would've rated that weapon as "overpowered".

It might also be worthwhile to point out that the number of people Allan

talks about above includes the entire 'official' GZG playtest crew :-/
Each 
point I listed in my previous post is there because of bad experience
from 
one or more playtests where we *didn't* record that particular data...
IOW, 
the list of data to be recorded is not "you have to go to all this
effort to be worthy of being a playtester" but rather "these are
mistakes 
we've already made in the past; please try not to repeat them" :-/

 >Detail is the key. A playtest result that says, "We tried the fighter
 >rules last night. Didn't like it. Fighters are too powerful with
 >them," or, "We played SV versus UN last night, and the UN kicked butt!
 >Great work!" is of little to no use. We need data to see if the rules
 >are working, or have bugs in them.

Very much so - not least because the way a rule is intended to work
might 
not always be how the players *think* it is intended to work, causing
them 
to state that "it didn't work" when in fact it did perform exactly as 
intended... :-/

Later,

Oerjan
oerjan.ariander@telia.com

"Life is like a sewer.
  What you get out of it, depends on what you put into it."
-Hen3ry

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