It’s that time of year. Time when holidays and kids’ Christmas Show at school, and anniversaries get in the way of gaming. Tonight we were short a gamer, so we turned our efforts to playtesting Murder on the Hindenburg, one of the up-coming adventure scenarios Black Campbell Entertainment is producing.

Playtesting is one of those things that seems like it a bit redundant. Maybe you played the adventure once with some friends and figured you’d just turn it into a product. Sounds great. The problem is that often, a scenario is tailored fairly specifically for the players and their characters. They don’t always translate well when you want to publish them for more generic use.

White Ape of the Congo was originally created as a short Meetup group game. The goal was to introduce folks to Ubiquity and score a player or two. (It worked.) Later, it was tested again with another group, and I tweaked the pre-generated characters based on the experiences to make the adventure and the characters work as smoothly as possible.

The Zugspitze Maneuver was originally a one-shot introduction to gaming for a player. It was a solo mission, so the jump to a scenario for 2-6 players was a tough one. (I settled on 2-5 players.) This required changing the reasons for the mission, creating characters that had reasons to be there, and adapting scenes to fit multiple players. The second playtest went well, but revealed likely actions and outcomes that I hadn’t planned on. The module got better.

Murder on the Hindenburg was designed for 2-5 players; we had three tonight. They took the two characters I suspected would be the most popular, and who the adventure was tailored toward, but they were very good about talking to me about how the other two characters could be integrated better. (I’ve got a really good group. Yay, me!) The adventure played in a single session of about 2.5 hours — considering they sidestepped two scenes, it ran about as long as it should have. (I planned for three to four hours.) I spent an hour and a half after the play tweaking the adventure to make it play smoother, give the GM more options and heads-ups for what players might do. It got better.

Playtesting is like reading a story you’ve written aloud. Sometimes, the stuff that looks good on paper doesn’t sound good coming out of your mouth. That’s when you know what it will sound like to a reader in their head. Playtesting, especially with different groups of players, lets you experience different styles of play and tactics that players might use — the stuff you never plan for, or didn’t think about.

Just like a plan never survives contact with an enemy, an adventure never fully survives contact with a player. Playtesting helps you work out the kinks.

Next time, I think we’ll be playtesting The Death Jade. I’m looking forward to it.