Your players are your co-creators (and you should credit them)
Playtesting isnāt just testing, itās collaboration. Players help you break your adventure and get out of your own head. They find connective tissue you didnāt know was there. They inspire you to see the space you built in a new way.
I playtest early. Like really earlyāsometimes before Iāve even finished keying the whole dungeon. I trust that life will find a way, and Iām lucky enough to have a group that trusts weāll have a good time even if there are blank spaces on the map.
Those blank spaces are often where the best ideas come from. I love when players ask questions or make assumptions that fill in the gapsāsometimes they end up creating something far better than what Iād planned. Iāll happily change things on the fly if it makes sense in the world and the moment. Some of you may have instinctively shivered when you read that. Breathe.
This isnāt how we always play. My group runs prewritten modules by the book. We run modules that I have published by the book too (mostly). We swap GMs and systems on a whim. Variety is the spice of life. Eat some salad with your meat and potatoes and whatnot (sorry for the food analogies, I'm writing this hungry). When I was experimenting with Powered by the Apocalypse games like World of Dungeons, I was fascinated by the instruction to āleave blank spacesā for players to fill in. I never fully clicked with PBTA, but I loved the idea of a game where everyone was improvising together. It takes the pressure off, and the best ideas naturally float to the surface.
That said, itās not how I want to play all the time. I once ran an eight-session Slugblaster campaign that was incredibly satisfying but also exhausting. Running an entire game off prompts, even with brilliant players, can be a lot. I listened to the Slugblaster AP postcast Quantum Kickflip and they use some language that I started hearing elsewhere as well: "offers." Ideas that players offer up for the next thing the monster does or the situation changes for better or worse. SB gives players more authorial power through their character equipment, like the Reality Cannon, but it's more of a conversation between GM and players. The rules make no mention of doing this for situations or the world, but it felt natural to ask my players for help with those when I needed it, so I did. Slugblaster let me experiment with a more authorial game in a way that felt less intimidating than the PBTA framework and more rewarding. It felt more like what I imagine improvisational jazz is like.
Playtesting problem-solving, non-authorial, world-favoring gamesāwhich are the ones I designācan still make some room for player offers. Once, a player asked if the head of a taxidermied owl would twist off. Sounded right to me, and made a connection to a previously unrelated item in the dungeon. I ruled there was a 500 gp diamond inside the owl, hidden by the twist off head. Now itās in the module.
When Iām designing, I tend to hyper-fixate on tiny details that donāt actually matter as much as I think they do. Then I playtest, and suddenly itās clear what needs attention and what just works. Iāve spent literal days staring at maps trying to decide where something should go, only to find that players figure it out faster than I ever could.
Yes, it can be stressful to head into a session not knowing if Iāll have to start dipping into not fully-formed ideas, but it almost always works out. Players make connections between random elements, and that will spark new ideas in your design for later.
So make sure you credit your playtesters. You are making music together.