About playtesting

[eldskald]

Greetings folks.

I'm on the proccess of creating my own homebrew. Of course, a few new classes and races came along. I'm on the middle of playtesting them, to see if everything works as intended and to see if they're balanced. But of course, I'm no big company and all I have is a bunch of friends with barely any time to come together and play. I'm also not the type to simply play and take nothing from it, I'm more of a scientist type.

I've looked around the internet and it seems like there are not many discussions on this matter. The best I found was this (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?299304-Playtesting-Tabletop-RPGs) post from 2013. I wanted ideas on how to do playtests more efficiently.

Rightnow I have 3 guys, two of which are running PHB martial classes and the third one running the class I want to test. I simply put them through combat situations and compare the homebrewed class with the others. We just run combat encounters because that's basically what martials do, and also time issues. We go through different types of enemies, level by level. Has anyone here ever done this? How did you do?

The thing is, I intend to test a caster class too, eventually. But testing on combat encounters only is obviously bad. My idea to test them is to make one-shot adventures that last one day only. The problem I have is that a test like that can't be done in a way to compare the new caster with the PHB ones, unless we run the same one-shot multiple times with multiple casters. There must be a better way. Ideas?

Thank you in advance.

[DapperReaper]

well if your adding classes and races.... you'll probably want at least one of each of the following for comparison purposes
-new class and old race
-old class and new race
-new class and new race
-old class and old race

preferably the old class you compare will be similar to the new class, such as both spell casters, or both melee fighters etc.
those are the first thing to come to mind anyway
for more extensive testing you might also consider a wide range of enemy configurations to see how they do against different enemy types, like if one of your new classes has divine properties you might compare how well it does against undead vs a paladin, just as an example
also if your testing for balance issues, you should look at min/max instances and see how they perform both when things are swung completely in their favor and when they have no business even attempting something and see how they compare to base classes in similar set ups
should also consider the previous at different levels, preferably levels they get key abilities or power spikes

maybe that's a lot for your group to do, you'd have to judge that for yourself, but that's the most scientific way for testing homebrew I know, hope that helps