Mr. Pirate, I am deeply baffled by you. You are a very nice guy and I appreciate that, but the fact that information I want exists and you clearly know it makes my Brain very angry.

I apologize if it appears I give you a hard time - it's not my intention. It's a side-effect of my obsessive nature. Thanks for all the awesome stuff you do!

I live to serve..

There's still more ahead for the SW RPGs than for the WH40K RPGs. Those are definitely dying a slow death.

Testing new mechanics seems interesting.

But the Adventure part does sound very tedious indeed.

I guess if you don't genuinely enjoy the developer side of things it's probably not worth to do it just to see stuff early.

I haven't tested a roleplaying game, but have tested boardgames and MMOs, and my experience is that it is more likely to put you off playing them, as by the time the new stuff comes out you've already done it so many times.

I work on video games as a programmer, and the same applies - I wouldn't want to work on, or test a game, that I wanted to play. It just makes it mundane and un-fun.

Can confirm - testing something I want to play would be terrible! I worked in QA at Electronic Arts, SIerra and a bunch of other game companies for well over a decade and it's never been "Hey, lets get a look at this super secret item and play through once!" - it's always been "Here's a broken as hell alpha version that won't load 3/4ths of the maps and crashes constantly. Oh and you have to write up everything about those crashes."

I imagine that the private Beta that FFG does isn't quite as broken as all that, but it's still not going to be "Lets play this adventure and then forget about it!" At the very least, it'll require stopping, taking notes, comparing ideas, going back through and playing again with a new angle over and over again.

It might be fun, but it'll be work - and I'd much rather play for pure pleasure than working.

Shoot your mouth off on the forums alot and they contact you.

Well, sounds like I'm a shoe-in!

Occasionally have something intelligent to say while doing it.

. . . .aw damnit.

Well, they at least know what you look like. I have the picture to prove it.

There's still more ahead for the SW RPGs than for the WH40K RPGs. Those are definitely dying a slow death.

I'd heard rumours that FFG and Games Workshop are parting ways, or at least that the WH40k RP lines were being ceased.

Can confirm - testing something I want to play would be terrible! I worked in QA at Electronic Arts, SIerra and a bunch of other game companies for well over a decade and it's never been "Hey, lets get a look at this super secret item and play through once!" - it's always been "Here's a broken as hell alpha version that won't load 3/4ths of the maps and crashes constantly. Oh and you have to write up everything about those crashes."

It might be fun, but it'll be work - and I'd much rather play for pure pleasure than working.

The building and testing part is just as much fun to me as the playing part. I'm so weird...

Speaking as someone who's been GMing FFG SW for a year now and who is only now just getting around to AoR -- this product line has a ton of stuff out already. Really. FFG Star Wars is my 10th or so pen and paper RPG, and I can honestly say I've seen more activity from them on the RPG line than most games would show in 10 years. Including D&D. If you can afford to buy all the books in the three lines and get through all the material usefully and still be left wanting -- well, then you're playing a helluva lot more than me. Even if all they did was do was finish the splat books, I think you could safely call this a nearly complete product line that could be used for years to come.

In addition to the (hopefully inevitable) character splat books, the only thing I'd hope for more of is region books. I just picked up the Strongholds of Resistance book and am honestly very impressed. Given my masochistic tendency to write all my campaigns from scratch, I'd prefer if they pulled their attention away from adventure modules -- but I understand I'm in the minority there. Keep in mind that of the 12 "non-starter" books released in 5th ed D&D so far, a whopping 8 have been adventure modules. So for FFG SW, I feel pretty happy that the focus has been on what I consider to be the critical elements.

There's still more ahead for the SW RPGs than for the WH40K RPGs. Those are definitely dying a slow death.

I'd heard rumours that FFG and Games Workshop are parting ways, or at least that the WH40k RP lines were being ceased.

That wouldn't surprise me.

GW always badly mismanage their IPs and wouldn't know quality if it bit them on the behind.

WHFRP3 was a great product until they pulled the plug. The sky really was falling there, but it wasn't FFG's fault.

I guess once again I'm the odd girl out in this conversation. I love doing things like this. Heck, I designed an entire RPG system (based on Pathfinder-ish d20) for the Avatar: the Last Airbender setting (current version is ~240 pages, although after our campaign I found some areas that needed major revision, but before I got to it I discovered this little game called "Force and Destiny"...), and I tested it and tested it and tested it...and then once I had it good enough, I ran a campaign so I could have even more fun with the thing I'd built!

The building and testing part is just as much fun to me as the playing part. I'm so weird...

Oh, dont get me wrong. I enjoy my job - getting paid to break things is pretty cool. It's just that after I put in 40 hours a week for 16-25 weeks on a project, the luster has worn off by the end (especially if something cool got cut along the way). When Star Wars Galaxies dropped back in 2002-ish, everyone at in the Sierra testing department was bending over backwards to get onto the Beta, save for me. I was all "Why would I test a game all day and then go home and test a game all night".

Yet I played the game, and played the beta of Jump to Lightspeed, and even got hand-picked to join the Combat Upgrade Alpha (5 players were picked to represent each combat profession and I was one of the more prominent posters in the Teras Kaasi forum). I never got tired of the game and played it until they broke it by going to a class/level system.

Usually the games I beta test and enjoy are the ones I stick with the longest. Maybe I feel more connected to them.

I've also beta tested some tabletop RPGs (no FFG though) and probably have my name in a few books. Again that just makes me enjoy them more.

Then again I'm a guy who works on computers all day as my job then goes home and hops on a computer for fun so I'm probably a bit bent.