Ok, I don't know if there are any other GMs out there like me, but when a company labels a product as "beta," to me that is saying, "take these rules and beat them into a pulp." So I am going to be attempting to do just that. I have come up with a system and some goals that I would like to accomplish, and I would also like other ideas of things to do to really give the rules a once over (Besides grammatically. You do your thing grammar people, I respect you, but I'm not one of you.)
Goals
1. Observe how fast a group of new gamers pick up the rules sight unseen.
2. Test every single Career/Specialization at least once, with more play time given to things that seem unbalanced or broken.
3. See how much the players can take. How hard can I hit them before an inevitable TPK.
4. Test high level play.
5. Test the force system with every single class at least once.
Method.
I want my players to have the feel of being in the Outer Rim, hence I developed this system.
For the Beta at least, I am going to run this as a sort of competitive RPG. Me, the GM, against the players. This will give them the feel of always running from something like a lot of the characters on the Outer Rim might feel. I as the GM am going to try and stress the players characters to the max. I want to kill them. Not because I am a sadistic GM who enjoys that, the opposite usually, but because I want to know how far they can be pushed in a normal game setting.
Every time a character dies, the player may make a new one. The new character has to be of a different career, and then later a different specialization than their original character, and the new character receives an amount of bonus XP above the old, effectively letting us play into the higher levels of gameplay while still allowing me to push them a lot.
Offer some sort of reward to the player who lives the longest. I don't know what yet, but something substantial enough that it will create some infighting among the players. All of my players are close college buddies, but I still want them to have some sort of reason to be backstabbing and infighting like one might find in the Outer Rim.
I hope that the above method and states goals will allow me to push the system, discover flaws, and examine lots of different aspects of the game in a real play setting. Currently we have a Pathfinder game running, so this is going to happen on weekends and whenever we can get to it. What do you think?