How would I go about requesting homebrew-review for an entire game system?

Question

I have about 3k words of a game system representing mostly additions and improvements to Wushu Open.

I'd like to request comments, complaints, criticism, and concepts, but I fear that the site's character limit on the one hand, and the charity of readers on the other, may be working against my ever receiving the read-through-and-analyze that I hope to obtain from somebody in general, and the esteemed users of this site in particular, who to a greater or lesser degree live in my head as consulting spectres despite our minimal interactions (sadly not to the extent that I can elicit them for feedback).

I've thought about asking a set of targeted questions for individual mechanics, but the loss of the context of the rest of the improved system as a whole will result in each mechanic being compared to Wushu base, rather than as it interacts with my system. A holistic analysis is needed, but I don't know how to make it fit here. Maybe this isn't the right place for it, but I hope that isn't the case.

As an aside, is this a game-design question rather than a homebrew-review one?

Answer 1

You would not and could not get an entire game system reviewed here. What you need is a playtest.

Our format is specifically engineered for problems that need solving. It is best at surfacing two kinds of answers: (1) answers providing objective fact, and (2) answers providing expert guidance to solve a problem based on direct experience. Critically, answers need to be able to be better or worse than one another. A question where this isn't the case is a survey or discussion, which aren't suitable for our system. See What kind of answers should I avoid asking?.

Playtesting a game system is fundamentally not compatible with our model and requires interactions that our model fails at. First off, a playtest is not a problem that needs a solution; it's a different kind of open exercise entirely. When a playtest concludes, it concludes with survey of playtesters and their experiences. If you want to investigate further, discussion with them about those experiences. The goal of surveying and discussing is to elicit feedback that helps you shape the system and understand whether it's achieving the objectives you have for that system, and all responses are valid and helpful for that process.

Then there's factors like the sheer scale of a playtest that make it inappropriate for our Q&A system to handle.

These are all good things! It's great that a playtest works that way! It's also fine that the process doesn't fit here; we're just razor-tuned to perform very well within a very specific scope and a playtest is not within that scope. Our system doesn't try to be the be-all end-all; we try to do our part within a larger ecosystem.

What you should do is organise your own playtest with independent groups, and come to us or an RPG design discussion space when you have specific problems you need assistance resolving, e.g.: what's the process for a successful round of playtesting, or you have done your round of playtesting and found a specific design problem you're not sure how to resolve.

Answer 2

Cut it to pieces!

If you need 3000 words to explain the changes, we need more than 30000 words to explain the implications. As a result, we'd break the limits of the system.

Another thing is, that people might have observations about sub-system, and not the others. Cutting it to one related block per question keeps it handleable.

Connect the posts!

If you have a series of questions, connect them via links to the previous part(s) that are relevant.