So, literally everyone seems to shit on WotC for not playtesting their stuff. There is a hollow and empty declaration. Because the truth of the matter is...
Nobody playtests their stuff. I know multiple indie creators who all go from writing a game to publishing it with no steps in between. I don't have input into Kevin Crawford but have seen his kickstarters were elements of his game were completed after the fact. This is usually limited to random tables, but due to his caliber of design he's the only one who really gets a pass on this. As far as I can tell, there are no creators who actually playtest their stuff, so everyone in the industry, including every game, suffers from a fundamental lack of playtesting. The entire industry, from the freelance creators of the OSR to WotC do not spend any time playtesting anything they produce. And this means that garbage is what is being input into the industry, and garbage is what is coming out of the industry.
It wouldn't be as bad if they didn't also spend a lot of time bitching that things aren't playtested. But they do. They can spend hours shouting at each other in the backroom echo chambers of Discord or Guilded complaining about playtesting failures of the big dogs, all the while not playtesting any of their own materials. They write and publish in vain hopes of making it big and getting off disability. It's not going to happen, this isn't the industry for that. This is a luxury hobby industry. It should be a surprise when someone's hobby turns into a revenue stream. It is not meant for poor-broke folks to garner an income above the poverty line. There's an old saying that making a million dollars in the RPG industry is easy, you just have to start with two million dollars.
This is the reason modern games, even indie ones, tend to not measure up to games of the distant past. Over the Edge, being a tiny game was actually a set of campaign notes and used mechanics before it was a published game. AD&D1E was MOSTLY that as well. AD&D2E might have been, or was skating on 1e design. There aren't a lot of impressive minds able to internally design good rulesets without considerable playtesting. Marc Miller shot his shot with Classic Traveller, somehow making a generational and genre defining game as what seemed like a stream-of-consciousness effort. Crawford I mentioned above. The jury is still out on Metzger. These instances are exceptions, not the rule. The rule is, like with video games, RPGs need playtesting to have bad elements ironed out. Because there is no substitute for actually seeing a design hit a table. This is why second editions are usually the best editions, because the lack of playtesting is actually ratified over the course of the first edition's lifespan.
