Yesterday, I was browsing around in an online digital music store when I came across an Album that I would most certainly have purchased much sooner if I had known that it existed.

This is one of the major problems that has beset the music industry over the last twenty or so years.

The Drake Of Sales

I’ve often suggested a sort of Drake Equation for marketing. The total number of sales is equal to:

  1. The total number of people who will consider buying gaming products,
  2. Multiplied by the fraction of that number who are interested in the genre of your product,
  3. Multiplied by the fraction of that number who are interested in the type of product being offered some people don’t like PDFs for example, some people won’t buy anything else),
  4. Multiplied by the fraction of that number who do not dislike the medium of your product,
  5. Multiplied by the fraction of that number who do not turn away because they do not play the game system that your product is tied to,
  6. Multiplied by the fraction of that number who do not bear a grudge or a dislike for the publisher of that game system,
  7. Multiplied by the fraction of that number who do not have a personal dislike or animosity for someone involved in the product,
  8. Multiplied by the fraction of that number who dislike the artistic or visual style of your product enough that they won’t buy it,
  9. Multiplied by the fraction of that number who will not purchase your product because they have already bought something similar that fulfills their needs,
  10. Multiplied by the fraction of that number who are not turned away by the price of your product (which can actually be a factor slightly larger than one if the price is cheap enough, but this is a factor relative to the perceived need for the product) ,
  11. Multiplied by the fraction of that number who might by your product anyway because of the subject matter or the look of the product (yay! Another increase!),
  12. Multiplied by the fraction who can or will purchase from the marketplace in which you are selling (some people may not buy online, others may not buy from Amazon or whatever),
  13. Multiplied by the fraction who aren’t turned away by the reputation of someone involved,
  14. Multiplied by the fraction who won’t acquire a copy illegally
  15. Multiplied by the fraction of that number who actually learn of your product’s existence.

In essence, this litany of potential disasters defines the general potential customer base and then whittles away at it by defining aspects of a product that might turn away a potential purchaser. There are 14 factors listed to define that whittling; if each of them turns away a mere 10% of the potential customer pool, you will sell to only 22% of the potential marketplace.

That number isn’t all that realistic, though. Many of these factors will be closer to 99.9% than they are to 90%, some will be lower by a little and some by a lot, some may even be greater than one for reasons of reputation, or a polished look, and many of these factors impact on the perceived value-for-money of the product.

Applied Drake – Assassin’s Amulet

Take Assassin’s Amulet – the primary reason for publication was to present the map and build an adventure around it, i.e. to sell a module. Everything else that we included is all intended to broaden the appeal of the product to include people who may not be interested in the module per se, but who might like a new character class, and a bunch of articles on how it would fit into a society, and new magic items, and so on. For those who are primarily interested in a game module, AA is horribly overpriced; it’s the job of everything else to create the perception of value for money through the very basic tactic of actually increasing the value for money. We had decided to sell for $20, so we wanted the product to have an actual value in the $30-35 range. (I actually wanted us to sell for $15 a copy, plus a margin of a dollar or two to cover production and sales costs, but was overruled by my more experienced co-authors).

But always, the problem was that last factor. No-one can even contemplate buying you product if they don’t know that it exists. I estimate that we reached about 0.05% of the potential market at best with AA.

The Marketing Of Music

And that’s the problem faced by music distributors these days. The industry has systematically turned away every avenue for discovery of their product out of sheer greed.

Radio used to be the primary publicity tool; getting your band’s song on the air guaranteed sales the next day. Live performances and reputations were often the next most powerful mechanism – one hit made another more likely simply through name recognition. Magazine coverage (interviews, reviews), which didn’t actually permit readers to hear the song or album of course, were – at best – a relatively minor contributor, but one that could help get that all-important broadcast. Word-of-mouth was an even smaller contributor, but one that could domino unexpectedly into a hit from nowhere.

But the record companies decided that it was their content that let a radio station attract sponsors and advertisers, and that this was all good for the radio station, so that they should charge each time a song was played.

The record company executives had a point, but overlooked that each time a song was played, it wasn’t just free advertising for their product, it was subsidized advertising. And this was a good thing, because bribery and corruption and other such scandals were frequent occurrences.

Even while Radio was riding high, along came the Music-oriented TV shows. Always hungry for new content, these added a visual and entertainment dimension to the product, and sales went up. And then – in the US – came MTV, and the film clip (Australia had been there since the mid-70s but not 24/7).

Sales exploded, and everyone was making gobs of money. But then the record executives again bit the hand that was feeding them, and applied the same logic as they had earlier done regarding radio – “these clips are horribly expensive to make, but you get to show them for free. We think we should get paid for producing your on-air content.”

So MTV started winding back it’s 24/7 music, which was starting to suffer from generational issues anyway, and went for non-musical content and reality TV. And that sucked all the oxygen out of music sales. With video and radio gone, or at least heavily muted as advertising tools, all that were left were Live Gigs and magazines, and whatever trickle survived of the earlier marketing kings.

(You may be wondering where the RPG-relevance is in all this. Patience, I’ll get there – take a deep breath.)

Throughout all this, it is worth noticing that at no point did the end customer get any consideration at all; they were considered (at best) a necessary evil, a wallet delivery system, at least in their eyes. This is an important observation, because the next thing to happen was the rise of File Sharing.

If the record companies had been on the ball, this could have been a replacement marketing tool, one that was fully under their control. Flood the internet with (free) album previews, engage the customers through an online review mechanism, evolve that into social media (i.e. “free advertising”) – the losses due to piracy were large only because the marketplace had been shriveled by past marketing decisions and greed. If the internet were used to replace/supplement Video and Radio, regrowing the market to its former size, not only would the piracy problem be much smaller, but it could in fact be treated as marketing, simply by leveraging everything that an MP3 didn’t give you in order to sell CDs.

Instead, they considered those using file sharing as parasites who would kill the industry, and declared their own customer base to be enemies.

In time, a compromise was reached, through the advent of Apple Music and the iPod. These days, there is more music being produced than ever – its getting uploaded to YouTube and other such sites. Almost ALL the marketing save word of mouth (enhanced by social media) has disappeared, and those creating this music are left with the naked problem – no-one can buy your product if they don’t know that it exists.

The Marketing Of RPG Products

Last week, I found a product on DrivethruRPG that was now heavily discounted, but that I would surely have purchased (or at least seriously considered purchasing) at full price had I known of it sooner.

The rise of self-publishing has meant that there are more writers getting published than ever before – but only a few who get taken up by a major publisher will ever hope to make more than a hobbiest.

It’s damn hard to make a living out of writing. It used to be that only one in ten could do so; now, because there are more writers out there but no more success stories, it’s one on ten thousand, or less. Still, there’s a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow for the lucky few. But notice that this is exactly the same problem facing the music industry.

There’s a very good reason why “The End Of The Rainbow” is the category that Campaign Mastery uses as a metaphor for Inspiration. It means that I/we (depending on who is doing the writing) think that there are ideas for adventures, characters, and/or campaigns that can be generated or can derive from the content, that it has value as a generator of ideas beyond the direct utility of the content.

(Okay, here comes the real relevance!)

Selling The Adventure

It may astonish readers, but GMs face an existentially-similar problem every time they dangle a new adventure in front of the players. Nightmarish horror stories abound of players not “taking the bait”.

In the most extreme cases, players may then turn around and blame the GM for running a boring day’s play!

The GM has to get the players to “buy in” to the adventure, usually by means of an adventure hook that captures their attention and fires their imaginations.

This is a marketing problem, but few if any seek to employ marketing tools & techniques to solve it.

I have identified seven marketing ‘elements’ – it’s probably coming on too strong to call these ‘essentials’ or ‘principles’ – that have applicability to this, and to related GMing problems. It’s my intention in this article to describe them, explain them as much as necessary, and then to adapt them into RPG-relevance.

I want to make it clear that I am not a marketing expert by any stretch of the imagination, I am very much just a curious layman in these matters. For that reason, neither the list nor the treatments applied are comprehensive, and I am not going to pretend that they are.

This means that there are almost certainly relevant aspects of marketing that I didn’t think of, or wasn’t clever enough to interpret. This article, then, is very much a foundation for GMs to build on with their own experiences and expertise. This is a beginning, not an end.

Seven Elements Of Marketing, applied to RPGs

I’ve always been fascinated by marketing techniques, the art and science of creating the impulse to buy in a customer.

It’s an interest that has helped me publicize Campaign Mastery, that has assisted in the development of Assassin’s Amulet, and that has enabled me to recognize when I am being subjected to marketing in television adverts, and in stores and supermarkets, however imperfectly. That gives me at least a chance of resisting the sales pressure, or giving in if that seems more appropriate – it gives me at least partial control over my spending. So there have been a number of real-world benefits to my education on the subject, however limited.

The resulting awareness has also spilled over into a number of articles here at CM that may be of interest, and that should be good starting points for anyone wanting to take this subject further.

Of course, I have written more directly about marketing a few times, too.

I’ve included these links here in the middle of the article because they serve to establish what credibility I can muster on the subject of marketing, and establishing that will help ‘sell’ the content that remains. So these contributions to the subject of marketing are, themselves, functioning as a marketing exercise – an effect that is at least somewhat mitigated by my making readers aware of the PR-intent of the exercise, but ‘complete disclosure’ demands no less.

So with this preamble having established both my bona-fides and enabled expectations to be reasonably settled, let’s get to the real meat of the article!

1. Product Differentiation

Fundamental to all marketing efforts is the identification of the distinguishing features of the particular product, and especially anything that differentiates it from any similar products on the market. It might be cheaper, or more efficient, or more effective, or any of a dozen other things.

These will then become the central focus of attempts to market the product.

For example, the Pepsi taste test invariably finds that more people choose a Pepsi over a Coke. Marketers quickly realized that one point of differentiation between the products is that Pepsi contains an extra teaspoon of sugar, making it sweeter, and that meant that while it would be more agreeable to drink without accompaniment, coke would be more palatable when consumed with foods, especially salty snacks. Pepsi devised the taste-test to present their product in the best light relative to their rival, based on the differences between their products.

If you have a new campaign to “market” to the players, you need to identify what distinguishes this campaign from all the others on offer, and from campaigns using similar or the same game system that may have been played in the past, or may even be going on concurrently.

Take Fumanor: One Faith as an example. The premise to the previous campaign, Fumanor: The Last Deity was that most Divine beings had been destroyed in a cataclysmic event a century earlier, forcing the survivors to unite into a single pantheon. This left gaps in the portfolios represented by the different deities; small ones could be papered over by expanding the ‘interests’ of the survivors, but there was one large gap that needed to be filled with a newcomer to their ranks. Thoth, the god of knowledge, had been destroyed by his attempt to acquire knowledge of the Gods’ enemies, but he had set in motion an elaborate plan to select and elevate his own replacement, one who would not have the same vulnerability that had been his own undoing. There was more to the story, of course, but that had been the central premise. A key part of the story was “marketing” the new pantheon to adherents of the old multiple-pantheon structure, in particular churches dedicated exclusively to one mythos, forging recognition of the new pantheon to their human worshipers. The One Faith campaign dealt with the attempts to unify the churches and social institutions behind the new banner, discovering secrets held by one institution that were to be shared only reluctantly.

2. Create a perceived need, then fill it

This is the bottom line for a significant level of advertising, especially the more successful campaigns. Creating a need takes many forms; it can be creating dissatisfaction with the existing products in the marketplace, or appealing to the senses, or environmental or social justice, or teasing the curiosity of the viewer. The most effective choice is always one that plays to the product differentiation, and there have been times when artificial ‘differences’ have been manufactured in order to support a planned advertising line.

An example of the latter that does not seem to have rebounded, post-COVID, is the souvenir tie-in with popular movies. There used to be one of these every month or two, but I don’t see them returning until the theater industry rebuilds further. The reason is that attendance numbers are still fragile, and the certainty of success of a blockbuster remains weakened or absent. These tie-ins represent significant investment on the part of the stores creating and selling the tie-in products, with significant lead-times required for the design and manufacture of the products; to be certain of success, it has to be clear at least a month or two in advance that a movie will be successful enough to make the tie-in profitable. The fact that these businesses are themselves operating with more fragile bottom lines means that there is less capacity for taking a risk, further undermining this promotional mechanism.

Most examples of this principle are more prosaic, and often formulaic. Show a kitchen counter that looks clean, superimpose some animated germs to imply that the appearance is deceptive, then show a cleaning product and an even cleaner kitchen counter that positively gleams, and the advertisement is pretty much complete; anything more is just a refinement on the basic package. This works by creating a sense of need – implying that most cleaning products will create the appearance of cleanliness but not the reality – and then satisfying that need on a visceral level by positioning the product as the solution.

Or, perhaps, the advert shows a group enjoying a meal or a picnic or whatever, then shows the product as being a key element of such a social occasion, and – hey presto – job done. Given the constraints that were placed on such social events through the early phases of the pandemic, I’m somewhat surprised that this advertising was not more prevalent as restrictions were relaxed; people would have been made more receptive by their inability to host such festivities during times of lockdowns and other restrictions, so creating a perception of need would have been relatively easy.

There are times when creating the perception of need is more difficult, or a particular attempt to do so is less successful. It’s by no means always as easy as the discussion above tends to suggest. It’s also easy to fail to make the leap from need to the particular product being advertised as the solution. And there have been past attempts where the story itself was simply not entertaining enough to hold viewer’s attention long enough for either or both of these to be established. So there are at least three ways such advertising can fail.

Targeting the advertising at a particular market segment can improve the odds of creating the sense of need. Connecting the solution to a point of product differentiation helps connect the product to the sense of it being the solution. Some newness about the product – either because it’s legitimately new, or because it can be packaged as “new and improved” – also helps, simply by implying that the existing range of products on offer don’t do the job of satisfying the need in an adequate way.

You can spend months studying this aspect of advertising, and the more that you understand it, the more aware you are of the attempts to manipulate your purchasing intent – create it, shift it from one product to another, capitalize on it. And that helps to insulate you from it, giving you greater control over your spending.

But this sort of awareness also helps when the shoe is on the other foot. It was a major discussion when planning the content for Assassin’s Amulet, for example; the intent was to include content that could be excerpted for stand-alone articles at Roleplaying Tips and here at Campaign Mastery to create “buzz” about the product and, yes, a sense of need/desire toward the product.

When attention turns to new campaigns, two scenarios suggest themselves.

The first is where the GM has the ultimate control, and the players simply participate in whatever he has brought to the table; this technique can be adapted to create enthusiasm toward the proposed campaign.

The second is where the players have a choice, and can choose not to participate in a particular campaign for whatever reason – from dislike of the game system that is proposed to disliking the premise of the specific campaign. The goal in ‘advertising’ the campaign is not just about generating enthusiasm, it’s about persuading players to participate in the first place.

In either case, the first step is to create a sense of need. Often, this can be achieved simply through the GM’s own enthusiasm for the campaign, but sometimes it can mean focusing on product differentiation: “We’ve been playing a lot of [genre x] lately, so I thought trying something from [genre y] might make a nice change of pace”. Or, if not straying too far from the usual genre, it can be an emphasis on product differentiation and what will make this campaign different from the last, and from the one before that, and so on.

These approaches generally bundle the satisfaction of created need with the creation of that need, but sometimes these still need to be handled separately.

Another powerful tool in this department can be the idea of a campaign of limited scope – a trial run, or an isolated adventure that may or may not progress to a full campaign if the players have fun.

An exciting name can be a big selling point, too, a name that intrigues or that implies promises with respect to content can create anticipation in the player’s minds – the absolutely critical key to such is making sure that you satisfy that sense of anticipation, even if the creation was due to sheer sloppiness on your part.

Key words can be critical in creating these expectations. “Post-apocalyptic” is one of these triggers, “deep space” is another. The phrase “adventure to adventure” or simply ‘adventures” (plural) can imply a more episodic approach.

Sometimes, a simple misunderstanding can create expectations that you nevertheless have to satisfy. I’ve described in the past how the original intent for the sequel campaign to the original Zenith-3 campaign were completely different to what the NPCs within the campaign had in mind, and how the current Zenith-3 Regency campaign had to change fundamentally to accommodate what the players expected (and were looking forward to).

It’s an imperfect science, then, but it can be a powerful one.

3. Know Your Target Market

There are resistances that you can’t simply overcome – I already know that proposing a Star Trek campaign will fall on deaf ears, because the players I have access to are simply not interested in such a campaign. To sell such a proposal, I would have to repackage it, perhaps as a Star Wars or Traveler -oriented campaign.

This is an example of knowing your target market, what they are willing to entertain, and what is a bridge too far.

In many respects, it can be easier for those engaged in more traditional marketing of products; they can target by gender, or by socioeconomic stratum, or even a specific segment of a market. Because they are dealing with mass-market advertising, they can afford to only succeed with a portion of that market and still have a successful marketing campaign. In fact, they would go into such a situation expecting to only succeed with a fraction of the available market, but weight of numbers works to their advantage.

A GM promoting a proposed campaign to his players has no such cover; practically by definition, he has to target specific individuals, and that’s a very different proposition.

Evolving social demographics are a perpetual challenge for the traditional marketer; the normal approach of determining which member of a household generally makes the purchasing decisions with respect to the category of products, and explicitly targeting them, begins to break down fairly comprehensively when society itself undergoes some form of metamorphosis. With families in Lockdown, the traditionally-identified purchaser of an item might no longer be valid, but that won’t be the case universally; you could view this as a fracturing of the market base, requiring greater focus on what the disparate sub-groups have in common, or you could back away from stereotypical advertising and take a more generic approach that tries to encompass both the new decision-makers and the old.

When the transformative influence ends, not everything will go back the way it used to be. As a result, the old approaches may no longer apply, and new patterns have to be adopted.

For example, there has been a big push, starting pre-Pandemic, for greater diversity and inclusion in advertising here in Australia. As the Pandemic arrived, and the accompanying restrictions and associated demographic changes in who had purchasing power and who did not, this push began showing dividends, mostly in the form of tokenistic inclusions (for which a number of advertisers were quite rightly called out). Then the Pandemic impacts took hold, and the entire campaign for inclusion was de-prioritized in advertising, in favor of making ads that appealed to a broader audience because the advertisers were less secure in knowing who their target audience was going to be. As we have emerged from Pandemic restrictions, not all the old social patterns have reverted, so advertising continues to be more broadly-oriented, but the push for diversity and inclusion has been subsumed into that broader pattern; with no fuss being made about it, greater diversity IS being shown. It’s not at all abnormal now for a family scene to be a family with same-gender parents, for example. Unless you are specifically looking for it, you would hardly notice. There’s also a subtly-greater emphasis on showing community spirit, or of being a good neighbor. It’s as though the big push has had the desired outcome, but with the key transformative moments being masked by the impact of the Pandemic on the advertising content, hidden from view under the banner of appealing to a more general audience.

The imminent end of an ongoing campaign and raising of the question, “what will we play next” is, in some ways, quite akin to a transformative social event. The strongest influences tend to be differentiating the next campaign from the current one, and appealing to as broad a base as possible.

I’m acutely aware of this, as my Zener Gate campaign is winding down and will conclude sometime in the current calendar year. The current plan, approved by the players, is to resume the Warcry campaign, perhaps best described as a superheroic science-fictional family soap opera space-opera. With time travel, but that’s often less of a focus than a more Doctor-Who-esque bouncing around from one interesting place to another, especially at the moment. That contrasts very strongly with the Zener Gate campaign, which is paramilitary and political with a central focus on time travel within the timeline of the Earth and associated solar system. There are heavy sci-fi elements to both, and both have time travel, but that’s where the similarities end.

In promoting this plan, three individuals had to be targeted: the first was the central focus of the campaign, the titular character, and his player; that was easy. The second was a player in the campaign from its previous incarnation who was not a part of the Zener Gate campaign; that wasn’t all that hard, either. The third was a player in the Zener Gate campaign who might or might not choose to join the renewed campaign, replacing a player whose passing brought the first version of the campaign to an end. He likes space opera, but not ‘cosmic’ level adventures; this would be both, so it could have gone either way. In the end, he chose to come on board, so we’ll see how it goes!

4. Create a sense of value-for-money regardless of the actual price

This is a tricky one and something that not all marketers actually acknowledge. It’s all about perception of price and product positioning within the market, and that can be a difficult thing to control.

Entire advertising campaigns have been draped around the positioning of a particular product as a ‘premium brand’ and worth the higher price being demanded for it. If your product costs twice as much as that of a serious competitor, you are at a serious sales disadvantage, especially when economic times are hard; this attempts to turn that liability into an asset.

The key is to find virtues that you can allege are manifested by the premium product that do not attach themselves to the competitor. “Longer-lasting”, “Mega-pack”, “Eco-friendly”, “Sustainably sourced”, and many other terms like these, are the weapons, as is the blunt declaration “Premium” – usually accompanied by the caveat, “at an affordable price”.

These are designed to create the impression that a product manifesting these virtues should cost a whole lot more than the ‘premium’ product being offered does, implying that it is both socially-responsible and a bargain. Despite the higher price.

The other end of the marketplace also has its own version of this necessity. The perception to be overcome is not that it is overpriced, but that it is so low-priced that quality has been compromised. One of the most common approaches is to supersize the product so that the net price is just a little less than the average mid-range competitor, making a huge virtue out of “value for money”, but there are more sophisticated tools as well. “Convenience” is one that comes and goes. Attempting to position the product as ‘closer to nature’ can sometimes work, and when it won’t (because the premium product already has that marketing space claimed), “purity” can be a substitute (it’s really hard to have both qualities at the same time).

Before we can translate all if this into the sphere of RPGs, we need to decide on the equivalence of the concept of cost.

Ultimately, this is an amalgam of three factors:

  • Actual financial cost;
  • Time;
  • and Effort.

The last of these can be further divided, into

  • Complexity, and
  • Learning a new game system.

The resulting four attributes are the ‘cost’ of a proposed new campaign.

The financial cost can include everything from purchasing game-day food, to travel costs, to the purchase of roleplaying references and sources. The latter is generally a one-off up-front cost, the others are ongoing costs of participation.

The time cost can include not only the time spent participating, but the travel time, and even the cost of not doing something you otherwise would.

The complexity cost can relate to how complex character maintenance is, to the nature of the plotlines inherent in the proposed campaigns and the effort needed to keep them straight in the mind of the player, to any demands outside of the gaming table that are imposed on the player. Some of these can be one-time cost, dealt with during character construction; others are ongoing costs that have to be dealt with regularly or periodically.

Finally, there is always an inherent cost in effort required to learn a new game system, if one is involved, and this can be the deal-breaker in any proposal. This not only is a direct cost at the start, it can become an ongoing cost as well, and it acts as an amplifier to everything listed under complexity.

The GM needs to sell the proposition that an offered campaign will be worth these expenditures, and the inconvenience that they carry. Sometimes that’s easy – if a player already knows the game system, for example, and has already bought anything required for it, two of the costs are either diminished or completely obliterated, and that yields a far more favorable cost-benefits ratio. Playing a new game system that a player has always wanted to try out can be a completely different mitigating factor.

The suitability of the game system to the proposed campaign is a critical factor that falls within the scope of this heading. A game system that has been home-brewed to exclude the mechanical parts that the players don’t like, in the process distancing it from its primary reference genre, may be quite a different proposition to a ‘warts and all’ implementation of the game system.

5. Identify and utilize perceived product/producer strengths

Perceptions can often differ from reality. A manufacturer can have a reputation for high quality that can be ‘rubbed off’ onto a medium-quality product, for example. Some cleaning products are perceived to be more effective than others because they are perfumed with a scent that is associated with disinfectant or soap. Other scents are known to arouse hunger – the odor of freshly-baked bread, for example. Some institutions are regarded as more professional and trustworthy than others.

These are all assets that can be taken advantage of, even if they don’t actually contribute to a material point of product differentiation. A perceived benefit or advantage doesn’t actually have to be real or verifiable; it will still influence the interpretation and credibility of actual points of product differentiation to make them more effective. The same facts are true for everything from toothpaste to cough medicine, from bank loans to baked treats.

Applying these facts to an RPG requires a little self-assessment with no sugar-coating. Is there something you are known to be particularly good at? Is there something you are known to be relatively poor at? Then your proposition of a new campaign should emphasize the first and downplay the second.

I’m known for my intricate plotting, for rooting my campaigns in their backgrounds, and for an equitable sharing of the spotlight. I’m not so well known for being a military strategist. If I postulated an alternative-world-war-two campaign, it would never get off the ground on its own merits; not only would I not be seen to be playing to my strengths, I would be lauding my virtues in an area in which I’m known to be weak.

If, however, I were to pitch such a campaign with a co-GM or advisor of known militarily strategic expertise, and provide explicit details regarding the historical variations and their causes that implied a coherent and plausible background, I would have negated the liability (even turned it into an advantage) while playing from a position of strength. Suddenly, a concept so divergent from my personal strengths that it would be laughed out of the room sounds very intriguing, an option that none of my players would have considered credible.

I have told my players repeatedly that I expect the current Z-3 campaign to be my last superhero campaign; it still has at least 16 years of game-play before it reaches the planned crescendo, plans that are preliminary and not set in any form of concrete at this point, and yet there are already known plot loose ends that are not intended to get resolved in the current campaign simply because not everything ever gets tied up in a nice little bow. If I were to gather those plot threads together, I could conceivably formulate a third Z3 campaign. I don’t intend to do so, because I think it would be anticlimactic after the current campaign has run it’s epic course. Besides, I’ll be in my mid-70s at that point!

That potential is there because it adds to the credibility of the campaign I’m running right now, not because I ever expect to use them in a sequel.

But if I were ever to intimate that I had changed my mind, I would expect my current set of players to sign up immediately – not only do I have form within the genre, but such a campaign would clearly be playing to my strengths as a GM.

In the meantime, though, I can launch other, shorter, campaigns that play upon that same set of strengths, and expect to get sign-ups.

It’s important to note that any campaign I proposed would me chosen because it sounded like something I would have fun doing, and something that would enable me to entertain the participants; I’m not choosing a campaign based upon my strengths or weaknesses, I’m thinking about what assets I have to convince potential players that they would enjoy participating by virtue of those strengths. I could propose, for example, a Fantasy campaign set in an age when existence was soft and malleable, when even the Gods were finding their way. This would play to another known strength, the big concept, so I would expect player interest – but their first question would be about the game system. Or I could offer a game of political intrigue set on the fringes of a great galactic empire. By implication, that hearkens back to the ’embedded rich plotting’ advantage.

The goal is to sell the campaign that you want to run to the players. That means taking advantage of your known assets and neutralizing known weaknesses (or better yet, turning them into assets).

6. Products that earn the greatest profit should be placed at eye level, then down for the next two shelves. Products earning the least profit per sale should be at the floor or on the top shelf.

This is actually a maxim of shelf-arrangement employed by successful supermarkets, but it’s just marketing in a different environment.

You could paraphrase it as placing your most profitable commodities in a location where they require the least effort on the part of customers.

There are also corollary rules regarding which shelves go where. Again, the most profitable shelves should be near the checkout – once people have committed to a purchase, you want to translate that into an actual sale as quickly as possible.

Once again, to translate this into the RPG medium, we need to decide on what is going to be the equivalent of most profitable. The easiest solution is to pick things that we’ve already discussed, but the more useful approach would be to consider something that we’ve only lightly touched on – fun value.

The translation thus becomes, “whatever will generate the most fun for the players should be the option that comes most readily to hand.” Unlike the previous section, then, this is about the content of a proposed new campaign; it’s not about the adventures, per se, but about the context and framing mechanisms that will lead from one adventure to the next.

But this is still about marketing; you want the players to whom you propose the campaign to feel that something fun is right at their fingertips in the proposal. It’s about making the proposed campaign a salable product from the point of view of the players concerned, then getting out of the way. “You are a rogue AI hiding out in a computer system, forced to manifest as characters in various simulated realities until you find a way to escape this confinement” – this promises variety, and a bit of silliness, but with a serious undertone linking adventures together. Saturday Morning Cartoons meets The Great Escape in a Tron-inspired environment. I can see this appealing to two or three of my current players, were I to propose it.

Only I might know that the majority of those “computer games” are a cross between Star Trek and Star Wars – or different Fantasy milieu – or Sherlock Holmes mysteries set in the 24th century, or whatever. In effect, it would repackage these campaign concepts into a form that will appeal in a way that the straight concept might not. And that’s marketing, too.

7. Use anticipation to build excitement

It was well known that Walt Disney had experimented with waiting times to build anticipation for the rides at Disneyland by the time that I first visited there, just a few days after Space Mountain had first opened to the public. The fact is even referenced in Dream Park.

The outcome of these experiments was that it worked, up to a point; but that there was a cliff to the response, after which additional waiting time detracted from the entertainment value of the ride. Disney used portable fencing to define the length of the waiting line – if it was full up, patrons would go somewhere else for a while rather than mill around aimlessly while waiting for a slot to open up.

Get it right, and the anticipation would be converted into excitement when the patrons actually boarded the ride, enhancing their enjoyment of the experience. Disney’s designers worked hard at getting it right.

It’s also true that not all attractions were created equal. There was always a long line for Pirates Of The Caribbean; there was a long line for Space Mountain (because it was new); there was a shorter line for the Haunted Mansion, and a still shorter line for the Jungle Cruise, and so on.

This principle works for RPGs, too. Given a bit of lead time, anticipation can become excitement (if the quality of the ‘ride’ is not a let-down). Too much, and it can become a negative. Too little, and you don’t take full advantage of the ‘free extra enthusiasm’ that can be generated.

Every campaign, every ‘ride’ has a different optimum point, and it will vary from one participant to another when you’re dealing with such a small group. That makes this tricky for a GM to get right, but so useful when you do that you have to keep making your best guess as to the right answer.

There are a multitude of factors that come together to define the ‘right time’ in any specific case, which also makes it hard for me to offer much in the way of specific advice.

But it is possible to cheat, and that can be a safe workaround. To cheat, you propose the campaign and then release information packs until you reach the point of play commencing. Since you won’t have time to generate these once the countdown has started, it’s best to generate them in advance. There should be no more information packs than there are players participating is something that I’ve found to be a good rule of thumb. Releases should be at regular intervals, and there should be enough time for players to assimilate the material before the next one arrives.

One should contain the campaign background in a narrative form. One should deal with any house rules, or should provide the game rules if it’s a new game system. One should probably focus on the available character construction options. One should focus on important NPCs and organizations. One should focus on the most recent events, and the location where play is to commence. And that’s probably more than enough; unless you have 5 PCs, you will need to conflate some of these, or forego them in favor of in-game attention.

Other key decisions can play into things. Two of these decisions are: character construction in advance, or simultaniously, at the game table? and, Do you want to run a session zero that brings the PCs together? Or some other form of prequel adventure?

Broader Application

Seven elements of the totality that is marketing in the 21st century. Hopefully I have demonstrated the relevance to the concept of selling potential players on a proposed campaign.

But that’s just the beginning. Every time you introduce a new NPC, or location (dungeon?), or crisis, the same principles apply – you need to make these convincing (unless they aren’t supposed to be), and that means marketing.

You have a captive audience, who are practically begging to be convinced to buy in – but closing the deal is up to you. Marketing can provide many tools to help you do so.

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