Friday, January 3, 2014

Campaign Pitches: Play on Target Podcast Ep. 24

In this episode of Play on Target we talk about pitching campaigns. While we start with big-scale games, we eventually move to one-shots and con games. More than most of our discussions these approaches depend heavily on your audience. I’ve been lucky enough to have fairly stable groups over the years- who generally trust what I suggest to them. They do have some things they don’t care for: Kenny hates Rolemaster, Dave’s not a fan of Superheroes, and Scott recoils from Horror. That’s part of the consideration before I even get to the point of pitching campaigns. You have to filter out otherwise awesome ideas in favor of other, more awesomest ideas that your players will love. 


THE MANY GAMES OF GAMEMASTERS
In the episode I mention a couple of times I put forward pitches for the players to consider. I’ve written those up as posts:

Narrowing down to ideas you’ll actually get to the table can be the hardest part. Each campaign choice closes off other ones. Do you run more? Do you go for shorter games? Do you move entirely to one-shots?

Right now I’m in the position of having two major campaign slots wrapped up. In both cases I’m planning to run mini-series campaigns to bridge the gap. On one night I’m going to finish off an earlier game which we put on hiatus. On the other I’m going to do a short campaign I promised a player a few years ago. After that I’m less certain. I want to shift to a longer game in each case, but I’m not sure what. I have some ideas…

Wait, that’s what got me into trouble last time. This time when we go to the next bigger game I will make an effort to narrow it down to the 3-5 games I really dig and want to run. I’ll have to kill off some of my darlings, but that’s the price to be paid.


If you like RPG Gaming podcasts, I hope you'll check out Play on Target. We take a focused approach- tackling a single topic each episode. You can subscribe to the show on iTunes or follow the podcast's page at www.playontarget.com.

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