Better Game Nights Through Marketing

Being a good game-runner does not require marketing and UX writing skills, but I’ve found it sure does help! At the end of the day, it’s all about understanding your audience, cultivating experiences, and achieving shared goals, whether the campaign you’re running is in Dungeons & Dragons or HubSpot.

But are the skills really transferrable? Let’s get into it.

Market Research

When planning a marketing campaign, you want to identify your key audiences and develop a deeper understanding of each: their wants, their hesitations, and what a successful interaction with you looks like for them. Typically, marketers source this information from a combination of existing data from similar campaigns and – if you’ve got the budget for it – surveys.

In tabletop roleplaying games (TTRPGs), “existing data from similar campaigns” is my nearly two decades of experience playing, running, and observing games like the one I’m trying to put together. All game runners (often called “dungeon masters” or “DMs” when talking about Dungeons & Dragons specifically) have access to some form of this.

But effective marketing and fun TTRPGs have another thing in common: they are a conversation. One that the DM, or the marketer, facilitates. That’s why, as I’m planning a campaign, I will send a Google Forms survey to my players. The key is to ask incisive and frank questions. You want the act of responding to the survey to be as quick and easy as possible, while providing genuinely useful information. That’s why I ask both questions like “How much experience do you have playing this game?” and “What kind of adventure-motivations do you like most? (Check 2),” followed by 10 options and a write-in line: You want to know what to expect your players to bring to the table, and what they expect to take away from it.

You can find a generic version of the survey I use here. Feel free to tailor it to your table and style!   

Process Documents

Process documents help to preempt the question “Am I doing this right?” They make tasks reliably replicable and helpfully transparent, so everyone is on the same page.

Whether or not your players are new to the game system you’re using, I find it helpful to provide players with process documents. The two main ones I use for D&D are a character creation process document, and an anatomy-of-a-turn handout.

While D&D – and, near-universally, other TTRPG systems – does provide its own “process documents” for these in the form of their rulebooks, I find it helpful to collate, simplify, and streamline. For example, the Dungeons & Dragons 5^th Edition Player’s Handbook includes a 5-page chapter on character creation that barely even touches on the differences between the various classes and species you can play. It’s very helpful for someone trying to familiarize themselves with the basics of D&D, but it’s less useful as a working document you can use to build your character. That’s why I strip away a lot of the scene-setting to cover the brass-tacks basics of what you need to do to build your character, including sections on picking species, class, and background, as well as one for leveling your character up to where the adventure begins.

Sure, you can do this with the Player’s Handbook as-is, but you’ll be flipping back and forth between pages 11-15 (character creation), 17-42 (in-depth species descriptions), 45-112 (in-depth class descriptions), 121-125 (backgrounds), and 143-159 (equipment). Or, you can follow the simple instructions in my document, complete with a handy checklist at the end.

The “anatomy of a turn” is kept quick and scannable: a small, rectangular image that I virtually (or sometimes literally for in-person games) pin to the play area, reminding players of the types of options available to them in combat.

These process documents create a smoother, more enjoyable user experience. My knowledge of both how the game works and common pitfalls allows me to preempt questions and empower players to dive right into making their imagined hero into a collection of functional game mechanics ready to play: a character sheet.

Guided Use

While the last section talked about player-facing process documents, there is another kind of process document: the “adventure” itself. These are documents made by and for DMs, and, in this case, I’m both the writer and the runner, so my adventure notes can slip into extreme shorthand. But for adventures I think I may want to run repeatedly, or that I think others might like to take to their tables, I create a full-fledged document, laying out the descriptions to be read, the opportunities for interaction, and so on for each room or space the players might find themselves in.

Whether my notes are brief or robust, it is my job to make sure, moment-to-moment, decision-to-decision, that the players understand what’s going on, what options are available to them, and how they might reasonably expect those actions to unfold. That is to say, every new room includes within it its own call(s) to action and apparent reward(s) for following through. Not every party will bite on every CTA I provide. But, between my “market research” and the ample opportunities for interaction, I’ll be sure to get them there.

Real-time Refinement

As they say, “No battle plan survives contact with the enemy.”  

Players, like any audience-participant, can be unpredictable. Sometimes, that unpredictable behavior drives them away from story-crucial elements. It’s like when new leads keep coming through old creative rather than the current push. This is when you have to be open to incorporating the feedback your players are giving you through their actions, and use it to help find a way to align their preferred course of action with your preferred outcome in a way that feels satisfying to both of you. What is it that’s drawing them there, and how can you give them more of it? Sounds a lot like marketing.

For example, can your story’s murder weapon be found somewhere else if the players don’t want to check the second-floor study? Or can you still keep things moving along without the murder weapon discovery by trying something different, like introducing a witness?

I like to plan some contingencies for things like this, but, in all honesty, the best thing you can usually do in a situation like this is to steer into the skid. If players are pursuing an action you didn’t expect, it’s speaking to interests they have in your world that you didn’t expect. Pay attention to the decisions they make, not just whether or not they’re the choices you want them to make, and then find a way to give them what they want that also gives you what you want.

Just like in marketing, you have to meet people where they’re looking for you.

Conclusion

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