#6: Big List of TTRPG Marketing Wisdom 🧠

Welcome to the 6th edition of the Indie RPG Newsletter! I’m @chaibypost and this is another long issue.

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I. The Big List of TTRPG Marketing Wisdom

This week I stumbled upon the second part of a brand new blog series by award-winning indie game designer and content marketing professional Ash Kreider called “Marketing Yourself”. If you’re anything like me, you probably find marketing as mysterious as the mating rituals of mantis shrimp. This new series’ whole purpose is to lay out the basic techniques in an accessible and jargon-free manner. Which is awesome. Like the mating rituals of the mantis shrimp, marketing is hard for non-mantis shrimp. I mean, hard for non-marketers. It feels complicated, unfun and kind of gross sometimes. But we live in the shadow of the great beast of capitalism (not a shrimp) and if its dark, you might as well fashion a torch.

So I thought it might be a cool to go back through all the marketing advice that I’ve saved, bookmarked, or squirreled away somewhere and share it with you all. Please feel free to save, bookmark or squirrel this list away somewhere.

• The single best read that I have about marketing is this 2019 TTRPG Marketing Q&A that Orion Black did with 4 highly experienced designers. Orion asks them all the same questions which means you’re getting multiple perspectives in conversation rather than the typical advice-from-the-holy-mountain style pronouncements. It’s a 52 minute read according to Medium so get comfortable before diving in. Here’s a sample:

  Q: Where do we even start? What is marketing and how do I do it?

  Will
  A: Marketing is something that seems hard. Like a lot of games now it’s easy to learn but difficult to master so a lot of people try to do it and think that they’re the best without really knowing the how or why. Marketing is the process of drawing attention to a product, brand, or service — anything you do that gets or keeps attention is marketing whether that’s a social media presence or ads or interviews, etc. You need two things when marketing; eyes on your market, and words about your product. Both of these will turn into dollars in your pocket if you do marketing right.

• One of the participants in that Q&A, Cecil Howe, had an old post called “How to become a Godzillionaire on DrivethruRPG if your name doesn’t rhyme with Yon Blick, Clobbert Malwb, or Blizzard of the Toast”. The original text-version of post is sadly lost to the vagaries of the internet but there is an audio-version on the Blogs on Tape podcast that is still available. If you’re staring at the title and are as confused over what Cecil is mocking, it’s John Wick (not the Keanu Reeves character, the game designer), Robert Shwalb and Wizards of the Coast. It took me way longer to figure out than I would care to admit.
  
  To add to this, OSR luminary Skerples wrote a post called “How To Become A Hundredaire On DriveThruRPG” which is also useful to check out, especially if you publishing on DTRPG. It has graphs.
  
  (Edit: The Wayback machine on the Internet Archive does have a backup of the original post here. Thanks to reader Colin Le Sueur for the link.)

• Another participant of Orion’s Q&A, Daniel Fox, appeared on the Tabletop Babble Podcast to talk about marketing. You might find that useful as well.

• Mnemonic designer Dee Pennyway wrote a really nice post on Pillowfort called “Quiet Marketing: For Quiet People Who Need Marketing”. I found it really useful and now “quiet marketing” is my new favourite term.

  How do you promote your work, without feeling like you're promoting your work? There's a lot of ways "into" marketing, but for me the easiest path is a way of processing that I've started calling Quiet Marketing.

• Daniel Sell of the Melsonia Arts Council wrote something recently called “So You Wrote A Good Book And Don't Want To Starve To Death?”. It’s a bullet-point, no nonsense list of basic things that you should know about marketing an RPG. It’ll take ou 5 minutes and it’s completely worth it.

  Make your book cover as nice as you can afford. That's the thing that gets shared on social media and is always gonna be money well spent. Even if the guts are empty and the build quality sucks, have a nice cover.

• The RPG Design Panelcast is a podcast that collects and archives panels from various game conventions. It’s a fantastic resource. Obviously, the panels all vary in terms of quality but the backlog is full of gems. If you’re interested in learning about marketing, maybe you want to start with Marketing 101 and Marketing 201 from Metatopia 2018? I don’t remember these panels but they have the right name!
  
  Jason Pitre who publishes the Panelcast also did a publisher survey in 2019. It focused on production costs more than marketing but it does talk about budgets, crowdfunding, and how publishers perceived the success of their products. You might be surprised by how many copies a successful indie RPG actually sells. Please be warned, it’s absolutely overflowing with bar charts and pie charts.

• This is a very simple and practical post about marketing that is aimed at indie video game developers but 100% applies to tabletop designers. I really like how it de-emphasizes marketing when you’re just starting out and then gives you concrete steps on how to start as you successfully complete multiple games. For example, if you’ve never released a game commercially on your own, he says:

  95% of your effort should be focused on releasing and learning what it takes to finish a game. Don’t worry if nobody knows who you are.
  
  Posting to 1 (and only 1) Social Network that you really like reading and interacting with.

• If you’re interested in zines, Kickstarter’s annual ZineQuest initiative seems to be a great platform to launch your first zine. Zeshio put together a lot of data on all the zines published through Zinequest 2019 and it’s super useful to study. He also has a nice twitter thread about printing and a very useful blogpost about shipping that will save you a ton of time if you’re trying to figure out these things for the first time.

• If you’re interested in learning about Kickstarter, there’s lots and lots information on the general internets and it’s all confusing. But the ongoing TTRPG Resource Jam has 1, 2, 3, 4, … 5 different Kickstarter-related submissions. There’s a budget template, pre-launch checklists, and general advice from people who have written multiple successful campaigns before, etc.

• If you publish your games on itch.io, Starwest has a really nice template for the images you need for social media and your itch landing page. There’s also a template to make a presskit with all the necessary information about your game that a media outlet might need.

• Last item on this bullet list is ONE WEIRD TRICK courtesy of Rob Donoghue, one of the co-founders of Evil Hat:

Rob Donoghue @rdonoghue

Long day already, and I should get offline for a bit, so I'm going to share THE SECRET. The single most powerful RPG marketing trick there is. The ONE WEIRD THING you can do to get people to see and think about your game. Ready? Say nice stuff about other people's games.

Added on 26.09.2020:

• Jeff Stormer of the Party of One Podcast has distilled what he knows about using podcasts to market your games into three simple blogposts.

• The Brain Trust podcast did a recent episode on “degreening” which is a term they invented (I think) for thinking about a pipeline for designing and marketing games that don’t require kickstarter. One of the ideas is a “bounty board” where designers with patron communities can allow their patrons to vote on games by essentially pre-ordering them based on a design pitch.

(Do you have any other resource that you think I should add to this list? Message me on twitter @chaibypost or just reply to this email. I’ll to be happy to add it in.)

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Hello! In case this is your first time reading the Indie RPG Newsletter, it’s a mix of curation from around the interverse and my own personal thoughts on indie tabletop RPGs. Subscribe and get it in your inbox every weekend! I put a lot of effort into making it as interesting and useful as possible for my readers!

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II. Discarding Dice and Masters with +1 Forward

+1 Forward is one of the podcasts published by the Gauntlet gaming community and for years, it’s put out regular episodes talking about games that are Powered by the Apocalypse. In the middle of 2020, they decided to do a limited series that discussed Belonging outside Belonging games (aka the No Dice No Masters system). If you’re not aware, these are dice-less, token economy games that (usually) don’t have a GM. They also tend to involve telling the stories of marginalized communities.

So far, they’ve covered Dream Askew, Balikbayan, Venture, Grand Guignol and Wanderhome. In each of the episodes, they speak to the designers of the game and the conversation is always full of game design insights. In the latest episode, they spoke to Josh Fox, the designer of Flotsam: Adrift Among the Stars, which adds some very thoughtful scene-building framework to the game to make it easier to grasp for new players. If that sounds interesting, look up the podcast wherever you usually do and give it a listen!

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III. WOTC’s Monopoly and Adventure Design

I don’t know if you saw that Polygon story? The one about D&D’s newest adventure? I caught a taste of it on twitter but I didn’t even bother reading the story. To summarize what I understood, a Polygon writer reviewed the latest D&D 5e adventure and talked about how it would be a challenge ‘for even experienced DMs to run’. Like that was a good thing. Justifiably, people were dunking on the story from all directions.

It’s a silly article but it reminded me of this fantastic thread on reddit titled “Dear WotC and other authors, please stop writing your modules like novels!”. (The thread has 8k+ upvotes! This is a popular opinion!) Turns out if you let someone monopolize an industry, they start producing inferior products and spend their money on just firming up their monopoly. I’m seeing all these celebrities that D&D get for their charity games and not only is 5e a pretty hard game for people to learn and play on stream like that but this is clearly where WOTC’s major effort is being spent. Just an endless cycle of market surveys and PR campaigns.

Personally, indie games are the only thing taking up my mind space right now and with their focus on collaborative storytelling and fiction-first principles, adventure design seems to have more or less disappeared from my life. Most new fiction-first games have story seeds or campaign premises but that’s about all they can do because those games are so character-driven. The rest of the gameplay is just what happens at the table.

I guess the setting or the worldbuilding that comes baked into a lot of the bigger indie games are their ‘adventure equivalents’. Like Doskvol in Blades in the Dark. Spire and Heart are just sandbox adventures with a very minor ruleset tacked on. (Also, my very personal opinion is that the ruleset isn’t the best one to play in those sandboxes. Sorry, Rowan Rook & Decard.)

The big recent exception (in terms of games that need “adventures”) seems to be Trophy Dark which was designed with the idea that people could design and publish their own Incursions. It’s sister game, Trophy Gold, is explicitly an “OSR to Storygame” conversion engine which means that some principles of adventure design are built into the core of the game. It breaks adventures into ‘sets’, each with their own ‘theme’ and then goes from there. If you’re interested in that idea, check out Trophy Gold. It’s a really interesting collection of ideas that I think a lot of players can take and modify to express their own personal preferences.

(If you want more schadenfreude about bad game design, there was another reddit thread this week that asked for “unplayable modules” and boy, did people deliver.)

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IV. Miscellaneous

• If you’re playing online and need a basic interactive tabletop space that isn’t a full blown VTT, I recently learned about https://www.owlbear.rodeo/

• The next edition of the Unbreakable Anthology has put out a call for pitches from Asian writers and artists. They’ve officially moved away from focusing only on D&D 5e and are open to adventures from a variety of systems - which is amazing! I might pitch them something if I can get an idea by the deadline.

• The Rolling Boxcars blog maintains a list of online gaming conventions. There are MANY.

• Someone asked on reddit for “Good RPGs to learn game design?” and the top comment is almost a brief history of roleplaying games with a lot of links to a lot of good games. Regardless of any possible ‘mistakes’, it just warmed my heart to see someone engage with a question like that so generously.

• Ooo, also, there’s a new indie zine called the indie zine coming out soon with a cool list of contributors.

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These ads help keep this newsletter going and I’m very grateful for them! If you’d like to advertise with the newsletter, the submission form with all the guidelines can be found here. (I know it’s the same links as last time!)

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In the last issue, I talked at length about colonialism in RPG settings and I realize I might not have talked about my own identity enough for readers to understand that I’m talking from a specific point of view as a person from a former British colony. I’m a shy person generally - at least, online - but I’ve added some basic information in the About page of this newsletter. (You might have to scroll down to see it.)

Anyway, thanks for reading as always! Please share the newsletter around with your friends, enemies, and frenemies.

Have a good week!