My GMing rotation will be up again in the future. While I haven't put together all of the games I'm willing to run, I have always been confused about how best to get those game across to the group. What confounds me is that they are often too passive, I give my pitches and a I get a chorus of "whatever you want is fine"'s. It's not that I don't believe it, but I don't . I think maybe I'm missing something in my pitches that would help the group better decide.

My pitches include the following info:
- System
- Setting
- Overall tone of the game.

I've found asking what a group doesn't want to be just as important as what they do want.

Try asking them as individuals, away from everyone else. Ask them what they don't like in a game, as well as what they feel is 'worn out'.

By eliminating(or just reducing) things that players hate, you'll be closer to what they actually want. Even if they don't know what that is.

My experience might not help you, since I pretty much exclusively run D&D now, but here's what I do.

First off, if you think your players are playing hard to get by saying "whatever you want to run is fine".. keep in mind that you are doing almost the exact same thing by offering to run whatever game they want to play.

So get specific about what game you really want to run.

When I begin a campaign, I send around a region map so that everyone can see the area. Then I usually have three or four locations to start from, with an accompanying starter hook. The hook is presented as entirely optional.

In my current campaign I think I gave the choice of:

"You can start in the large coastal city of Evander, where a necromancer's curse has recently caused low-level undead to rise up and menace the city at night. OR you can start down south in the small farming village of Azenmir, where people have been acting strangely and there have been a series of unsolved murders..."

The benefit of having limited choices (but multiple points-of-contact on each choice) is pretty good. The guys eventually chose Azenmir, but for different reasons. One guy because he wanted more of a wilderness setting than a city to start out in. One guy because he didn't want to deal with undead. One guy saw that there was a spot on the map marked "orc territory" not far from Azenmir, and he wanted to mess with the orcs.

Your pitches sound like mine.  I usually send out 5 - 10 1-2 paragraph pitches with game, system, tone, mood & theme, goals, etc. for various games I'd like to run.

It sounds like your players just enjoy playing whatever you want to run.

In my case it's an all night discussion which sometimes drags on for a couple of weeks between meeting up and emails. Lot's of movies, books and artwork references get thrown into the discussions.

For instance in my current Over the Edge campaign , I wanted to run something based on the doc Our Brand Is Crisis and set in Thailand. Somewhere along the way the conversation branched out into TV show land. I suggested that maybe the campaign should take place over a 24 hour period...

We were struggling to find a system so I made a post here asking for suggestions. Pundit suggested OtE which had somehow slipped my mind...and that's how The Day of Living Dangerously came to be.

Regards,
David R

Our GM sent us five different pitches for five different flavors of 2300AD, complete with movie references and suggestions for PC careers, and we agreed on one of them. That's the way to do it, especially in a scifi game.

I think it's important to get the players excited about the game and at the same time to get them to raise any flags about settings, systems or themes they won't like.  It's better to push hard and get people to say no, than to run the game based on "whatever you want is fine" and then discover that you're wasting your energy.  It's SO demoralizing for a GM to have a campaing fizz out because of lack of interest on the part of players, it makes it three times more difficult to start your next campaign.

I too typically give the 3 to 6 or so top productions I'm interested in, with a paragraph-long pitch for each.  But I try to give the pitch as the summary for a book or movie I'm trying to sell, and to make it as specific as possible.  System-wise, I describe the basic mechanics and try to compare to something the players already know.  And I ask players to indicate their ranking from favourite to least preferred, with notes on any games they're just not interested in.

On a slightly different but related topic, you can see my brief notes on promoting the weekly games at our local gaming club, where we play a different game every week.  I linked to some good examples of pitch, teasers, and trailers.

I've created a couple of posters for some games.

The first is for our Vampire: The Reqiuem game set in the days just after Hurricane Katrina. It's a bit of Vampire meets Lost, with strange invaders showing up as the Kindred population is reeling from the fallout from the storm.



The second is for a D&D game. The basic premise is that the Shadar-Kai (the native inhabitants of the Plane of Shadow) have teamed up with the mind flayers and other beasties from the Far Realm (a Cthulhu-ish plane) to make war on the rest of...well, creation. It's got a WWII/Nazi/Hitler feel to it.



The idea with both posters - and the pitches - wasn't to convey factual information about the campaign. They do to a degree, but the thrust behind them is to appeal to the player's emotions, to help put them in the scene, etc..

Seanchai

I talk about games that I want to play with the groups I play with.  After that, I start drawing up some artwork and writing supplements to hand out to capture the mood of the game.  I bounce the stuff off them for suggestions and then I revise it.

I guess I'm spoiled. My old gaming group would pretty much play any idea I pitched at them. But I did play with these guys for 10+ years, so I did have the advantage of knowing them well. I'd often discuss with them what types of games they wanted to play next (we had 4+ GMs so we rotated every so often).

I based a whole Ravenloft campaign that started in a town that I had used in a previous 'one shot'. In the one shot, I stole the characters from their homeworld with the mists, they solved the adventure and returned home. But having put some detail into the game, the PCs were almost reluctant to leave. That spawned the idea to start the campaign here, three years after those events.

My pitch of "Remember the the town in Ravenloft that characters X,Y, and Z went to and fought The Shifter? I want to start a Ravenloft campaign there, with you guys starting off as children and then advancing a year or so between sessions, till you hit adventuring age."

My players asked a few questions "Who are we the children of? How old would we be? What are the restrictions for the world? (This was the first time any of us played natives of RL).

I told them the ages. (11-13) Their parents were those of NPCs that the previous adventures had interacted with. One was the son of the Innkeeper (who had provided background info to the party), one the son of the town blacksmith (the blacksmith's other son had provided support and info aswell) and the last was the daughter of the town baker (no interaction with previous party, it's just who she wanted for parents)

They build a tree fort, fought bullies, explored a 'haunted cabin' (not actually haunted, but one of those 'I dare you to go in there' places) and other 'kid stuff'. Then, once the youngest was 14, Something Bad Happened. They found out that their parents were former adventurer's and that they had fought a terrible evil in their younger days. This evil has returned for their children. (Parent's low level due to level drain and are retired)

I gave the 'kids' relatives that were powerful adventures. The Innkeeper was a psionicist (3rd level) and had a brother (the pc's uncle) who waspowerful wizard (12 level).

The Blacksmith was a priest (3rd level) the older brother was one as well (though he'd left the previous year) the blacksmith's brother was a powerful Paladin (14 level) (also the PC's uncle)

While the baker was just the baker, the daughter had grown attached to Maggie, a woman in her mid 40s who sang at the Inn and told tales (6th lev warrior, 6th level thief, 5th level 1st edition bard), who she wanted to be just like.

The PCs were sent away to another village some distance away to a group of semi-retired adventurer's for training. They were told that they would have to keep moving to prevent the 'evil forces' from finding them. Along the way they picked up a ranger and half-vistani priest.

All that was background, once the training was done, the PCs were free to go where ever they wanted. They ended up buying an enclosed wagon (sort of like the ones the gypsies used) and hit the road, seeking to hide from the darkness until they grew powerful enough to return home.

All that from the background of a two session game I had run half a year before. So look to your(or another GM's) old stories for a pitch. You'd be surprised  at what you can find.

Listen to your players. Jot down notes and ideas from that.

Be enthused about your campaign. This is essential.

Pare it down to essentials and be flexible, both in pitch and campaign. You can always build more on later and most campaigns take on a life of their own organically.

Use the Motivator. Keep editing a poster until it's polished, produce multiple versions of the same basic concept. Very useful to me for both working out ideas and for pitching them to the group.

currently running:


working on the pitch for a hard to sell campaign:





(kudos to Clark Ashton Smith, William Hope Hodgson, Tsutomu Nihei, Meg Lee Chin, and PJ Harvey)

I try to be as clear as possible about what the game will be like. I'm willing to sacrifice a lot of other things like fancy graphics and neat pitch-lines to make sure the other players know what kinds of things I'm interested in doing in the game.

JimBob has a whole form that he fills out to numerically describe things for potential players, but I think he does that because he plays with a lot of different people and numbers can sometimes help people get a sense of things when you can't devote a lot of words to it. I usually play with the same group of guys, and usually the same game, so I want to explain what my idea is and how it's going to be similar or different to what we've done before and I can spend a lot of time going over it with them or changing things if they're interested in something else.

Quote from: Pseudoephedrine. JimBob has a whole form that he fills out to numerically describe things for potential players, but I think he does that because he plays with a lot of different people and numbers can sometimes help people get a sense of things when you can't devote a lot of words to it.

More because players, especially when you don't know them well, simply won't read a lot of words describing the game. But if you write a little checklist, whether it's bullet-pointed words, or words with numbers, it looks like a character sheet and players are used to reading those

Just wanted to note that I am taking this all in, and I like it a lot.