Preparing your campaign: The Elevator Pitch

So you want to run a campaign. You tell your gaming group that it's going to be a sci fi adventure using Savage Worlds and they should make up some novice level characters. You meet for the first session and they enthusiastically describe their characters to you. Bob has a tough colonial marine type, Fred is playing a pacifist Vulcan scientist and Jane is playing a Jedi with no light sabre but a stack of magical powers. How, you wonder, will this work with hard sci fi Apollo 13 style scenario that you had planned? 

The problem here was that everyone has a different idea of sci fi.  All four people are referencing different bits of the genre and you've got ideas that are likely to conflict with each other. This is perhaps a slightly extreme example but many GMs just tell their players a genre and a ruleset and find that they run into difficulties later on because the game they want to play is not the same as the ones their players want.

The way to avoid this is to be clear about what you want to do from the start. This is where the elevator pitch comes in.  For me, this is the first and most critical stage in preparing a campaign. It's also helpful, although perhaps less vital, in creating a one shot adventure.  In case you haven't heard the term before, the idea of an elevator pitch is that you are in an elevator with someone important and have 30 seconds to sell them your idea, whatever that happens to be. The pitch needs to be clear concise and intriguing  So in terms of organising a campaign, it's a short description that gives the listener a good idea of what it's going to be about.  Sometimes a single sentence is enough. Some examples from campaigns I've run might include:

• "Star Trek meets Ridley Scott's Aliens."
• "Become a knight and rule a barony in the service of the king or the church."
• "Hard-bitten LAPD detectives take on cybernetically enhanced criminals in the near future."
• "A Game of Thrones with Elves and Dwarves and you need to put a member of your House on the throne."
• "Drive out the Dragon from the Elven homeland so they can return from their exile."
• "Star Wars before the Rebel Alliance appeared."

And a couple of example from one-shot games I've run:

• "It's Firefly and you're doing a job for Mr Niska."
• "You're ministers in the British government who uncover Cthulhu secrets, go mad and die."

Why is this helpful? Several reasons. One, you need to get clear in your mind about what kind of campaign you want to run. After all, if you don't know what you want to do in your campaign, how will the players know? It also allows you to establish the tone of the game; I find TV, film and book references helpful for this as they give people common points of reference. Keep in mind that if you're using a well established setting then players will expect certain things. For example, in Star Wars I would expect space fights, lightsaber duels and smugglers.  In Star Trek I would be anticipating more investigation and ethical dilemmas.  Both are sci fi but they are pretty different in tone and style.

Your pitch will probably also suggest how linear or sandboxy your campaign will be.  Some people have a strong preference for one or the other so it's wise to think about this early on.  You'll see that some of the above examples have a specific objective, others don't and in my experience both types of game can be good fun. Sandbox style games need plenty of interesting things for the players to do otherwise they end up drifting and people get bored. A more linear game with a specific objectives gives the player characters a goal to work towards and a sense of accomplishment when they achieve it, but they need to feel that they are actively shaping the story and are not simply puppets in the GM's pre-written novel.

An elevator pitch has another important task: it helps you find out if your players are interested in playing the game you want to run before you start prepping.  Yes, you could just announce that you're going to run that awesome My Little Pony RPG you bought last week but your players might not want to play it.  If they're your friends they may start the campaign for your sake but you'll likely run into problems.  People may start skipping sessions or the ponies might turn out to rather more violent than normal in the genre... 

Role playing is a cooperative hobby and it makes sense to find a game that everyone wants to play before you invest your time and energy in planning the campaign.  Just because you have a cool idea for a campaign doesn't mean it's going to work with your particular group of players at that particular moment. This doesn't necessarily mean it's a bad idea but it may simply  not catch their enthusiasm.  Sometimes the reasons for this are obvious, after all, if your group has just finished a long Pathfinder campaign they may not want to play another epic fantasy campaign right away, regardless of how neat the idea is. Sometimes people are just not interested and the reason why isn't really clear.

What I find best is to have a couple of ideas to put to my players before I do any serious prepping for the game.  I do this in a pretty informal way, usually chatting in the pub after the game. I talk about ideas I have for future games and see what people latch on to and also what they don't think will be fun.  I'm sure I've avoided some serious flops by doing this. For example, when I watched the first season of Sons of Anarchy on DVD I really wanted to run a campaign based on it.  Unfortunately none of my players were interested in motorcycle clubs or the TV show itself.  I also struggled to work out how to translate the TV show into an RPG, I just couldn't work out what I wanted to do in the campaign.  Happily I had other ideas, one of which grabbed the others interest and we did that instead.  We had a blast.

Keep in mind that one of the secrets to being a good GM is avoiding the obvious mistakes! Role-playing games run on the enthusiasm of the people involved.  Always find a campaign that both you and your players all want to play before you start and you're already halfway to running a fun game.

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