"Selling" your wacky campaign to players.

[Blue_Kryptonite]

My players consist of Wife, Teenage sons, Oldest Son's fiancee, occasional out-of-town best friend, and OOOTBF's ex-wife. I am the sole GM, so if they don't want to play it, well, they watch TV.

In actuality, though, every game world gets a debut. More than one has never made it to game night. When they do, I usually write up a small 2-5 page bullet-point document of essential world points and differences.

...I'm still trying to convince the oldest teen that Damage Save is fun instead of Hit Points, and his Fiancee "Likes X-Men, and JLA, and Spider-Man", but "Doesn't understand the genre" so she won't join us for the one in four sessions M&M game. Time will tell.

 

[Blood Jester]

I'd say do the brief write-up of key changes, and then take as many opportunities to discuss common 'uncommons' as possible in game. You might consider a session (or part there of) of 'birds-and-bees' with the players, a chat of what life is like.

To be honest, knowing you (and I'm sure your players know you much better) I'd trust you enough to give any wacky idea of yours a shot. Easy sell there.

Then again, with your skills, maybe I'd make you do a Flash movie of 'a day in the life' for your world.

Edit: how did I change colors by accident?

 

[Sir Whiskers]

What I've been doing is "leaking" ideas one at a time, to get people used to some of the more radical concepts...(snip)...
I will definitely give them some sort of "overview document" before we start play, and I would definitely recommend that, but the wackier the world, the more I advocate pre-selling before you get to that point.

After trying the whole Player's Guide thing and having the players ignore most of it, I'm going to try something along these lines. My thought is to talk to the players about the basic idea, to see what they like and dislike (I've already done this). Then as I expand on the basics, I'll continue to run some of the ideas by them to get feedback. In this way, I hope to get them attached to the campaign before it even starts, since they will have had a role in creating it. We'll see if it works.

BTW, the biggest drawback to this method is that it might detract from the current GM's campaign. Have to be very careful to avoid that...

 

[Umbran]

The Player's Guide document approach works well if your players are the sorts who read rulebooks. If they aren't, it might not get close and full attention. The other problem with the full Player's Guide approach is that it violates a fairly decent rule of GMing - don't create more than you need to. The less you have to set in stone to detail to the players before game start, the more room you leave yourself for later growth.

I personally find a "Bullet point briefing" works reasonably well, especially for the first sell. I tend to like to start my games at low level, so the characters aren't going to know every detail anyway. And a great way to simulate character ignorance is through player ignorance

 

[Emirikol]

How did you present your wacky campaign idea to players? How did you sell them on things like

I run in Hyboria. You know, the place where there are no demi-humans and spellcasters are f'ed from the start.

I sold them on how cool it was to break out of the mold. Then I stuck everything in an easy to use houserulebook with lots of pretty pictures of broads and barbarians.

One of the female players had a hard time with the no-elves part. Christ. What's the big deal about them? You've got 7000 other races in Hyboria. What makes elves so especial?

jh

 

[Chronosome]

Thanks a lot, guys. Tons of good advice.

(BJ: A Flash movie intro, eh? Hmmm...)