How To Convince Your D&D Table To Play Indie Games

How do you convince players to play more?

So you’ve got yourself a crew that you want to play with more. You’ve been playing with them a while and the energy is fantastic. They’re enjoying the game, too. At the end of the session they are breathing heavy, exclaiming, sharing their favorite moments, complimenting one another, etc. You’ve got the recipe for seeding a second game. But you don’t want to run just any game - you want to run something other than Dungeons & Dragons.

It can be difficult to get others to commit long-term for something new, so you start small. Try these strategies to open up your players to the possibility of helping you grow and expand your business, within reason. Sometimes, you might only get a game or two extra out of it - but that’s not bad. That’s good! It’s 1-2 games you would not have had previously.

Scaling takes time, effort, and you’re going to stumble a bit on the way. Build your new tables as solidly as you can to accident proof them. You have to be especially thorough in building your non-D&D game tables.

First, let’s vet your player(s) that you are going to approach. Sometimes, this is the whole table - others, it’s only 1-2 players. If you approach the wrong people before they are ready or before they are open to the idea, you will not “close” with them (make the sale). That is okay - they can come around later as long as you are not pushy.

Ideal 2nd Game Player:

• Good attitude

• Plays well with others and is charismatic

• Roleplays to include others and helps others become more engaged

• Provides you with feedback privately but is not rude

• Helps out newbies

If you have yourself one of these players, then this is a prime candidate for someone to seed your new game. From here, I always introduce a one shot or short campaign series to interrupt the current long-form campaign. e.g. We’re playing Curse of Strahd, and I run a 3 session campaign of HEART.

I pitch it to my players. Here is how:

The Indie Game Pitch

• 1 Page Player Brief

• YouTube vibe video (2-5m at most)

• Pre-gen characters

• Automation in your VTT if applicable (Foundry’s Pathfinder 2e)

• A campaign you are excited to run

Ideally you have felt things out with them for the game here and there. You’ve shared one or two things with them in your gossip period and they have expressed interest. Then, you drop the above proposal. If they accept, you post a new game listing, cancel the sessions scheduled for the block of time, and onboard your current players. You can either do this separately from the potential new joins (if your table isn’t full) or you can wait to do this on the first new session day.

From there, you’ve already done all the hard stuff. If they love the new game, you will have a much easier time opening it up on a separate day and getting some of them to bite.

Overcoming Objections

Often people do not want to be sold to directly, so you have to be indirect about it. Therefore, you need to build a list of likely objections that they will have in order to resolve them before they come up.

• Too expensive? (Charge the same price as your current game, unless you can justify a higher price.)

• Not enough time? (Run it during your current session time for a short period. They may reconsider a second game after having a ton of fun playing it.)

• Only like D&D? (This one is difficult to overcome, but you can try running D&D adjacent things or game systems that take less than 5 minutes to learn with pre-gens.)

• Don’t want to learn a new system? (Automation, cheat sheets, pre-gens, everything that gets in the way of them having fun sooner rather than later.)

Anyway, that’s that. Let me know what it is that you do to bring people in for indie games! Also, if you’d consider supporting me on Patreon, then you gain access to the exclusive pro GM community on my Discord who offers much better help than you find on the streets.