Make a Pitch

In the very beginning of creating a new chronicle, campaign, or heck, even a one-shot, **make a pitch** to your players about your ideas for an upcoming game - you need them to 'buy in' for what you're planning.

If you skip this step out of ignorance, convenience, or lazyness, things will very likely fall apart pretty soon anyways, so you should really try to get everyone on board for what's going to happen in your game.

(If nothing else, this prevents players from showing up for some cool Wild West high-noon shoot-outs gameplay, when really the GM is planning lengthy scheming and intrigues between Indian tribes vs railroad companies vs local Luddite settlers, complete with politics double-crossings and deep shit....)

**How to make a good pitch:**

Since early-stage chronicle building is (for me) mostly about what style elements (as broad as that term can be understood, I mostly think about genre elements, mood and themes) to include and how to combine (compare, contrast, align, support...) them, I would see the best advice here being: **Identify what the important style elements are, for you, in your head-movie of the upcoming game,** ***and make the chronicle about those***. And tell everyone you're doing it.

This is where it becomes important to Communicate Openly and Honestly, since you want player expectations to be as spot-on as you can get them - this way, you can be sure that everyone who shows up for the game, is actually here for the same thing.

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**Problem Games:**

Some games are deceitful about this. They may seem as if no pitch was necessary for them, since "everyone knows what to expect from a game of \_\_\_\_\_\_ anyways" or similar sentiments.

These are usually the 'big ones'. Yeah, you know 'em - D&D, Shadowrun, Vampire... the ones where everybody seems to know exactly what they are about (and how to play them) - but that usually allow for a shit-ton of playstyles (and player expectations) in practice.

I'd say that *especially* these games need a precise pitch. You could in fact play social drama, combat grind, urban dystopia, transhumanist philosophical soul searching, megacorporational greed and corruption, or gonzo adventurism in the Shadowrun setting alone. And even without going to such (relative) narrative extremes, expectations can and will vary between various players who have had various exposure to any given game's background and/or rules. (One person may have heard almost nothing about D&D except that it has orcs and elves and leads to hilarious and bizarre situations between adventurers and monsters, while another may envision it as the ideal vehicle to finally live out all their old-school Sword and Sorcery fetish for grit and gore... good luck making both of those happy in the same chronicle without some advance talking to)

Examples:

It was a good thing our Vampire the Masquerade GM told us explicitly that his game was not to be about "diablerizing yourselves to the top", and neither would very many ancient vampires feature (if any). He wanted to go for a more low-scale approach, with e.g. an 8-th generation European Tremere being a BIG FUCKING DEAL for the characters, and no trace of Methuselahs or Antedeluvians anywhere in sight. The whole Caine myth was played way down in that chronicle. It was not a problem at all, we were kept busy enough (by far!) by local politics (=intrigues and backstabbing) of mostly less than 400-year-old kindred and had many intense and satisfying sessions. But it was good to get the players on board for that early on. Else the players might have gotten it "wrong" without a chance of knowing it, and the GM might have had to deal with constant distractions by players pulling in different, potentially unwelcome directions...