Dice and Demonstrations: Winning!

It’s time to talk about success, and what it means. This is one where GMs and Sales Engineers are working towards a very similar goal: Not “beating” your audience, but working together with them so that both sides get what they want.

Running a game means that, above everything else, I want to tell a story that moves forward, typically with a group of players who want to be the heroes in that same story. That means that I’m not in opposition to their goals, ideally, but it’s my job to point out the struggles along that path, and guide them through those struggles.

The difference, of course, is that my job as an SE involves showing, telling, and even selling the solutions that I have available. It’s tremendously helpful, but narratively less satisfying than those moments where a player finds an avenue that I hadn’t considered, instead! In fact, in my most recent session, I had this: A moment in which a player came up with a solution so innovative, so unexpected, that I needed to call for a brief break, letting my players grab some refreshments, while I worked out how to incorporate their idea into a new solution. This wasn’t something to be punished, or held back, but instead, I sought to elaborate on it, to fit things together in a way that made sense and satisfied everyone.

The way that this works, however? It’s all about attitude. I don’t go into a session assuming defeat. I don’t prepare myself under the assumption that I’m going to be outsmarted, and I don’t hand those players a victory just because they want to win. Just like on a pitch, on any demonstration, in every meeting, I enter the room with singular belief: I can walk out of here with a win. It doesn’t matter if I’m up against an incumbent solution, if the deck is stacked against me. If I’m in the room, someone got me in there. Someone thought I was worth your time. Someone convinced you to hear me out. Maybe it was me, maybe it was my rep, maybe it was my customers’ trusted technical advisors.

It doesn’t matter who, it matters that you have an audience, and the last thing I’ve ever wanted to do is take that audience and assume that I was wasting their time. Time is valuable! It’s money, it’s an opportunity to get something else done, and that’s just as important for a hobby as it is for the workplace. Who wants to waste time doing something they don’t like? At the end of the day, it’s my responsibility to entertain and educate, and that means that I have to go in, every time, with the confidence that I know what I’m doing, and that I can guide my audience into a satisfying outcome.

The alternative is to come in assuming the worst, to grovel for attention, and to carry an air of defeated desperation that doesn’t come off well in front of your audience. Even if they consider themselves the most important person in the room— and they are, they’re your audience!— they’re not there to watch you beg for scraps. They’re not there to demand your fealty, and if they are? Then you have to start to ask yourself why you’re at that table. In order to win, you need to find an audience who’s just as invested in winning, or you need to get them there. Sometimes, you won’t get there. There are some people you can’t reach, some opportunities you can’t navigate, some players who didn’t pay attention to the game as described and would rather do something else, and that’s fine! Everyone has different preferences, perspectives, and priorities, and sometimes you’re just going to need to take a step back and either point them to an alternative solution… or regroup and look for a different path to victory.

But above all else, you’ve got to be flexible, understanding, and aware that just because you saw a specific path to your win, be it the players beating the Big Bad, or claiming that Technical Win, it doesn’t mean that it’s the path you’re going to follow.

Dice and Demonstrations: On Stories

As a Game Master and a Sales Engineer, I’m a storyteller. I’d say that’s the main thrust of this series, but there’s one question that comes up from time to time, and it bears answering in both realms:

How do I come up with these things?

The simplest answer: To tell stories, you need to consume stories. Reading, watching, listening, it all helps. Whenever you have the opportunity to see your peers at work? Take it. Watch how someone else tells a technical story— even one that has nothing to do with your offering. Sometimes, you’ll learn a thing or two about style. About efficiency. About something as simple as a slide transition. If they’re working on the same product offering as you? Maybe they know something you don’t. Maybe they just make a point that you never thought of. Either way, you’ll quickly find yourself comparing notes, adopting what works for you, and sometimes learning that what you’ve been doing the whole time doesn’t work for you.

When telling stories? I can go on about mythology and common tales, but that’s something that I can boil down as this: Whatever story you want to tell is going to pull from the stories that you remember the best. This isn’t due to a lack of imagination, but rather, an abundance of inspiration. If you watched Game of Thrones, you’re probably to tell a fantasy story with political intrigue and brutal stakes. If Star Wars is more your thing? Well, Lucas famously pulled from both Akira Kurosawa and Flash Gordon.

This is where your own flavor will come from, though. If you only watched Rashomon, The Hidden Fortress, and Seven Samurai, your work won’t quite resemble Star Wars, even if you add in blasters and lightsabers. Likewise, if all you ever knew were the old Flash Gordon serials, all you’re likely to tell is another Flash Gordon story. The trick is to learn from everything, from everyone, to get your hands on a variety of stories, because at the end of the day, we’re all cooking with the same ingredients. Sometimes, we’re even cooking with the same spices.

The trick is in your preparation, your style. In taking various things and taking a taste of each of them, finding what you like, and experimenting. There’s nothing wrong in standing on the shoulders of giants, and in fact, it’s better if you change those giants every so often, and in so doing, add new perspectives to your process.

How To Run A Tabletop Roleplaying Game Like A Sales Engineer: On Authenticity

If there’s one thing I’ve definitely seen in savvy buyers, it’s that they can sense a bad deal. They’ll know when you’re presenting something that you don’t actually believe in. The tells are complicated, of course, and often subjective, but the I’ve definitely spoken with customers who have been skeptical about either my offerings, or those of my competition. Generally speaking? I prefer to be a straight-shooter about that. If I believe in what I’m offering, if I’m convinced that I can solve your problem with what I’m offering, I can get around those reservations handily.

In short, Objection Handling is easy when you’re not objecting to yourself.

So it goes at the game table, too: I rarely run high-fantasy games, opting for stories more in the space opera/science fiction range. It’s a bit more of a niche, one that often requires a bit more explaining about how the world works. Players are used to fantasy, after all. Lord of the Rings, Dungeons and Dragons, they’re not “all the same,” but they tend to operate with a common set of tropes that make it straightforward to figure out who you want to be in the story. People know what to expect, and can pivot quickly within the lanes offered.

But here’s the thing: While I could run a high-fantasy campaign with orcs and elves and magic and “everybody meets in a tavern,” my heart isn’t in it. I prefer to tell stories in an alternate, fantastic future instead of an alternate, fantastic past. I like to explore how science can impact the human condition, how the world would respond and change with the introduction of new ideas, and I can tell those sorts of stories all day.

So, why be someone I’m not? Why be inauthentic, and why sell something that you don’t believe in? It’s a lot of time spent doing something that I wouldn’t enjoy, and trying to convince other people that they should enjoy it as well. Instead, I wear my storytelling allegiances on my sleeve. I bring enthusiasm to the table, excitement, and a tendency to have thought through enough of the world I’m presenting that the enthusiasm is often infectious.

Likewise, when I handle Technical Sales, I’d like to think that I bring that same enthusiasm: I remember which challenges burdened my and my team the most when I worked in Operations. I remember where I wish I had a magic wand to make certain problems go away. So when I’m offering something, when I’m on board to push a solution? It’s because I see a problem, I see how I think it can best be solved, and I’m bringing that story to the customer’s table.

They say to find out what your customer wants, and that’s true. But one shouldn’t forget at the end of the day, you’re your own first customer. If you can’t be authentic to yourself, how can you ever expect your customers to feel like they can trust you?

How To Run A Tabletop Roleplaying Game Like A Sales Engineer: On AI and Large Language Models

Let me open with this: LLMs are a dead end. That doesn’t make them bad, but it does mean that one should bear in mind that they’re limited. You just need to know how to use them. One use case that came up a lot was using them to generate correspondence for customers. On the surface, it makes sense: For some people, wordsmithing takes more time than they have. It’s like a muscle that requires regular training, and sometimes, you just need to get the job done. They are, after all, large language models. They’re trained on more works than most people will ever read, so they’re going to be very good at working with that information.

While I’m not that sort of LLM user, I have found a pretty solid use case, specifically with Google’s NotebookLM. See, I own a lot of rulebooks in PDF format. I’ve paid for them, they’re mine, and that’s great, but even though I’ve read them all, studied the rules and suggestions they provide, my recall isn’t perfect. It’s good, but it’s not perfect.

Enter the world of a private LLM. Instead of relying on a bunch of bookmarks and transcribing notes into a format that works for me, why not upload everything to my own, custom model? Instead of going to a public LLM, why not make one that uses everything good, and discards the worst problem in them: those cases where you get inaccurate data back?

So, that’s where I’ve gone. The Game Master’s Assistant. If I don’t know every rule, I ask. If I need to check some obscure ability in a sea of books, I can just throw it at the AI, and get an answer back. And the best part? I’ve asked it unanswerable questions. I’ve gotten the terminology completely wrong, and it tells me the same thing I’ll tell a customer when I don’t have a good answer:

”I don’t know.”

When I do that, I’m not admitting weakness. It’s a call to action to find the answer. When the AI does it? It’s not going to make up an answer, either. It may not be able to tell me that answer, but it definitely saves me time. I can ask, I can usually get this little robot brain sitting up on GCP to get me some answers, and most importantly, it means that we can get back to having fun.

I don’t fear AI. I’m not worried about LLMs replacing me. But it helps to remember the dream, as quoted by Joanna Maciejewska:

”I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for AI to do my art and writing so that I can do my laundry and dishes.”