Christopher Kalos

Technology, Hobbies, and New Ideas

An avid techie since childhood, I've finally decided that it's time to establish my own presence on the web, as opposed to outsourcing it to a bunch of social network pages.

Here you'll find musings, my professional history, and anything that catches my interest.

As will become obvious as this page grows, I'm an Apple user, through and through:  When I work, I use the best tools for the job.  Sometimes that's Microsoft-based, sometimes it's Apple-based, and often, it's Linux-based.  Once I'm at home, though, I find that comfort, simplicity, and ease of use trump all of the flexibility in the world.   

Cool counts for a lot.  Simplicity counts for a lot more.

 

How To Run A Tabletop Roleplaying Game Like A Sales Engineer: Underpromise and (Ideally) Overdeliver

July 22, 2024  /  Christopher Kalos

Once I had the routine lined up, I had to answer the next question: What’s on the truck? What’s my product?

In my case, right now, it’s a bit of a loving mashup of homages to various bits of pop culture. At first, just a couple of franchises that I realized could exist in a shared world… and then I kept going. It’s ambitious. It’s messy. It’s incredibly self-indulgent. But there’s the thing, isn’t it? I knew what it was, and I knew that it wasn’t going to be to everyone’s taste.

Now, imagine my surprise when the door got kicked in by my players. I actually ended up with a great problem: I have more demand than supply. At one campaign, one party of players, there’s an upper limit to just how many people I can accommodate, and I have players who want in, but just can’t spare the time. There’s really two reasons for that. The obvious is that I just might be offering something uniquely interesting. The other one is that when I talk about it, I speak with confidence. I know what I’m offering. I’m passionate about it. And more? I know what I’m not offering.

It’s challenging to bring a customer away from a particular pattern of doing things. You can bring in numbers, you can talk speeds and feeds, and you can run the slickest demo they’ve ever seen, but at the end of the day, you need to compete with institutional inertia. Customers don’t switch to a competing solution overnight, and when they do, there are inevitably questions. If you told them that you can do all the same things that their current solution can do, and you can’t, you’re going to erode trust. You’ll eventually lose that audience, because your credibility comes into question.

Now, if you know what you can’t, won’t, or just plain-out shouldn’t do, the best thing to do is to direct your customer away from that. Maybe they had a workflow that ignores Best Practices for that area of technology. Maybe Best Practices changed. Instead of ignoring that? Face it head on. Tell your customers what you don’t think your product should do. Find out what results they want, and see if you can deliver on those same results. Focus on outcomes, not on features, and you’ll build up credibility when you prove it in the delivery.

That’s how I introduced my players to their story. I was asked a few questions, and some of them made me think: “Can I fit this into the story?” There were a lot of cases where I said yes, but likewise, I explained when I said no. The concept didn’t hit the flavor, typically. I was going for contemporary heroism, and some ideas fell more into post-apocalyptic horror. It’s not a bad genre, it’s not even a bad idea to see what you will or won’t blend together! But if you’re telling a story, and your heart isn’t in it… then what are you delivering? Can you really put your all into something that you don’t believe in? Do you have a vision in which that chapter can fit?

In the end, if you acknowledge the advantages and the constraints of what you’re offering, your confidence will show. You’ll know precisely what it is you’re trying to do, and when you mix confidence and credibility, you build a connection. In one case, with your customer, and in the other, with your players. In the end, that’s still an audience that’s invested in the story you’re telling, and one much more likely to ask for more.

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