Finding Collaborators When You’re New
Project Management for TTRPGs
TL;DR: In this post, I explain how I found collaborators for Encounters in the Radiant Citadel as a brand-new creator with few connections in the TTRPG writing space.
This is part of a series on Project Management for TTRPGs. Stay up-to-date on this series by subscribing to this newsletter:
The Most Important Choice
The most important choice you make for a project is who to work with. Whatever your flaws as a project lead might be, if you can find good people, attract them to your project, and ensure they enjoy working for you, you have 80% of the skills of a good lead. Conversely, if you can’t do these things, that’s something to reflect on and fix. In this post I’m going to talk about:
Finding good people
Attracting them to your project
Questions to Ask Yourself
I’ve been trying to write this post for a while, and it kept becoming huge (I might end up writing an offshoot post about networking or interviewing people). Here’s what I’ve settled on as actionable advice. When you’re looking for collaborators, ask yourself these questions:
What roles do you need to fill?
You’ve written a Project Plan. Look at the section on Roles and Responsibilities: what different team roles do you need to fill? This will inform your answers to these other questions. For this post, I’m going to talk about finding writers – and for your first collaborative project, finding co-writers and editors is a great place to start.
What process will you use?
Will you put a call for collaborators in the networks you’re a part of and see who is interested? Are you going to make an application and encourage folks to apply? Are you going to reach out to individual creators and ask if they want to join your project?
Where are you going to find people?
Are you going to ask friends? Folks you play games with? Twitter? Discord servers? As someone who was new to the TTRPG writing scene, this was the hardest question for me to answer. I wasn’t active in any of the digital communities. I had a few friends who I knew might be interested but none of them were serious about writing for TTRPGs full-time. If this is the position you’re in, here are a few suggestions:
Read the processes I used in the example below 👇. I honestly think it’s the one new, extremely smart idea I had about TTRPG management (all of my other extremely smart ideas I learned from working on other projects 😉)
A lot of creators congregate in Discord servers – but often you need an invite to get in. For example, this is true of the DMsGuild Discord server. Three easy-to-access options are the Roll20 | DriveThru Discord (meant for folks publishing TTRPG content on DriveThruRPG), The Rising Tide Discord (a newbie-friendly community for TTRPG professionals), and the RPG Writer Workshop Discord (if you take one of their courses, joining the Discord is part of the process).
Game Jams (itch.io is a great place to find these), conventions, and playtesting are great ways to meet folks that are interested in making games, not just playing them.
Who do you want to work with?
Remember when I said ‘Who you choose to work with is the most important decision you’ll make’? Well, when you’re reaching out to strangers on the internet, it’s sometimes hard to tell whether they are good. “Good” is also subjective but a few qualities to think about:
What are this person’s professional goals and commitment? Are they creating as a hobby or are they interested in writing professionally? Do their goals match yours?
Are they kind? Is this a person you’re comfortable being creative with?
Do they follow instructions and take feedback?
Are they communicative and timely?
What does their unedited writing look like? Work published through TTRPG companies often goes through an editor.
Do they have other skills or community connections that bring something to your project?
Figuring out the answers to these questions is hard for folks you don’t know well; it’s why larger employers tend to hire via recommendation or hire the same freelancers over and over again. But with a little bit of elbow grease, you can learn some of this from portfolios and social media presence.
How are you going to convince them to work with you?
If you’re running an application process, your pitch for your project will be part of your call for applications. If you're reaching directly out to collaborators, it’ll likely be in an email or DM. The important thing here is that you’re not only selling your idea, you’re selling you. See all those questions about determining whether a person is “good” to work with? You should display those things about yourself (and your project). Be kind. Be communicative (share your project documentation and payment information upfront). Talk about the other skills you bring to the project. Share your own portfolio, writing, and projects, so that folks have faith in your ability to follow through and finish work. See Setup a Minimal Online Presence for more thoughts on this.
Example: How I Found Collaborators
After taking a few Storytelling Collective classes, I realized that writing was fun, but if I kept working alone, I’d burn out. I decided to organize a group project. I’d also recently completed the Spring 2022 Write Your First Encounter (WYFE) workshop and thought that I could organize a similar encounter bundle but on a smaller scale. I came up with a project plan and then it was time to find collaborators. This project eventually became Encounters in the Radiant Citadel.
Here’s how I answered the questions above.
What roles do you need to fill?
I decided to look for additional writers who would also be responsible for editing other collaborators' work. I knew I could handle the layout and art for the project. I really wanted to find creative collaborators who were interested in adventure writing and game design.
What process will you use?
I briefly considered making an application or doing an open call for collaborators on the RPG Writer Workshop discord - the only TTRPG writing discord I was a part of at the time. I ultimately decided I wanted to reach out to writers directly. I was new to the scene but I wanted to be picky. I worried the folks I’d most want to work with wouldn’t see an open call for applications or wouldn’t apply because I had very little TTRPG “street cred”.
When you ask folks to apply or contact you, they must approach you. You require some of their energy and time to even get the conversation started. They open themselves up to being “rejected” by you. On the other hand, if you reach out to potential collaborators, that dynamic is flipped – suddenly you are the one who expends energy reaching out to them, who expresses interest in them and their work. Ultimately this could convince folks who otherwise wouldn’t have known or considered applying to work with you.
Where are you going to find people?
One of the single most successful things I did for Encounters was my approach to finding my collaborators.
As I mentioned, I took the Spring 2022 WYFE course. At the end of the class, I got a pdf of the one-page encounters everyone had written. I had 80+ writing samples, written recently, by folks who had enough interest in TTRPG writing that they took a class and finished an encounter.
I treated this as my “pool” of possible collaborators. I read through all 80+ encounters without knowing who the writers were. I gave a rating to each one. In the end, I had identified about 17 encounters that I really liked. This was the group of folks I was considering working with.
I also reached out to friends, a few of whom were published creators, to see if they were interested in collaborating. The way that I met my TTRPG friends varies; I’ve been playing for years and love introducing new folks to the hobby. The two replicable ways I found or created TTRPG community were attending conventions in 2019 and hosting an indie TTRPG book club called AARG (Adventurous Roleplaying Game Group). If you’re curious about AARG, you can read an example of my pitch to my friends here.
Who do you want to work with?
The nice thing about looking at WYFE authors was that I knew every one of them had a base level of TTRPG writing follow-through: they had all taken a course and completed a well-written encounter in a month. I could also assess what their “unedited” writing looked like. I was fairly certain nobody had sought out professional editing help on these one-page encounters.
After narrowing down the authors based on writing quality, I tried to figure out who the authors were to determine the following:
Does this person write TTRPGs consistently or professionally? I looked for an easy-to-find web presence, whether they had a portfolio, and whether they’d published anything else.
Do they have other skills or community connections? Some of the encounters had custom layouts, art, or maps. Some credited playtesters or other help, showing that they had a community of folks supporting them. Some folks had large social followings. Some of their websites listed other skills, such as editing experience.
Are they communicative and kind? I looked briefly at the online discussions they participated in. I looked for how engaged they were and whether they were helpful. I remembered the folks I had had editing trades with during WYFE.
In the end, I had six folks I decided to reach out to, and another five alternates.
How are you going to convince them to work with you?
Now the scary bit; I had to pitch myself and the project to these six strangers.
Friday (@isfridayTV) has a great post on her Substack Dollars & Dragons about how she convinced collaborators to join the Vineyard team (it also helped that she is a staunch supporter of paying freelancers a living wage). The pitch email I sent was similar. Here’s a rough approximation of what it looked like:
Here’s what to include:
I like Quick Summaries or TL;DRs so readers can understand immediately what is being asked and decide whether they are interested.
Talk genuinely about why you’re excited about them as a creator.
Show a clear, concise vision for the project.
Share basic information about the project:
Dates
Collaborator responsibilities
Payment/Compensation (you can read more about paying folks here)
Make a case for why you are an exciting person to work with. Offer up samples of your work and writing. In my case, I also said I would handle the layout and upload the final product to DMsGuild.
Include next steps: make it clear by when and how they should respond if they are interested.
In the end, five out of the six folks I reached out to said yes. I sent a similar email to my friends and four of them ended up joining the project.
Lessons Learned
My biggest takeaway from putting together the team is that working with a mix of friends and strangers is hard. A friendship is usually informal, versus a work relationship, which involves pay, an output of content, etc. I did a fairly good job of setting expectations about the time commitment and seriousness around deadlines. But there was extra emotional work in changing the nature of the relationship and being firm with friends about deadlines.
From the point of view of the collaborators, mixing friends and strangers brings into question whether my friends had more access, favoritism, or leniency from me, the lead. A lot of issues can be mitigated with enough communication, but it takes the extra work of proactively communicating and checking in with folks.
The larger issue, and I’ve heard this from other creators who have worked with friends, is a mismatch in goals. This is true for anyone you work with, but often a close friendship with someone can make you overlook a goal mismatch. While you might be trying to make it as a professional TTRPG creator, if your friend is not, that’s something to be aware of and consider. Your time might be better spent meeting and practicing working with folks who actually have a chance of becoming long-term creative collaborators.
Conclusion
My collaborators were awesome. Taking the time to find creatives that I jived with was so important.
At the top of the post I said: if you can find good people, attract them to your project, and ensure they enjoy working for you, you have 80% of the skills of a good lead. Well, I’ve covered finding and attracting people, so next we’ll tackle making sure teammates enjoy working for you. And a great way to start is with good onboarding, which is what I plan to cover next.
In other news, Big Bad Con is gearing up, with submissions, volunteer sign-ups, hotel booking, and scholarship applications open. If you like indie TTRPGS and can make it out to the San Francisco Bay Area, I highly recommend it! You can read more about my experience last year here and here.
As a side note, I’m taking May off to visit Japan for the first time in 10 years. I might try to post something small about inspirational game mechanics or it might be a bit quiet here for a few weeks. As always, thanks for reading!
And thank you to the talented Poorna Mazumdar for providing feedback on and editing this post. Poorna’s a writer, editor, and project manager in the TTRPG space. You can follow her work here or on the bird app here.
Over and out,
- 🫙 👁️ 👁️