Doctors hate this one weird trick.

The shocking truth behind bread.

He looked under his daughter’s bed. You won’t believe what he found.

The internet is full of clickbait headlines. One would think that we’re all too smart for them, but let’s be honest – they exist for a reason.

But what can we learn from them, as Game Masters?

(You know, other than what that one weird trick is.)

If you get my daily emails, you know that before you ever see what’s inside of one, you see the subject line.

(and if you don’t get them, you should be)

Now from a marketing perspective, the subject line has one really big job – getting you to open the email. Whenever I write one, I have this in mind.

Some folks might get a bit of ick from that. Isn’t it manipulative? No more so than any story ever written. If something is written well, each piece of it makes you want to read the next one.

A really good example of this was the Da Vinci code. Say what you want about it, but each piece of the book was designed to set up a question that the next chapter answered. It was a trail of curiosity bread crumbs that made you feel good when you hit the resolution, only to hit you with the next one.

Ultimately, the reason these click bait headlines work is because they’re a mystery. They peak your curiosity. Look, I wanna know what that trick is that doctors hate. I eat bread all the time – is it killing me? Did dad find jars of toenail clippings? I don’t know, BUT I WANNA KNOW!

These are all great hooks! I’d argue that the best RPG campaigns are just a string of great hooks themselves. One leads to the next, and so on and so forth, until the players answer the ultimate mystery.

“You can hear scratching from the other side of the door.”

*PCs open the door, find zombie, kill zombie.*

“Now that the zombie is dead, you see the pendant it wears. There’s a face with tentacles on it emblazoned upon the jewelry.”

*PCs take pendant, carry it through the dungeon until they find a mindflayer.*

“The mindflayer holds a gnarled stick, topped with a small, alien skull.”

*The mindflayer uses the staff to raise zombies.*

Each of those examples has a point of curiosity. Each “answer” leads the PCs to the next point of curiosity. It’s a chain and it’ll keep the players guessing. (What’s with the alien skull? I wanna know!)

This is what all good storytelling does. This is what a good sales page does. It’s definitely what a good dungeon does.

Everything is storytelling – it’s all just different formats and mediums.

Talk soon,

-James