Rolling for Initiative is a weekly column by Scott Thorne, PhD, owner of Castle Perilous Games & Books in Carbondale, Illinois and instructor in marketing at Southeast Missouri State University.  This week, Thorne looks at several in-store promotional efforts.

I thought about following up last week's column with ways for customers to get themselves asked not to come back to stores, but decided to keep that for another column.  Believe me, there are ways you can do it, though.

I'm following up our bounce-back coupon promotional strategy from International TableTop Day, wherein we gave players in various games over the day a coupon good for $1 off a game featured on the TableTop series on the following weekend, the idea being that customers would return the following weekend or "bounce back" to use the coupon.  Given the number of coupons we gave out, I would have considered 5-10 of them turned in a successful application of the strategy.  Unfortunately, we received a grand total of 1 (one).  Ah, well, there is always Free RPG Day (you do know about Free RPG Day, right?).

The lack of success with that promotion got me thinking about a couple of other promotions coming up from game companies.  As you might have noticed on ICV2, Paizo Publishing has announced the Pathfinder Society Quests program, releasing a Pathfinder Society adventure tied to the company's next hardback release (see "Paizo Launches New Hobby OP Initiative").

Normally new Pathfinder Society adventures are available to all Pathfinder Society groups to run.  These are only available to retail stores that have registered with Paizo and submitted a photo proving the existence of a brick and mortar location, with the first not releasing to general Pathfinder Society play until after PaizoCon in late May.  The idea is to move Pathfinder Society players into stores to play the Quest rather than playing it at libraries, schools, homes or what have you, and get them to buy the books tied to it.

Of course, once the players come into the store, it rests upon the store to sell them the particular products and, unfortunately, Paizo's subscription program does give an inducement to players to sign up and purchase their products directly from Paizo.  Paizo developing a program such as Wizards of the Coast's early release of books to stores that have registered as members of the WPN or a Bits 'n Mortar program allowing stores to give away PDFs of a book with the purchase of a print copy would go a long way towards making it easier for stores to sell Pathfinder products.

As it stands, the Quest program will get PFS players into the store but offers them no additional inducement to buy.  Case in point, we had Pathfinder Society players in the store all day today but the only RPG stuff sold was D&D 5th Edition.

Another promotional program rolling out this week is the AsmoPlay program, which I discussed a few weeks ago.  Very nice idea (see "Rolling for Initiative--To OP or Not to OP…") but stores are committed to buying all three of the kits which contain two of each of the games in the program:  Splendor, Cash ‘n Guns and 7 Wonders, along with assorted promo items.  The problem is, and why we decided to pass on it, most stores don't need two copies of a game in their game demo library.  Multiple copies are useful if you want to run a tournament, which Asmodee encourages stores to do with the kits, but honestly, more stores would make use of a single copy for demos rather than finding storage space for 6 games that we cannot sell.

I really like the idea of promotions targeted at getting people into stores and there are some interesting ones coming up.  Did I mention Free RPG Day?

The opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the writer, and do not necessarily reflect the views of the editorial staff of ICv2.com.