It’s hard to hold a one-sided conversation with a camera. I don’t like doing it, but it’s the done thing. The difficult part is that you have to be certain about the video’s topic, or at least be confident in your opinion, or at very least give the appearance of confidence. Because everyone feels uncertain about their D&D games sometimes, so they find comfort in some online authority or guru.

But I’m not that guy. I’m always working stuff out.

Expertise always wins (except when clickbait wins)

These are my top five videos for videos over the last 28 days. I haven’t done anything to promote these videos or my channel — it’s just raw stats from people finding me.

#1 My most popular video is where I share my “expertise” about running A Wild Sheep Chase. Because I’m good at reading and re-writing stories, I can present myself as an expert convincingly enough in this case. “I want to hear from an expert on this topic. Oh here’s one, he’ll do.” This video consistently gets more and more views.

#2 #4 #5 Since I publish all these D&D things on DriveThruRPG, it makes sense people would think I’m the expert on them. So when they have questions about my monster cards or whatever, they watch the designer’s videos. “I want to know how to print these best, so I’ll check the author’s YouTube.” Though it might have something to do with these videos being pinned to my sales pages.

#3 I think this video about initiative is click-baitish, because I don’t really know whether you can improve initiative or whether it’s even a problem, so it’s a big claim to say, “Hey! Initiative is bad and it’s always been bad and I have the solution!” I don’t know anything about balance or game design, just what’s fun for me, but here I am pretending to be an expert, and for some reason that must resonate a little bit.

Areas I am actually an expert in

• Stories (from my degree)
• Layout design (from my work)
• Video games (from my hobbies)

That’s it. So if I can skew my videos generally towards D&D content featuring stories or layout or video games, they might perform better. Who knows! I’m going to touch on this topic again in a few months after I implement some of these ideas and collect a little more data.