Rent-A-DM

Lockridge said:

Good post Delericho,
I think you covered everything. One question though: is that $30 per player or per group?

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Per group. If one player wants to pay for everyone, or the group wants to do a collection, that's their business. As long as I get paid, I'm not bothered.

Edit: I should have mentioned - obviously, if there's a larger group, each player pays less. However, if the group becomes very large, the quality of the game is likely to suffer. Therefore, if the group size goes above 6, I will warn the players that this is likely to impact on quality. If they choose to go ahead, that's their prerogative. More than likely, I simply won't take on a group of more than 8 players... since I know that that is the absolute limit at which I can run a good game. Either way, since each person is paying less, and since I have given the warning at a likely reduction in quality, I would be comfortable with this arrangement.

delericho said:

If I'm being paid, then it's a job, and I'll treat it as such. This means being fully prepared, arriving on time, being polite and professional, and basically doing everything in my power to ensure the group have a good time... and it means charging real money for my services.

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The idea here is to get someone who runs a really good game, and more importantly a really good demo game, and thus suck newcomers into the hobby. As we all know, the single best advert for D&D is to play it with a really solid group, so there it is.

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You've hit on a couple of good points. The first I'd say is a must and kind of goes without saying. Second, I think part of the idea is to get the players hooked. I know when the next disk for 24 arrives from Netflix I abandon all self-control and know I'm going to be watching all four episodes because I gotta know what happens next!

I think the same principle has to apply to adventures. Each adventure in the path is an episode that while it has a beginning, middle, and end, leaves the players wanting more and wondering what happens next.

Basiclly, the Pro-GM is the drug dealer, the game is the substance of your choice, and the players become addicts. Hey, you know, I think the first game should always be free.

Honestly...we're pretty much doing this now with adventure paths. Instead of hiring someone to run the game we're paying someone to plot out an entire campaign for us.

Other than time spent reading and making our own modifications we've pretty much payed someone to DM for us. 90% of DM'ing is prep..the rest is making sure the game flows and answering questions.

Ah, but a custom adventure is an enhanced experience!

I've had a standing offer for years. Pay my plane fare, put me up, feed me, and give me a bottle of good scotch, bourbon or wine for my troubles and I'll DM. Almost got someone to take me up on this!

The games at GenCon are actually "paid" DMing. Though it's much lower rate (basically admission or a refund) and you're an independant contractor to the convention.

I don't know. The concept seems sorta .... iffy. :\

If you help for room, board and transport, hey I'm game.

Professional DM for rent!

I don't get paid to DM. Monetary payment is so...mundane. I much prefer my current compensation. Offerings of chocolate at my dice altar and prayers from my hapless minions not to kill them.

Community Centres will often pay you to DM (in Canada) but the players are ususally awful children.

Honestly, when the community Centre approached me (via my friend Paul, who was their activities director), the 15 dollars an hour was not a prime motivator.

I was in my "RPG Missionary" phase and thought I was--through the medium of my admittedly awesome GMing skills--going to be bringing in a whole new crop of gamers to the hobby.

The reality of it is that the experience pretty much soured me on the idea of "Gaming with Strangers", "Gaming with Youngsters" and hell, even "Gaming with the Poor"

Firstly, the table was basically about half kids with zero interest in playing. They had just been dumped their by their moms as the cheapest daycare on the list. They sucked. "No attention span too short" seemed to be the motto.

Even they were better than the handful of doughy white kids whose entire imaginary output seemed to be Themselves as inner-city Black Gangstas.

The rest of the table was kids/teens who "just couldn't get it", and by "get it" I don't mean the math, or the setting or even concepts like "let's pretend"...I mean really simple stuff.

Names. Names as you and I know them were out of the question. The concept was utterly lost on them.

Names seemed pretty easy to me. Really. I wasn't looking for anything culture-specific...just something that was recognizably a name.

The best one kid could do was I Really Rule. Apparently that's a name.

Another could manage It's not Rape, it's surprise sex in the Name: ______ section of the character sheet. When I asked what that was supposed to mean, he said that was his name on MSN messenger.

The kid who literally couldn't think of another name for his character than Eminem (despite attempting--and sweating from the difficult thought process--to do so for 10 minutes) was starting to look better and better. :\

The lone girl at the table was just a fat schlub who didn't seem to know why she was there, and seemed perfectly content to stuff her face with chips. Bags and bags of chips. One after the other.

The game itself was beyond idiotic. The entirety of the actions of most of the non white-gangsta-wannabe players at the table could be selected from the following list...

• I fart at him!
• I hump him!
• HAWHAWHAWHAW
• I kick him in the nuts

That's pretty much it. If they met anyone, those were the available responses.

The Doughy White Gangstas seemed to be unable to get anything done other than throwing gang signs at one another, acting "hard" and talking about weed they had clearly never smoked and "bitches" they had never "turned out".

15 dollars an hour was slavery.

Teflon Billy said:

...unspeakable stuff...​

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Now, that makes that thread at... was it rpg.net?... about the "creepiest thing ever" fall short... very short.

Thank someone you still kept your sanity...

anyone have info about sad story about this Bugaboo character? the one that apparently impaled himself on his dice (from what i gather)? I looked on Google and couldn't dig up much (well nothing actually).