If you were paid to be a GM

[Celebrim]

That's $100/show btw. Which probably is reasonable for a birthday party performance.

I can definately see our professional GM offering a similar service - $100 for a one shot birthday party performance (complete with battlemat, props, and miniatures) of up to 4 hours duration.

If for some reason, $100 was above what the market is willing to bear, then the magician has a problem. If he can't squeeze in more shows per week (and at some point, there are only so many hours in a week), then he is offering a product that isn't viable. His next option is to lower his price, which will lower his living quality.

obviously, the lower price might entice a few more customers, but like I guesstimated, there's only so many birthday parties you can book a week (likely 1 per day of the week plus a few doubles).

My guess is that you don't know much about being a professional magician.

So you are right, there are only so many birthday parties you can book in a week and they usually are nights and weekends which leaves you with this big block of time that is ideal to work in but which is generally open. What's the professional magician to do?

Book office parties and motivational speaking engagements with businesses.
Book time with schools and children's hospitals. Worse come to worse, you do this free of charge, then put it as charitable work to lower the exorbitant taxes that come with being self-employed.
Sale yourself to nursing homes and assisted living centers.
Do late night at bars and comedy clubs.

There are probably some parallels between this and what the professional DM has to do. The key would be offering a service of such high quality, everyone agreed that you were worth far more than the average run of the mill amatuer DMs that flood the market offering their services for free. That's what the pro magician is offering - something so cool you've never seen it before and maybe never even imagined it.

 

[Janx]

I can definately see our professional GM offering a similar service - $100 for a one shot birthday party performance (complete with battlemat, props, and miniatures) of up to 4 hours duration.



My guess is that you don't know much about being a professional magician.

Of course I'm don't. But on the other hand, you see how much of my extrapolations you
actually agree with (like only working week nights and weekends by default).

Once assessed and a number computed, then one can begin the exercise of brainstorming ways to bring the number down or increase volume of business.

As you have by figuring out what the magician can do during the week days.

Since you confirmed (and even upped) the numbers of prep time being part of the cost of GMing (you can't flip burgers during prep time, or do freebies for old people) it is in effect billable time (or at least needs to be factored into the price).

Usually, what I find by performing the computation (one of the many hats I wear at work), is we figure out if the price is higher than clients will accept (that's human intuition usually), or we figure out if we can get the costs down to either improve our margin or make the price appealing to a potential clientt.

Failing that, we come to the conclusion that the activity is not a viable business venture.

I find that the computation need not be particularly precise. It usually renders a ballpark figure that is close enough for comprehending what the venture will cost.

For instance, I can compute EN World's basic expense and income need fairly readily. it won't precisely match EN Worlds, but if somebody was thinking of replicating the site, it's close enough.

A server of modern and decent specs will cost $5-15K with warranties from HP (we just bought one for $5K and it has 24 cores). The life of that server is 3 years, so split up $5,000/36=$139/month which can be comparable to cloud hosting, but more reliable (cloud hosting will not give you 24 cores for that price).

EN used to be hosted in Florida, and I know Level3 charges $1K/month for 20/20 Mb/s up and down. Probably going to need a decent pipe for high web traffic.

So already, we need $1139/month to host the site. Not counting firewall (that's sort of cheap), and actual data center housing (the main driver of data center rent is internet and IPs).

For a rack, one channel of power (20 amp max before they make you buy another channel)
is $250/month.

So 1139+250=$1389.

Plus, the owner wants/needs a salary. In true ventures, owners get paid last, but let's keep imagining what the goal is to pay the bills the owner actually has now, and that is simulated by the 40K salary.

which is $3,333/month. Humans are the expensive part of the equation.

Our new monthly cost/minimum income objective is $4722/month.

I don't actually know how much ads bring in (I don't work in that arena).

But we do know EN charges $3/month for a subscription.

That means we need $4722/$3 = 1574 subscribers per month to meet the cost goal. For the actual EN site, with 150K members, that's probably doable.

Now obviously, we can fine tune the numbers. That's part of the exercise in making a go/no go decision to pursue the venture.

But if the people looking to do the venture don't think they can draw in the required # of subscribers (or other revenue like ads), then the venture will go broke.

Now at some point, people take chances, or step into this kind of thing partially. It is possible to spin up a site cheaper (and not make much money) until it grows big enough to be a full time venture. The world is chock full of things that wouldn't have gotten done otherwise.

but I find it is helpful to understand the larger scope of what a business venture entails before investing in something that isn't sustainable/doesn't scale well.

 

[ThirdWizard]

I think a DM could charge 50 bucks and only run adventure paths in Golarion. That would require minimal prep time. The session is four hours so thats 12.50 per hour. That is about the max you could make in my opinion. I believe maybe I could get a group to pay me that. It wouldn't be that horrible but it wouldn't be worth it for me.

AHA! This made me think of another aspect of being a paid GM and why people might do it. They might want to play something that isn't very mainstream.

How hard might it be for a small group (say 2-3 people) to find someone to run a game of Rifts for them? FISA Star Trek? An entire Paranoia ongoing campaign for a year? Thier own self-made homebrew game? Pretty difficult, I would think. These are niche markets or old RPGs or both. You can't just go down to your local FLGS and find some people to run some of these older, lesser known, or unpopular games. So, one likely scenario for a group looking to hire a GM is that they're a small group of people, perhaps even only two, that want to run an obscure game, but can't get enough people to have a proper game.

So, its likely you aren't picking the system. And, that's going to mean you might have more or less prep time, and you might have more "homework" to do in order to learn the system.

If, for instance, I was hired to run a game of Dungeon World, I'd require zero prep time or close to it. Show up to the game, wing everything, and go home. Maybe spend 5 minutes between sessions making up a new Font, but I could probably do that in session during some roleplay I wasn't involved in.

On the other hand, hire me to run a 3.5 epic level game, and suddenly I've got to spend untold amounts of time between sessions in prep.

Or a Game of Thrones PVP campaign with 20 people who are all vying for their own personal power and glory - making alliances and turning on each other, all while trying to combat some external threat. I can't even imagine the headache that would cause, both in and out of session. But, nobody in their right might would do that for free, right?

So, does cost take this into consideration? I would say yes. There'd be some kind of pricing scale that would have to be made. X game costs $Y/hour. A game costs $B/hour.

 

[Celebrim]

Failing that, we come to the conclusion that the activity is not a viable business venture.

That would be my conclusion as well. Currently PnP RPGs seem to run on a potlatch economy. The DM - for his own amusement and satisfaction - regularly gives away $100-$200 worth of his labor and investment per session purely to entertain his friends. Because this is the normal way the community works, its simply not possible to enter the market for DMs in for profit manner as the not for profit competition drives down the price to essentially zero.

This is occurring despite the fact that I think there is a shortage of GMs in the market compared to the demand. If anything, I think we are seeing lower recognition of the value/work of a GM than we did 20 years ago. There is declining social reward as a DM obtained via the offering of potlatch, possibly related to the increased availability of subsitution goods such as accessible and tactically complex and even somewhat story rewarding video games.

There is also increasing hostility toward GMs and their product that seems to be winding its way into the actual text of RPGs. You read the 1e DMG and you come away with the idea that the players are the villains (which in and of itself may partially explain the trend) that need to be controlled for the good of the game. You read a more recent GM manual and you come away with the idea that the GM is the villain that needs supressing for the good of the game.

My personal feeling is that the entire market for PnP games is on its way to collapsing because of this, and that the trend for demanding increasingly simple games with buzz words like 'no myth' or 'old school' games (which basically seems to mean maximal play time for minimal prep) in the remaining shrinking PnP community is directly attributed to the break down in the market for GMs. Everyone wants to play a PnP game. Hardly anyone wants to run one.

I looked recently at Tegel Manor, which is about as 'old school' as you can get. Creating something like that is probably 20-30 hours of prep for 160 hours of play time. It's really efficient in terms effort to create relative to play at the table, so the hypothetical professional DM could buy a copy and bill almost nothing for prep and only charge for essentially the labor of running the game - lower costs to probably 1/3rd my estimate (assuming you could make it up with volumn) or produce adventures to that quality level with relatively low sunk costs.

I also realized that its completely unpublishable given modern standards of depth and quality - precisely because its level of quality is now common place in the amateur community - and that I have zero desire to either play in or run a game like that any more (unless it is being run by my 8 year or something).

My conclusion is that it's not just professional DMing which is not a worthwhile business venture, but anything related to the hobby at all. Within 10-15 years, barring a real social revolution, the only role of PnP gaming will be to inform the design of cRPGs. Monte's movement of Numenera into the cRPG world is I think critical, and really, you won't be able do this for a living without that in the near future.

 

[Celebrim]

If, for instance, I was hired to run a game of Dungeon World, I'd require zero prep time or close to it. Show up to the game, wing everything, and go home. Maybe spend 5 minutes between sessions making up a new Font, but I could probably do that in session during some roleplay I wasn't involved in.

But therein lies the problem. A product that involves such little investment is probably not one you can differentiate and get people to pay for because it doesn't have a lot of added value over getting someone to do it for free or doing it themselves.

Dungeon World as a game model is in my opinion relying on two things - nostalgia and novelty. Novelty wears off really quickly. In effect the players go, "Is that all this can do? Why am I paying for this again?" Old school players are looking to recapture the feel of games long gone, and if they don't figure out soon that the feel they remember was largely based on novelty, then its likely just nostalgia, friendship and/or a lack of substitution goods keeping the game running.

Once again, based on my own 30+ years of experience, I assert that there is a direct relationship between the amount of prep time in a game and the ammount of fun the player of the game has. Once the novelty wears off, players naturally begin demanding things that require more and more work - more story, more investigation, more puzzles to solve, more novelty, more epic plots, more tactical fights, more consistency, more kingdom management - because very quickly old school dungeon crawling as the sole game element tires and always has quickly grown tiring. It's just not possible to run a worthwhile game off of no prep for very long. At this point, I just don't think there is much value in offering people a chance to kill things, take their stuff, and level up. You've got too many competitors in that market.

And if what you are offering me is a chance to kill things, take their stuff, and level up, frankly, I won't be back for a second session and I'll feel like I've been cheated because I too am a product of the potlatch economy and @#$@ it, I expect more than that at this point because I've savored what the game can be like when more is offered than that.

You can substitute some of your work for the work of someone else - professional game scenario writers, for example. But you can't offer as high value product something that has no value put into it.

Or a Game of Thrones PVP campaign with 20 people who are all vying for their own personal power and glory - making alliances and turning on each other, all while trying to combat some external threat. I can't even imagine the headache that would cause, both in and out of session. But, nobody in their right might would do that for free, right?

Which just makes me realize that this trend I mentioned above has been going on since the hobbies beginning.

In the Beginning, Gygax was running tables of up to 12 or so players 5-6 nights a week. There was high demand for his product because literally no one had seen anything like it before, and honestly, had he been charging money back then - it would have been paid. The only way to keep up with demand was to run a specific sort of high play time relative to prep game - the classic persistent Maze-like Mad World Mega-Dungeon near to a Haven game that is the height of old school. I know how to generate those things, and I could easily build one that would handle that sort of demand indefinately off of relatively little prep - essentially generating more play than could be consumed.

But right from the beginning, many people in the hobby got bored with that and started imagining what else you could do with the mechanics of an RPG. Some of the early flights of imagination attemtped to do EXACTLY what you just said -
"20 people who are all vying for their own personal power and glory - making alliances and turning on each other, all while trying to combat some external threat", and you are right - no one wanted to do that for free because they realized it was a full time job. So the attempt was made at pay for play Play by Mail games. The problem was, so far as I know, just about every single subscription PbM game of that sort just absolutely floundered, and in many cases failed to ever successfully launch (the 80's equivalent of a failed Kickstarter, I suppose) precisely because the would be professional GMs vastly underestimated the effort required to run such a game. Imagine trying to run say World of Warcraft as a play by mail game with just one person on your staff.

Lots of the early visions collapsed because the work load was too high, or else had to be ported to computer environments ('The Hundred Years War', for example, was an early fairly successful cRPG port of what you just described).

 

[Mishihari Lord]

Once upon a time we had a resident expert on this topic. Unfortunately I haven't seen Bugaboo in years.

 

[Janx]

Once upon a time we had a resident expert on this topic. Unfortunately I haven't seen Bugaboo in years.

and there was that guy who was putting together his own business to be a Pro GM.

He had big ambition, but I recall his optimism seemed a bit unrealistic.

 

[Cybit]

I run a table of Encounters at the local LGS, and my table over time has become populated with a group of younger players (ages 8-12) who are all basically friends. The parents of the kids have asked me to DM for their birthday parties' and have offered to pay; I imagine they'd probably go for like $40 and free food. I don't actually know as I usually just do it for $1 (just to say I professionally DM'd) and as my gift to the player itself.

I think it's something you could do part-time as like a weekend thing, maybe make like 50 or so bucks (and get free food) a day, but beyond that, not sure it really is a viable form of sustainable income.

I agree with Ahn here, money just seems like it would mess things up for me.

 

[sheadunne]

A game store I used to frequent would pay a DM $5 in store credit for each game they ran at the store. They gave you $20 at the end of the first 4 weeks and then $5 a week after that for as long as you ran the game. You couldn't make a living at it, but it could buy you a book every couple of months.

 

[Li Shenron]

Suppose you had an opportunity to get paid to GM a campaign. How much would you have to be paid *per session* to make it worth your while? Consider the amount of time it takes to think up and plan the adventure up front, the time required to prep for each game, and the hours that you spend running a typical game. If you were using published adventures would that reduce the prep time and the price per session? Assume that there is no travel time or expense involved - you are doing this according to your own schedule, at your own place of residence, online using a virtual tabletop.

I'd go the other way around: see how much they offer, then figure out how much work it's worth. IOW the more they pay, the more time I'd invest in preparation work, the better the results (in principle at least).