DM For Hire - Rates?

[ElvishBard]

I game to spend time with friends, I think money would easily taint the whole expereince. Do you pay your friends to hang out with you?

Of course not, not since I found my parents were willing to pay them for me so I would leave the house once in a while .

 

[James Heard]

I'd pay a little (though not per hour) and might expect a little money from the players if I were providing some services. I mean, I've bought extra PHBs for the table before and I made everyone pitch in for those - and if I'm ordering the pizza for everyone then everyone should be tipping in for that too. If I were running another large game, say more than 12 players, I might want some gratuity for booze so I could sleep at night else face The Fear. If I'm playing at a game store then I usually expect table fees, I don't think it's terribly wrong to ask people for some small amount of money for what amounts to a measurable expense of my time - hobby or not.

Look at it this way, the more money people are handing me to do something I love the more time I feel I can comfortably allot to it. If, somehow, I were able to make a couple hundred dollars each weekend running a game I'd probably approach it like a second job. Without money I don't owe anyone anything. Bring your own drinks, pick up after yourself, deal with it if I have a lightbulb out and the AC off, and get off my back if you thought my game was crap.

 

[Mercule]

I voted "no way", but I'm not sure that's accurate, as I prefer to GM, normally. If it were a really, truely great GM, I might pay $20 per (4 hr) session.

I'd also accept money for my effort. Ideally, I could get paid for prep time, too (yeah, I'm a hypocrit). If I could make livable money for DMing full time, I'd be in heaven -- and I'd have much better games.

 

[Boojum]

I voted "less than 5.00", but I view that not as a cash payment, but more as buying the DM's snacks and drinks, chipping in for group supplies, and so on. In reality, I'm usually the DM, and while I'd love to be paid for my efforts (and would be able to devote much more time and energy to the game if I were), I enjoy the time I spend doing it enough that it's not a burden. Plus which, if I were to try to charge enough to make any sort of decent hourly rate, it would be far more than any players would be willing to pay. That said, I did once take $120 to run a game at a convention, but that was for a group of out of town players desperate to get another game in, and required that I run from midnight to 4AM rather than going home and sleeping, so there's no way I would have done it without the money. It ended up being a pretty bad game because of the combination of fatigue and running the module cold, but it was enough money to be worth it just treating it as work.

 

[Frostmarrow]

I'm certain we will be seing professional DMs in the next thirty or so years. The attitude for payed DMs have changed slightly since the dawn of EN-boards. Back then payed DMs were a huge joke. Now, it seems a lot of people are seriously considering it.

 

[diaglo]

Bugaboo, is that you?

 

[francisca]

I find the idea of paying someone to DM for me to be such an alien concept, I cannot fathom why one would do so.

 

[Jeff Wilder]

I currently maintain a two-bedroom apartment in SF, with one room dedicated to gaming. (There's room for up to eight players, a megamat, every WotC product available for perusal (and even borrowing), hundreds of other D20 and OGL products, literally thousands of D&D miniatures, tons of different accessories like Dungeon Stamps and SteelSqwire, broadband wired into the gameroom, geek DVDs galore for out-of-game times, and so on.) I pay $1430 rent. For an equivalent one-bedroom -- perhaps larger, aside from the extra bedroom -- I could probably find something for less than $1100.

I recently approached my gaming group (at least half of whom are genuine friends) with the idea of asking for $5 per session from each of them (DMs excepted) to help defray the extra rent I'm paying.

I was shocked when a couple of the players balked, saying that it was too much to pay. $5 for 5 to 8 hours of entertainment is too much to pay?

So I'll be moving, saving the $300+ a month to put toward student loans and the new Suzuki Bandit 1200S I've been eyeing. It's very odd how some people prioritze their entertainment dollar.

 

[loki44]

Aren't you basically paying for DM's when you play at a con? I know the DM's aren't pocketing the money but you're still paying to play.

 

[Hussar]

Because of where I live, I do all my gaming over OpenRPG now. It was the strangest thing, but I had a new player ask if I had a Paypal account and how much I wanted for gaming. Very strange. Apparently, from what my new player tells me, there are actually DM's out there who do this. Bizarro.