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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Benjamin Olson" data-source="post: 9811900" data-attributes="member: 6988941">I was a paid DM for (I think about) 35 sessions of 5e D&D a couple years back, and am looking into getting back into it (I had to wind down my DMing business when I got hired for a more than full time teaching job in rural Alaska which was an amazing experience but which I have since burned out on).In my experience the players you tend to get for paid games are often just choosing paid games because the particular game works out with their schedule. I do think based on my experience that players with some sort of special need for accommodation are a little more likely to reach out to a "professional DM" they don't know vs. an unpaid DM they don't know, either because they feel less uncomfortable making special requests of a stranger they are paying, or because of the vague veneer of professionalism (though I also mentioned being a public school teacher in my gm bio, so they may have also just correctly picked me out as someone ready to roll with accomodations).The DM is expected to be "professional" in the sense of not flaky, prepared, knowledgeable of rules, placing player experience ahead of their own, and, as OP alluded to, ready to play even when they don't feel like it, but there is no expectation by most players that they be some sort of "master DM" or even particularly above average in terms of actually handling the game (of course I was charging below the market rate of about $20 a session; if I was charging people $40 a session or something the expectations might be different). I think a lot of people choose to go to paid games because they've had frustrating experiences of free campaigns that keep getting cancelled until they eventually fizzle, and figure (somewhat accurately) that if there's money on the line the DM will show up and other people playing will be serious about playing.There are some huge downsides of professional DMing. Prep time lowers your hourly "wage" real quick (and people are presumably less likely to see the value in hiring someone if the game doesn't require extensive prep). You have to carve out a time in your week that is even harder to move than a regular game time. The onus to promptly answer Discord messages and the like is higher, and generally there is a lot of overhead to juggling your various groups scheduling that you have to be extra on the ball about. The Startplaying website, at least for newby paid GMs, is very much geared towards the DM picking a game, assembling a campaign, and guessing a time when people will be looking to play, and many games languish with no players or not enough to start, whereas in normal life the order of operations seems to more typically be get a group together and decide collectively on a time, and often also the game or campaign. The easiest D&D campaigns to "sell" seem to be the big published WotC adventures, which naturally have been the beneficiaries of a lot of promotion, but which are more often than not frustrating and byzantine nightmares to try to craft actual prepped campaigns from. Self-promotion is generally obnoxious for many of us, but necessary to get far in paid DMing.And, of course, there is also the issue of burnout if you're really trying to run enough games to have even a substantial side-hustle. I never really burned out, and to some degree you can just switch the games you run up to avoid this, but I will say that being a professional 2014 5e D&D DM really lowered my patience with 2024 D&D, because it was something that I worried I would have to learn or switch to if I wanted to keep my DMing income stream going. I was mostly out of the hobby by time the edition actually dropped, but I still came to it with some underlying resentment.In any case, I'm currently planning to try to make another go of it come January (I assume trying to start in December will just result in a lot of extra scheduling headaches). It's got it's problems, but the alternative for me is teaching high school, and if I'm going to spend half my time prepping some sort of content for people to interact with I prefer to do it for an engaged and appreciative audience rather than a bored and resentful one.</blockquote>

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