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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6264783" data-attributes="member: 4937">It takes at least 10 hours of work to support a game session of suffiicent quality that you could call yourself a 'professional' GM.  Occasionally for an ongoing original campaign it would take 20 hours of work if you have something big you needed to gear up.   I'll divide the difference and call it 15 hours, plus a 8 hour sesssion, means that each campaign takes about 23 hours per week of a pro DM's time.   Let's say a pro DM wants a $40,000 a year income (and keep in mind, you'd have to pay your own Social Security and employment taxes, so you'd not be making all that much).   For that, he needs to have two paying gaming groups every week paying for 8 hour sessions or 4 paying for 4 hour sessions, for say 50 weeks of the year (two weeks of vacation).   So that's $800 a week divided among 16 billable hours, or $50 an hour.   A 4 hour session costs $200.   An 8 hour session costs $400.  Assuming groups are 6 players and the GM, that means 4 hour sessions should cost each player ~$33.33 and 8 hour ~$66.66.$50 an hour is really not that unusual for a contractor.   If anything, it's pretty lowball considering that you aren't directly billing your campaign prep.   However, this is assuming the professional DM isn't doing something lame like running a Pazio adventure path straight up.   I imagine that a professional DM could offer that sort of service at a bargain price if it allowed him to squeeze in an extra group or two.   The bargain price might also apply to one shots, birthday parties, and that sort of thing.Speaking as an amateur DM, the biggest problem you'd face as a professional DM would be scheduling.   The adults who could pay for your service would be very unreliable clients, because they'd always be trying to reschedule on you.   It would be very difficult to maintain a steady income because it would be very difficult to keep groups meeting on a regular basis and to find work to fill in the gaps when your regulars couldn't meet at the normal time and wanted to delay a week.  I can see that alone forcing you to have a part time job in addition to your contracted labor just to keep the bills paid.   Ideally, you are also so good at this that you can rework your original work into some sort of publication 1-2 times a year and get a few hundred dollars in supplemental income.</blockquote>

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