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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6264908" data-attributes="member: 4937">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.</blockquote>

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