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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tav_Behemoth" data-source="post: 4752403" data-attributes="member: 18017">A good rule of thumb is that people will pay for professional GM services, or for the experience of playing a RPG, only if it's offered as part of something else they're accustomed to pay for. People pay for someone to educate their kids & give them a safe place to go after school and over the summer, so they'll pay Becky Thomas & her Roleplay Workshop GMs to run games.People pay for full-service vacation packages in Hawaii, so it seems like a reasonable bet that they'll pay Yax to run a game while they're there.People pay for walking tours, so they'll pay Ken Hite to use that experience as the basis for a Call of Cthulu session.People give money to charities, so they'd bid on the chance to play with Dave Arneson in a charity auction.People pay to gamble, so D&D for Cash can generate some income for its GM.People pay more for coffee if it's in a pleasant social setting with nice places to sit, so they'll pay for time in a gaming cafe.The two that are most relevant here are:People will pay to experience Dave Arneson or Ken Hite's creativity through their game design and writing, so they'll also pay to experience it in a RPG session. People will pay to go to a gaming convention, so both the people who run games at conventions and the convention organizers can be compensated somehow (although it's usually the organizer who actually gets paid, while the GM typically gets free stuff).The problems with the first of these is that it's extremely difficult to make any kind of a livelihood with game design or SF/fantasy writing, much less to parlay that into a pro-GM gig. The number of people who earn enough in these fields to make a decent living doing it full-time is similar to the number of professional astronauts or ballerinas. I'm not saying you can't become an astronaut, but you've got to have a realistic understanding of the challenges involved. You can no more expect to have an advance for a novel in two months or two years than you can expect to be in space at that time, and I think you're also deluding yourself about how measly that advance is likely to be.The problems with the second of these is that the margins are small. If you divide the amount they spend on their trip by the number of hours of gaming enjoyment they get out of it, after you subtract the cost of the other services they're paying for you're not left with a lot to cover the GMing part of things. And people only go to Gen Con once a year.</blockquote>

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