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Message: <blockquote data-quote="HywelPhillips" data-source="post: 8287324" data-attributes="member: 7029826">The most obvious solution is pay GM's. Pandemic lockdowns forced people to play online, and isolated them from their regular groups. Paid GM's stepped in to take up the slack, and it's never been easier to find a game if you're willing to pay to play.From my limited experience these games fall into three categories.1) Pile them high and give the players what they want. I've only come across this a couple of times and it isn't for me, but there are at least two big collectives of GM's offering low priced game, level up every session, and fast run throughs. The campaign I played a session of was on about its fifth GM, but it doesn't matter because you're rattling through stuff so fast that backstory and what happened earlier the campaign doesn't matter - everything is monster of the week.2) Minimum wage-ish GM's. These are doing sessions for $15 per player, and running multiple groups, often through the same commercial scenario because they get very familiar with it. That means they can run each session with minimal prep time, which is good because to make enough to live on you need to run at least one game a day, possibly two at weekends. This model seem popular though not least because players can see the value in paying the same as a movie for a 4 hour D&D game.3) Higher-end GM's. Sessions are $40 per session and up - up to and including many thousands of dollars for D&D in a castle or cruise ships to play Deadlands. Obviously appeals to a wealthier crowd, but in my experience these players are also the most involved and the most dedicated. Interestingly, I've had a few of the $15-a-session campaigns fade out halfway when players move on for real-life reasons and the GM can't find replacements willing to step in that far through the story. That's never happened in the higher-end sessions. Obviously those GMs are spending time on marketing etc. but also their games are massively oversubscribed because they are good at it. When I first started running and playing games online I thought this would be a fad and would fade when the pandemic receded. It still might - I'm certainly going to go back to face-to-face sessions with my best friends as soon as I can. But I'm DEFINITELY going to keep running and playing online too. It's so convenient when you live in a small town and you don't have to try to juggle people's physical commitments or drive to the city to a gaming club. Just go upstairs, start up Discord, and play.</blockquote>

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