If you're going to charge then you need to be offering more than the competition, otherwise people won't use your services.
There's a shortage of DMs (I think there's a reference to there being 1 DM for every 15 players in this thread, which would mean a shortage of roughly 66% - and that's assuming DMs are geographically spread out, which is unlikely to be the case). Competition is only a consideration if there are sufficient competitors.
That is true, however, I suspect it is a vast minority of the total pool of D&D players who are willing to pay for a game. Most people I know point blank refuse to pay. Incidentally I do. So while there might be more players than DMs, that doesn't mean much if most of those players aren't actually willing to pay anything. As I said, if you're going to charge people to play, then you not only need to be better than all the free DMs, but you also have to find the people who are willing to pay what you're charging, and the likelyhood of that goes down the more you charge.
The vast majority of that minority will be players who have a hard time finding a DM, either one they like or just any DM at all. I'd pay for a game with any of a handful of "celebrity" DMs I like, but I have the spending money for that and I'm not interested in paying a "professional" DM in general because I can find one who'll do it for free or I can DM myself. There is no "all the free DMs" for most of the people willing to pay, as that's exactly the reason they are willing in the first place.
I think I agree. The difference between a paid DM that can work the hussle and "all the DMs" isn't necessarily exceptional DM talent. It's most that aforementioned hussle as well as an ability to package what most see as their hobby as a service.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.
So then what quality should be expected of the DM based on amount of payment? For example, what do you expect of a $5 game compared to a $10 or a $10 to a $20?
$5 / hour - they haven't bothered to read the module before they run it. I know everybody's income level varies, but this is the kind of money you give to the guy sitting outside the shop on the corner. It's less than minimum wage. Anybody running it for this much should run it for free and just enjoy DM'ing because they're not making any money.
$10 / hour - pre-written module they've run before, no character personal storylines, no investment of time by the DM before the game. Still below minimum wage in the UK.
$20 / hour - pre-written module they may or may not have run before, characters have personal storylines woven into the game, prepped by the DM
$50 / hour - bespoke campaign themed around the requests of the players with complex personal backstories, custom maps, possibly artwork if the DM is good at it, custom tokens for online maps. The works, basically.
I think the mistake you are making is that you are treating the DM's time for each player seperately. As I said before, 5x$10 is for 4 hours is $50 divided by 4. That's $12.50 or £9.01 an hour. Considering most DMs won't declare their earnings that's effectively tax free. That's not only above the minimum UK wage but is much more than what you would get for working 'cash in hand'.
Also, most decent / good DMs can run a module with backstory hooks, and they do that for free. If you're going to charge then you need to be offering more than the competition, otherwise people won't use your services.
I mean, you're entitled to your opinion and presumption that "most people you know" are the end all and be all of a potential market, but your posts here seem to lowball the paid gaming market that actually exists, lowball both in terms of rates and number of people doing it (and presumptuous of what gig economy types and freelancers do and don't report on their taxes). You feel games are worth x$ and onlyX# of players would deign to pay for gaming. That's just not true. Ads on Roll20 aren't really indicative of what people can and do make through other services, any more than the pay to play ads here on DDB. It's this sort of "feedback" which is more an expression that paid gaming is not your taste, that led me to suggest the OP actually look into the communities around the services that provide robust support for paid games (advertisement, reviews, and transaction management) than a community based around a service that serves a pool of players by and large engaged in non monetized play. It's sort of like walking into a mall food court looking for guidance in setting up a vegan menu. There may be some insight, but by and large the bulk of the input doesn't know what they're talking about.
If you had read my replies throughout this thread properly, then you would know I am not against paying for games. As I said, previously, I currently pay $10 a week ($40-$50 a month) to play D&D with a professional DM. I don't see it as lowballing but simply being realistic. Most people aren't well off or are only on average incomes at best given the current economic climates in both the US and UK. Therefore, for most people, D&D is a hobby or a luxury. Put it simply, if my bills go up and I have to cut back on spending then my $10 a week dedicated to D&D is probably one of the first things to go.
Like anything with economics, it's all about supply and demand. Value is based on what people are willing to pay, not what you think it 'should' be. Out of interest, I asked the four other players in my paid game and the general conensus was that around $10-15 dollars was the ball park for what they were willing to pay. Similarly, you fail to understand where the majority of revenue comes from for professional full time DMs. Someone like Rob Hartley for example, will make a significant proportion of his income from things like YouTube and Twitch ad revenue, which will then also be topped up by things like Patreon donations, Twitch Bits and YouTube Super Chats in addition to what his players are paying him. Of course, if you're exceptionally good, then you might also sell your own homebrew content and modules etc.
There is also a big difference between how much a professional celebrity DM who does it full time can charge compared to a professional DM who does it part time in addition to their day job. The main difference of course being reputation and prestige. Someone like Matt Mercer is obviously going to be able to justify charging way more than your average unknown pro DM, and people are going to pay more because it's him.
I was thinking about writing my own short campaign, running it a few times as a free game where players can give donations to get feedback and what they would pay for the campaign. Then after a few times running it as a paid game then maybe considering streaming it. But again, I'm not sure what the market is for such things.
I know people love to play but if I did streaming, wouldn't I have to pay the players as well. Or do I run a free game I can stream and claim the donations for myself to justify the game is free to play? There seems like a lot of grey areas in the market and as a consumer and potential paid DM, I am just trying to figure out what is best for a player because, in the end, it's about making the players happy so you don't have a revolving door of unhappy customers.
So then what quality should be expected of the DM based on amount of payment? For example, what do you expect of a $5 game compared to a $10 or a $10 to a $20?
$5 / hour - they haven't bothered to read the module before they run it. I know everybody's income level varies, but this is the kind of money you give to the guy sitting outside the shop on the corner. It's less than minimum wage. Anybody running it for this much should run it for free and just enjoy DM'ing because they're not making any money.
$10 / hour - pre-written module they've run before, no character personal storylines, no investment of time by the DM before the game. Still below minimum wage in the UK.
$20 / hour - pre-written module they may or may not have run before, characters have personal storylines woven into the game, prepped by the DM
$50 / hour - bespoke campaign themed around the requests of the players with complex personal backstories, custom maps, possibly artwork if the DM is good at it, custom tokens for online maps. The works, basically.
I think the mistake you are making is that you are treating the DM's time for each player seperately. As I said before, 5x$10 is for 4 hours is $50 divided by 4. That's $12.50 or £9.01 an hour. Considering most DMs won't declare their earnings that's effectively tax free. That's not only above the minimum UK wage but is much more than what you would get for working 'cash in hand'.
Also, most decent / good DMs can run a module with backstory hooks, and they do that for free. If you're going to charge then you need to be offering more than the competition, otherwise people won't use your services.
I mean, you're entitled to your opinion and presumption that "most people you know" are the end all and be all of a potential market, but your posts here seem to lowball the paid gaming market that actually exists, lowball both in terms of rates and number of people doing it (and presumptuous of what gig economy types and freelancers do and don't report on their taxes). You feel games are worth x$ and onlyX# of players would deign to pay for gaming. That's just not true. Ads on Roll20 aren't really indicative of what people can and do make through other services, any more than the pay to play ads here on DDB. It's this sort of "feedback" which is more an expression that paid gaming is not your taste, that led me to suggest the OP actually look into the communities around the services that provide robust support for paid games (advertisement, reviews, and transaction management) than a community based around a service that serves a pool of players by and large engaged in non monetized play. It's sort of like walking into a mall food court looking for guidance in setting up a vegan menu. There may be some insight, but by and large the bulk of the input doesn't know what they're talking about.
If you had read my replies throughout this thread properly, then you would know I am not against paying for games. As I said, previously, I currently pay $10 a week ($40-$50 a month) to play D&D with a professional DM. I don't see it as lowballing but simply being realistic. Most people aren't well off or are only on average incomes at best given the current economic climates in both the US and UK. Therefore, for most people, D&D is a hobby or a luxury. Put it simply, if my bills go up and I have to cut back on spending then my $10 a week dedicated to D&D is probably one of the first things to go.
Like anything with economics, it's all about supply and demand. Value is based on what people are willing to pay, not what you think it 'should' be. Out of interest, I asked the four other players in my paid game and the general conensus was that around $10-15 dollars was the ball park for what they were willing to pay. Similarly, you fail to understand where the majority of revenue comes from for professional full time DMs. Someone like Rob Hartley for example, will make a significant proportion of his income from things like YouTube and Twitch ad revenue, which will then also be topped up by things like Patreon donations, Twitch Bits and YouTube Super Chats in addition to what his players are paying him. Of course, if you're exceptionally good, then you might also sell your own homebrew content and modules etc.
There is also a big difference between how much a professional celebrity DM who does it full time can charge compared to a professional DM who does it part time in addition to their day job. The main difference of course being reputation and prestige. Someone like Matt Mercer is obviously going to be able to justify charging way more than your average unknown pro DM, and people are going to pay more because it's him.
Underscoring or emboldening supply and demand and value just furthers your reductively naive and limited understanding of the market. Of course supply, demand and value are at issue but that's elementary, like saying accounting is about addition and subtraction and balances. I mean you're not wrong, but I wouldn't say your understanding is thorough.
You polled your other paying game mates. Of course there's going to be consensus, you're all in the same situation. Of course your belief in what the paid game market can bear is going to be within your budget. There's venture capital and just regular investors backing some of the paid gaming world. Talent and quality are both factors that influence markets such as there, think music and sports. Yeah, someone who spends $5 a weekend going to garage punk shows probably isn't going to be able to fork out $500 for ten rows away seats to see Tool ... but people do. Again, while sure there's a great bulk of churn in the paid gaming market that's done over LFGs on various platforms and PayPal/***** transactions. But as I discussed, there are plenty of platforms that draw a slightly to significantly higher fee, with more robust quality assurance and thorough feedback/review reporting, and a more integrated payment platform. And then there are folks who through word of mouth or what have you get offers. What "most of the people" do doesn't actually matter once certain price point thresholds are crossed. The market is sustainable if it supports people at that tier of pay play. Can everyone do it? No, but not every musician gets to go on world tours either (big scale difference but the point that there are tiers of "work for money" in this space should be clear). In short the fact that folks can get propositioned $300 for a one shot offers shows there is demand among the supply for those sorts of values.
I'll roll back to Matt Mercer not being a useful analog in whatever landscape you think you have a grasp of, but first the OP chimes in:
I was thinking about writing my own short campaign, running it a few times as a free game where players can give donations to get feedback and what they would pay for the campaign. Then after a few times running it as a paid game then maybe considering streaming it. But again, I'm not sure what the market is for such things.
I know people love to play but if I did streaming, wouldn't I have to pay the players as well. Or do I run a free game I can stream and claim the donations for myself to justify the game is free to play? There seems like a lot of grey areas in the market and as a consumer and potential paid DM, I am just trying to figure out what is best for a player because, in the end, it's about making the players happy so you don't have a revolving door of unhappy customers.
Again, this forum isn't really the best space to figure out how to be a professional or otherwise monetized DM, and your conception is muddled. Do you want to run games and people will pay you to run games. Or do you want to stream games and get money from audience/sponsorship. You can't really do both at the same time. In the former, players are paying you to run games, you're basically the MC for the players' interactive entertainment. If you're streaming, you and the players are all producers and performers of an entertainment for the streaming spectating audience. I'd recommend figuring out which you want to do. If you want to be a paid DM, go to a small shop like dungeon master direct or a bigger clearing house like start playing games, the latter has some GMs who actually allow free spectators (under the presumption that the spectator is a potential customer) and see what they do to command $15-45/per player a session. If you want to stream, watch streamers, find games you like and approximate their style and then dig deep in their archives to see how they got started.
The DMs who are well paid by players got their rate by being good DMs who turned a pastime into a service for their customers. If you don't think of the work of a paid DM as work with the attendant emphasis on customer satisfaction, you're not going to be able command good rates or sustain player interest (kinda like regular GMing but there's money involved). The streamers with good sponsorships brining in hauls through patronage ... they tend to have some experience in a creative field or fields. They can write, voice act, do art, stand up comedy, etc. Matt Mercer was not a guy who decided to DM for money, got some people to pay him for DMing them and thus Critical Role was born. He was a voice actor, with some writing/directing chops too. He happened to have some friends in his (non D&D) professional space who happened to play D&D. They all happened to live in Los Angeles. Well, not happened, actorly creative types in the U.S. tend to congregate to L.A. and NYC ... L.A. in the mid 2010s being the entertainment Mecca that it is was still trying to literally capitalize int the the largely millennial gravitation toward media like streams and podcasts over traditional advertising supported television, subscription/cable supported television and box office dependent movies. There was also the whole let's call it nerd renaissance in pop culture where things like comics, scifi/horror/fantasy genres etc had become the juggernaut audience draws. Geeks and Sundry was one of those endeavors to capitalize ... they knew Mercer (and a few other people) because actorly affinity groups and all and G&S worked with the Critical Role group (and a few other people). The folks Mercer plays with, they never paid him (well maybe there was beer money handed around). If this is all new info to you, and you're serious about the questions you started asking, it's just better to look at what's actually being done first hand, and decide whether you have the capacity to integrate or innovate within that market, than it is to research the possibility by polling a few randoms on D&D Beyond, a community that again largely isn't really the most robust proponent of any sort of monetized gaming, other than the services D&D Beyond sells.
Coincidentally D&D Beyond is doing all sorts of live plays this week with "professional gamers" whatever you settle your plan on, it'd probably be more benefit to watch those games than it is talking among your focus group in this thread. The experience base you've been conversing with is just too limited or counter to the concept to really be a useful sample.
Whether paid or not, the one common factor I believe all DMs have is confidence.
If I was a personal trainer, and I arranged to run a 4 hour boot camp session for a group of 5 people, the idea that they'd each pay $10 would clearly be laughable.
So then what quality should be expected of the DM based on amount of payment? For example, what do you expect of a $5 game compared to a $10 or a $10 to a $20?
$5 / hour - they haven't bothered to read the module before they run it. I know everybody's income level varies, but this is the kind of money you give to the guy sitting outside the shop on the corner. It's less than minimum wage. Anybody running it for this much should run it for free and just enjoy DM'ing because they're not making any money.
$10 / hour - pre-written module they've run before, no character personal storylines, no investment of time by the DM before the game. Still below minimum wage in the UK.
$20 / hour - pre-written module they may or may not have run before, characters have personal storylines woven into the game, prepped by the DM
$50 / hour - bespoke campaign themed around the requests of the players with complex personal backstories, custom maps, possibly artwork if the DM is good at it, custom tokens for online maps. The works, basically.
I think the mistake you are making is that you are treating the DM's time for each player seperately. As I said before, 5x$10 is for 4 hours is $50 divided by 4. That's $12.50 or £9.01 an hour. Considering most DMs won't declare their earnings that's effectively tax free. That's not only above the minimum UK wage but is much more than what you would get for working 'cash in hand'.
Also, most decent / good DMs can run a module with backstory hooks, and they do that for free. If you're going to charge then you need to be offering more than the competition, otherwise people won't use your services.
I mean, you're entitled to your opinion and presumption that "most people you know" are the end all and be all of a potential market, but your posts here seem to lowball the paid gaming market that actually exists, lowball both in terms of rates and number of people doing it (and presumptuous of what gig economy types and freelancers do and don't report on their taxes). You feel games are worth x$ and onlyX# of players would deign to pay for gaming. That's just not true. Ads on Roll20 aren't really indicative of what people can and do make through other services, any more than the pay to play ads here on DDB. It's this sort of "feedback" which is more an expression that paid gaming is not your taste, that led me to suggest the OP actually look into the communities around the services that provide robust support for paid games (advertisement, reviews, and transaction management) than a community based around a service that serves a pool of players by and large engaged in non monetized play. It's sort of like walking into a mall food court looking for guidance in setting up a vegan menu. There may be some insight, but by and large the bulk of the input doesn't know what they're talking about.
If you had read my replies throughout this thread properly, then you would know I am not against paying for games. As I said, previously, I currently pay $10 a week ($40-$50 a month) to play D&D with a professional DM. I don't see it as lowballing but simply being realistic. Most people aren't well off or are only on average incomes at best given the current economic climates in both the US and UK. Therefore, for most people, D&D is a hobby or a luxury. Put it simply, if my bills go up and I have to cut back on spending then my $10 a week dedicated to D&D is probably one of the first things to go.
You are happy to pay that, and the DM is happy to accept it, and that's fine. I am glad that you are enjoying your game, and I assume the DM is too.
The rest of what you say is flawed, however. People have different income levels. I spend more on a bottle of wine, or my lunch than you're prepared to spend on a weekly D&D session. Simply stating a few facts: I have a $45 / month gym membership. I spend $100 per month on petrol. My mortgage alone is around $1700. But I am around 40 years old, I have a senior management job, and $10 is pocket change to someone in that position. $50 per session on D&D on a Friday night would save me money, compared to going out on the town. I very much appreciate however that when I was in my early 20s, and certainly my teens, I couldn't possibly have afforded $50 per week on a D&D session - even buying the PhB was a major investment of my funds (I have no idea how any young person affords MTG cards). But D&D is no longer the preserve of teens and college students. DMs who played in the 80s and 90s, are still playing. Older players are earning over $100k dollars a year, and are also DMs - and the older and players who love the game the most are the most experienced DMs.
Nobody should have to pay for a DM, but DMs don't have to provide their time for free, or for an amount of money they won't notice they earned (People earning $70k per year and up probably won't if they lost $50). If you're paying a DM, then you have to ask yourself - what happens when this DM, who we're paying $10 for 5 hours+prep time, is offered $20 instead by another group? That is the supply and demand that you're talking about. The better someone is at DMing, the more time they put in, the more they will be able to charge. Anecdotes about what you and your friends can afford is not relevant.
Like anything with economics, it's all about supply and demand. Value is based on what people are willing to pay, not what you think it 'should' be.
If you check back to your own reply, after stating this you immediately just went on after this to tell my what you and your friends think it 'should' be, contradicting your own point.
Again, I can easily afford $50 a week for D&D - staying in playing D&D on a Friday or Saturday would actually reduce my weekly expenditure at this rate, since I wouldn't be spending $150 going out eating dinner and in the bar.
In terms of why people should pay individually:
When you go to a boot camp fitness session or other class, everyone pays the instructor
When you go to a comedy show, everyone pays entry
When you go on a boat trip, everyone pays to get on the boat
When you go to college, everyone pays their fees
And so on, and so on. The difficulty is that you might pay $15 to go to a boot camp fitness session once per week, but it's and hour long - not 5 hours long. I do appreciate I'm coming at this from the position of someone with comfortable disposable income (because I am old, and I've got a career, and when you're older you probably just have more money), but I can also see some of your position as well. Because D&D is fun to run, there will be DMs out there who are willing to run games for much less than I would want; but if we're talking about having systems for rating DMs, the inevitable conclusion of that would be that the most in demand DMs would be able to charge more, and more, and more as time goes on.
So then what quality should be expected of the DM based on amount of payment? For example, what do you expect of a $5 game compared to a $10 or a $10 to a $20?
$5 / hour - they haven't bothered to read the module before they run it. I know everybody's income level varies, but this is the kind of money you give to the guy sitting outside the shop on the corner. It's less than minimum wage. Anybody running it for this much should run it for free and just enjoy DM'ing because they're not making any money.
$10 / hour - pre-written module they've run before, no character personal storylines, no investment of time by the DM before the game. Still below minimum wage in the UK.
$20 / hour - pre-written module they may or may not have run before, characters have personal storylines woven into the game, prepped by the DM
$50 / hour - bespoke campaign themed around the requests of the players with complex personal backstories, custom maps, possibly artwork if the DM is good at it, custom tokens for online maps. The works, basically.
I think the mistake you are making is that you are treating the DM's time for each player seperately. As I said before, 5x$10 is for 4 hours is $50 divided by 4. That's $12.50 or £9.01 an hour. Considering most DMs won't declare their earnings that's effectively tax free. That's not only above the minimum UK wage but is much more than what you would get for working 'cash in hand'.
Also, most decent / good DMs can run a module with backstory hooks, and they do that for free. If you're going to charge then you need to be offering more than the competition, otherwise people won't use your services.
I mean, you're entitled to your opinion and presumption that "most people you know" are the end all and be all of a potential market, but your posts here seem to lowball the paid gaming market that actually exists, lowball both in terms of rates and number of people doing it (and presumptuous of what gig economy types and freelancers do and don't report on their taxes). You feel games are worth x$ and onlyX# of players would deign to pay for gaming. That's just not true. Ads on Roll20 aren't really indicative of what people can and do make through other services, any more than the pay to play ads here on DDB. It's this sort of "feedback" which is more an expression that paid gaming is not your taste, that led me to suggest the OP actually look into the communities around the services that provide robust support for paid games (advertisement, reviews, and transaction management) than a community based around a service that serves a pool of players by and large engaged in non monetized play. It's sort of like walking into a mall food court looking for guidance in setting up a vegan menu. There may be some insight, but by and large the bulk of the input doesn't know what they're talking about.
If you had read my replies throughout this thread properly, then you would know I am not against paying for games. As I said, previously, I currently pay $10 a week ($40-$50 a month) to play D&D with a professional DM. I don't see it as lowballing but simply being realistic. Most people aren't well off or are only on average incomes at best given the current economic climates in both the US and UK. Therefore, for most people, D&D is a hobby or a luxury. Put it simply, if my bills go up and I have to cut back on spending then my $10 a week dedicated to D&D is probably one of the first things to go.
Like anything with economics, it's all about supply and demand. Value is based on what people are willing to pay, not what you think it 'should' be. Out of interest, I asked the four other players in my paid game and the general conensus was that around $10-15 dollars was the ball park for what they were willing to pay. Similarly, you fail to understand where the majority of revenue comes from for professional full time DMs. Someone like Rob Hartley for example, will make a significant proportion of his income from things like YouTube and Twitch ad revenue, which will then also be topped up by things like Patreon donations, Twitch Bits and YouTube Super Chats in addition to what his players are paying him. Of course, if you're exceptionally good, then you might also sell your own homebrew content and modules etc.
There is also a big difference between how much a professional celebrity DM who does it full time can charge compared to a professional DM who does it part time in addition to their day job. The main difference of course being reputation and prestige. Someone like Matt Mercer is obviously going to be able to justify charging way more than your average unknown pro DM, and people are going to pay more because it's him.
Underscoring or emboldening supply and demand and value just furthers your reductively naive and limited understanding of the market. Of course supply, demand and value are at issue but that's elementary, like saying accounting is about addition and subtraction and balances. I mean you're not wrong, but I wouldn't say your understanding is thorough.
You polled your other paying game mates. Of course there's going to be consensus, you're all in the same situation. Of course your belief in what the paid game market can bear is going to be within your budget. There's venture capital and just regular investors backing some of the paid gaming world. Talent and quality are both factors that influence markets such as there, think music and sports. Yeah, someone who spends $5 a weekend going to garage punk shows probably isn't going to be able to fork out $500 for ten rows away seats to see Tool ... but people do. Again, while sure there's a great bulk of churn in the paid gaming market that's done over LFGs on various platforms and PayPal/***** transactions. But as I discussed, there are plenty of platforms that draw a slightly to significantly higher fee, with more robust quality assurance and thorough feedback/review reporting, and a more integrated payment platform. And then there are folks who through word of mouth or what have you get offers. What "most of the people" do doesn't actually matter once certain price point thresholds are crossed. The market is sustainable if it supports people at that tier of pay play. Can everyone do it? No, but not every musician gets to go on world tours either (big scale difference but the point that there are tiers of "work for money" in this space should be clear). In short the fact that folks can get propositioned $300 for a one shot offers shows there is demand among the supply for those sorts of values.
I'll roll back to Matt Mercer not being a useful analog in whatever landscape you think you have a grasp of, but first the OP chimes in:
I was thinking about writing my own short campaign, running it a few times as a free game where players can give donations to get feedback and what they would pay for the campaign. Then after a few times running it as a paid game then maybe considering streaming it. But again, I'm not sure what the market is for such things.
I know people love to play but if I did streaming, wouldn't I have to pay the players as well. Or do I run a free game I can stream and claim the donations for myself to justify the game is free to play? There seems like a lot of grey areas in the market and as a consumer and potential paid DM, I am just trying to figure out what is best for a player because, in the end, it's about making the players happy so you don't have a revolving door of unhappy customers.
Again, this forum isn't really the best space to figure out how to be a professional or otherwise monetized DM, and your conception is muddled. Do you want to run games and people will pay you to run games. Or do you want to stream games and get money from audience/sponsorship. You can't really do both at the same time. In the former, players are paying you to run games, you're basically the MC for the players' interactive entertainment. If you're streaming, you and the players are all producers and performers of an entertainment for the streaming spectating audience. I'd recommend figuring out which you want to do. If you want to be a paid DM, go to a small shop like dungeon master direct or a bigger clearing house like start playing games, the latter has some GMs who actually allow free spectators (under the presumption that the spectator is a potential customer) and see what they do to command $15-45/per player a session. If you want to stream, watch streamers, find games you like and approximate their style and then dig deep in their archives to see how they got started.
The DMs who are well paid by players got their rate by being good DMs who turned a pastime into a service for their customers. If you don't think of the work of a paid DM as work with the attendant emphasis on customer satisfaction, you're not going to be able command good rates or sustain player interest (kinda like regular GMing but there's money involved). The streamers with good sponsorships brining in hauls through patronage ... they tend to have some experience in a creative field or fields. They can write, voice act, do art, stand up comedy, etc. Matt Mercer was not a guy who decided to DM for money, got some people to pay him for DMing them and thus Critical Role was born. He was a voice actor, with some writing/directing chops too. He happened to have some friends in his (non D&D) professional space who happened to play D&D. They all happened to live in Los Angeles. Well, not happened, actorly creative types in the U.S. tend to congregate to L.A. and NYC ... L.A. in the mid 2010s being the entertainment Mecca that it is was still trying to literally capitalize int the the largely millennial gravitation toward media like streams and podcasts over traditional advertising supported television, subscription/cable supported television and box office dependent movies. There was also the whole let's call it nerd renaissance in pop culture where things like comics, scifi/horror/fantasy genres etc had become the juggernaut audience draws. Geeks and Sundry was one of those endeavors to capitalize ... they knew Mercer (and a few other people) because actorly affinity groups and all and G&S worked with the Critical Role group (and a few other people). The folks Mercer plays with, they never paid him (well maybe there was beer money handed around). If this is all new info to you, and you're serious about the questions you started asking, it's just better to look at what's actually being done first hand, and decide whether you have the capacity to integrate or innovate within that market, than it is to research the possibility by polling a few randoms on D&D Beyond, a community that again largely isn't really the most robust proponent of any sort of monetized gaming, other than the services D&D Beyond sells.
Coincidentally D&D Beyond is doing all sorts of live plays this week with "professional gamers" whatever you settle your plan on, it'd probably be more benefit to watch those games than it is talking among your focus group in this thread. The experience base you've been conversing with is just too limited or counter to the concept to really be a useful sample.
Whether paid or not, the one common factor I believe all DMs have is confidence.
Well I could technically do both if but not with the same group. Also I don't have access to game shops where I can watch people play games in English as I live in China at the moment and D&D isn't that popular even here in Beijing.
Now I myself already run paid games but I wanted to know where I could get info about DMs I wish to play with. I paid with a DM (whom I won't name) but he ran a $15 game and it was good for a few sessions but he was using the players to live out some sort of power fantasy and had a female player raped and had a male player sexually impaled for trying to save her. I think stuff like that should be things people know about DMs when you are looking to pay.
Of course the best way to have people get a feel for you is streaming or posting games on YoutTube but at that point, it limits you from running that campaign unless was insanely popular. I am a DM that masters a campaign, be it a module or homebrew, flesh out the world over many times running the campaign and then move one to a new one being able to advertise that game as a potential campaign players could play.
As I stated earlier, I'm making a campaign now, hence my need for playtesters later and then I can get a survey and fix what wasn't good and emphasize what was. It also gives me an estimate of what the players feel the game was worth.
If I was a personal trainer, and I arranged to run a 4 hour boot camp session for a group of 5 people, the idea that they'd each pay $10 would clearly be laughable.
TLDR - Having skim read these are the points I picked up on - please be more conscise if you want people to address all your arguments.
I think the fundamental difference in our positions is that you aliken paid DMing to a skilled profession whereas I and others would argue it is more akin to a hobby / entertainment. Obviously both points are valid. Some obviously do make it as a full time professional DM and there is certainly a market for the $300 one shot, but I would argue that while this does exist, it is much rarer.
The 'should be' comment is not contraditive - I was saying it's not just what you think it should be, but everyone, and obviously everyone is going to have different ideas and values. My friends and I think $10-15, you obviously think something higer, again both points are valid. And yes, people are going to have different economic situations. I suppose I should have expanded and said I have spoken to many different people in my experience of playing D&D, some who won't pay any, and some who pay higher, because obviously if you poll people willing to pay a certain amount there will be a consensus. My overall point was drawing on my experience of many different situations, but obviously that is subjective too.
Ultimately I think our starting points are far too far apart to come to any agreement so we will just have to agree to disagree for I think we will forever be going in circles.
I think you just have to accept that once entertainment is mentioned, sure it can be a hobby but it can also be monetized (I wouldn't say professionalized, though I suppose some of the emerging platforms may get better at quality assurance). You're right in your situation, but the gaming world is a lot bigger than your situation.
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Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.
So then what quality should be expected of the DM based on amount of payment? For example, what do you expect of a $5 game compared to a $10 or a $10 to a $20?
$5 / hour - they haven't bothered to read the module before they run it. I know everybody's income level varies, but this is the kind of money you give to the guy sitting outside the shop on the corner. It's less than minimum wage. Anybody running it for this much should run it for free and just enjoy DM'ing because they're not making any money.
$10 / hour - pre-written module they've run before, no character personal storylines, no investment of time by the DM before the game. Still below minimum wage in the UK.
$20 / hour - pre-written module they may or may not have run before, characters have personal storylines woven into the game, prepped by the DM
$50 / hour - bespoke campaign themed around the requests of the players with complex personal backstories, custom maps, possibly artwork if the DM is good at it, custom tokens for online maps. The works, basically.
I think the mistake you are making is that you are treating the DM's time for each player seperately. As I said before, 5x$10 is for 4 hours is $50 divided by 4. That's $12.50 or £9.01 an hour. Considering most DMs won't declare their earnings that's effectively tax free. That's not only above the minimum UK wage but is much more than what you would get for working 'cash in hand'.
Also, most decent / good DMs can run a module with backstory hooks, and they do that for free. If you're going to charge then you need to be offering more than the competition, otherwise people won't use your services.
I mean, you're entitled to your opinion and presumption that "most people you know" are the end all and be all of a potential market, but your posts here seem to lowball the paid gaming market that actually exists, lowball both in terms of rates and number of people doing it (and presumptuous of what gig economy types and freelancers do and don't report on their taxes). You feel games are worth x$ and onlyX# of players would deign to pay for gaming. That's just not true. Ads on Roll20 aren't really indicative of what people can and do make through other services, any more than the pay to play ads here on DDB. It's this sort of "feedback" which is more an expression that paid gaming is not your taste, that led me to suggest the OP actually look into the communities around the services that provide robust support for paid games (advertisement, reviews, and transaction management) than a community based around a service that serves a pool of players by and large engaged in non monetized play. It's sort of like walking into a mall food court looking for guidance in setting up a vegan menu. There may be some insight, but by and large the bulk of the input doesn't know what they're talking about.
If you had read my replies throughout this thread properly, then you would know I am not against paying for games. As I said, previously, I currently pay $10 a week ($40-$50 a month) to play D&D with a professional DM. I don't see it as lowballing but simply being realistic. Most people aren't well off or are only on average incomes at best given the current economic climates in both the US and UK. Therefore, for most people, D&D is a hobby or a luxury. Put it simply, if my bills go up and I have to cut back on spending then my $10 a week dedicated to D&D is probably one of the first things to go.
Like anything with economics, it's all about supply and demand. Value is based on what people are willing to pay, not what you think it 'should' be. Out of interest, I asked the four other players in my paid game and the general conensus was that around $10-15 dollars was the ball park for what they were willing to pay. Similarly, you fail to understand where the majority of revenue comes from for professional full time DMs. Someone like Rob Hartley for example, will make a significant proportion of his income from things like YouTube and Twitch ad revenue, which will then also be topped up by things like Patreon donations, Twitch Bits and YouTube Super Chats in addition to what his players are paying him. Of course, if you're exceptionally good, then you might also sell your own homebrew content and modules etc.
There is also a big difference between how much a professional celebrity DM who does it full time can charge compared to a professional DM who does it part time in addition to their day job. The main difference of course being reputation and prestige. Someone like Matt Mercer is obviously going to be able to justify charging way more than your average unknown pro DM, and people are going to pay more because it's him.
Underscoring or emboldening supply and demand and value just furthers your reductively naive and limited understanding of the market. Of course supply, demand and value are at issue but that's elementary, like saying accounting is about addition and subtraction and balances. I mean you're not wrong, but I wouldn't say your understanding is thorough.
You polled your other paying game mates. Of course there's going to be consensus, you're all in the same situation. Of course your belief in what the paid game market can bear is going to be within your budget. There's venture capital and just regular investors backing some of the paid gaming world. Talent and quality are both factors that influence markets such as there, think music and sports. Yeah, someone who spends $5 a weekend going to garage punk shows probably isn't going to be able to fork out $500 for ten rows away seats to see Tool ... but people do. Again, while sure there's a great bulk of churn in the paid gaming market that's done over LFGs on various platforms and PayPal/***** transactions. But as I discussed, there are plenty of platforms that draw a slightly to significantly higher fee, with more robust quality assurance and thorough feedback/review reporting, and a more integrated payment platform. And then there are folks who through word of mouth or what have you get offers. What "most of the people" do doesn't actually matter once certain price point thresholds are crossed. The market is sustainable if it supports people at that tier of pay play. Can everyone do it? No, but not every musician gets to go on world tours either (big scale difference but the point that there are tiers of "work for money" in this space should be clear). In short the fact that folks can get propositioned $300 for a one shot offers shows there is demand among the supply for those sorts of values.
I'll roll back to Matt Mercer not being a useful analog in whatever landscape you think you have a grasp of, but first the OP chimes in:
I was thinking about writing my own short campaign, running it a few times as a free game where players can give donations to get feedback and what they would pay for the campaign. Then after a few times running it as a paid game then maybe considering streaming it. But again, I'm not sure what the market is for such things.
I know people love to play but if I did streaming, wouldn't I have to pay the players as well. Or do I run a free game I can stream and claim the donations for myself to justify the game is free to play? There seems like a lot of grey areas in the market and as a consumer and potential paid DM, I am just trying to figure out what is best for a player because, in the end, it's about making the players happy so you don't have a revolving door of unhappy customers.
Again, this forum isn't really the best space to figure out how to be a professional or otherwise monetized DM, and your conception is muddled. Do you want to run games and people will pay you to run games. Or do you want to stream games and get money from audience/sponsorship. You can't really do both at the same time. In the former, players are paying you to run games, you're basically the MC for the players' interactive entertainment. If you're streaming, you and the players are all producers and performers of an entertainment for the streaming spectating audience. I'd recommend figuring out which you want to do. If you want to be a paid DM, go to a small shop like dungeon master direct or a bigger clearing house like start playing games, the latter has some GMs who actually allow free spectators (under the presumption that the spectator is a potential customer) and see what they do to command $15-45/per player a session. If you want to stream, watch streamers, find games you like and approximate their style and then dig deep in their archives to see how they got started.
The DMs who are well paid by players got their rate by being good DMs who turned a pastime into a service for their customers. If you don't think of the work of a paid DM as work with the attendant emphasis on customer satisfaction, you're not going to be able command good rates or sustain player interest (kinda like regular GMing but there's money involved). The streamers with good sponsorships brining in hauls through patronage ... they tend to have some experience in a creative field or fields. They can write, voice act, do art, stand up comedy, etc. Matt Mercer was not a guy who decided to DM for money, got some people to pay him for DMing them and thus Critical Role was born. He was a voice actor, with some writing/directing chops too. He happened to have some friends in his (non D&D) professional space who happened to play D&D. They all happened to live in Los Angeles. Well, not happened, actorly creative types in the U.S. tend to congregate to L.A. and NYC ... L.A. in the mid 2010s being the entertainment Mecca that it is was still trying to literally capitalize int the the largely millennial gravitation toward media like streams and podcasts over traditional advertising supported television, subscription/cable supported television and box office dependent movies. There was also the whole let's call it nerd renaissance in pop culture where things like comics, scifi/horror/fantasy genres etc had become the juggernaut audience draws. Geeks and Sundry was one of those endeavors to capitalize ... they knew Mercer (and a few other people) because actorly affinity groups and all and G&S worked with the Critical Role group (and a few other people). The folks Mercer plays with, they never paid him (well maybe there was beer money handed around). If this is all new info to you, and you're serious about the questions you started asking, it's just better to look at what's actually being done first hand, and decide whether you have the capacity to integrate or innovate within that market, than it is to research the possibility by polling a few randoms on D&D Beyond, a community that again largely isn't really the most robust proponent of any sort of monetized gaming, other than the services D&D Beyond sells.
Coincidentally D&D Beyond is doing all sorts of live plays this week with "professional gamers" whatever you settle your plan on, it'd probably be more benefit to watch those games than it is talking among your focus group in this thread. The experience base you've been conversing with is just too limited or counter to the concept to really be a useful sample.
Whether paid or not, the one common factor I believe all DMs have is confidence.
Well I could technically do both if but not with the same group. Also I don't have access to game shops where I can watch people play games in English as I live in China at the moment and D&D isn't that popular even here in Beijing.
Now I myself already run paid games but I wanted to know where I could get info about DMs I wish to play with. I paid with a DM (whom I won't name) but he ran a $15 game and it was good for a few sessions but he was using the players to live out some sort of power fantasy and had a female player raped and had a male player sexually impaled for trying to save her. I think stuff like that should be things people know about DMs when you are looking to pay.
Of course the best way to have people get a feel for you is streaming or posting games on YoutTube but at that point, it limits you from running that campaign unless was insanely popular. I am a DM that masters a campaign, be it a module or homebrew, flesh out the world over many times running the campaign and then move one to a new one being able to advertise that game as a potential campaign players could play.
As I stated earlier, I'm making a campaign now, hence my need for playtesters later and then I can get a survey and fix what wasn't good and emphasize what was. It also gives me an estimate of what the players feel the game was worth.
So to sum some of my points, if you want to make your own campaign world etc. Don't consider it "play testing." You like playing the game, right? Have fun with your playtesting, and just play with it with your regular group. No money on the line, no delusions of financial rewards etc. If you actually produce a project worthy of publishing, it's totally fine to go to try to publish it without compensating your game group/playtesters. On the other hand, if you're using their creative work like characters or homebrew they devised, then you need to negotiate some stuff. Otherwise, just list them in the product's acknowledgements. But really just play and don't worry about the business of gaming. If you think you got the sort of crew that would be good at "selling your world" through live play, that's next level stuff. Set up a game and see what your group, and your world are good for.
As to assessing DMs, again, online formats are great because on some platforms you can spectate / not play to see if the DM is worth your while. If you're talking about playing at a table, as DM who might have openings in one of my games (I don't normally get paid) I'd be fine with someone saying, "Hey Midnightplat, I'm interested in joining your game but as basically a complete stranger I'm a little nervous about committing a significant time investment (and in your case some $ too) would you mine if I drop by and watch one of your games before I actually sign up." I, and I think many GMs would be really cool with that. If it looked like you were having a good time I might even say "hey stranger, things are about to get interesting, we got some NPCs affiliated with the party if you want to jump on one and actually roll some dice for the second half of the session." Regardless a good DM should make themself available to see if you're a good fit with the table. This can also just be done with a conversation, I mean you and the DM will be talking a lot over the campaign, figuring out if the DM is someone you enjoy can usually come from a 20 minute chat. At the end, you should be feeling, "yeah, this person sounds cool, I'm in" otherwise, try the next DM.
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Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.
I think you just have to accept that once entertainment is mentioned, sure it can be a hobby but it can also be monetized (I wouldn't say professionalized, though I suppose some of the emerging platforms may get better at quality assurance). You're right in your situation, but the gaming world is a lot bigger than your situation.
This is true. However it is also true that, while anyone can be a comedian, singer, actor or other entertainer, that does not in and of itself make any given one of them good enough to sustain a living at.
Oh absolutely, it's why I wrote earlier that not every musician gets to go on world tour (it's a mix of talent and business at that level) my comments toward the OP were completely neutral toward the prospects of their capacity of doing so and achieving TTRPG "stardom". And again, as I think I made clear, the most successful of D&D streamers/entertainers I'd argue already had substantial or at least significant professional experience and success in creative/entertainment fields (Mercer voice acting, Colville worked in video gaming, and I don't think their outlier in the AAA so to speak roster of folks making bank in TTRPGs ... I've got mixed feelings as a piece of writing of Colville's essay on what "becoming a thing" in D&D did to his sense of self etc, but it's worth reading in this regard if you're in the OP's position and coming at this with little exposure entertaining the public). I think the fact that it ceases to be "fun and games" is why plenty of talented gamers prefer to just stick to the fun and games aspect of the hobby. I mean writing yet another apology to your patreon or kickstarter network about delayed shipping containers (and getting flamed on Twitter anyway or wherever despite the situation being out of your control) ... that sorta messes with the fun of the pastime.
I mean I'm not looking for stardom in TTRPG, it's a part time thing that I am looking to do while I pursue other things. Also being a player without paying is actually quite hard because free games fill up instantly.
I've seen it proposed that going with a for-pay GM and a bunch of strangers (to start out the campaign, anyway) is superior to gaming with friends, because it's easier to boot a problem player (hard to do if it's someone you work with during the day, or your wife's bestie or something), and you can potentially weed out the group so that everyone is compatible in the game style they want to play (also not going to be true of people who are already friends) and so on.
I still view D&D as something I do with friends -- it's the reason why I do it. But I guess if your main goal is just to "play D&D" then the strangers w/paid DM model might have some advantages.
It's just not for me.
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WOTC lies. We know that WOTC lies. WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. We know that WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. And still they lie.
Because of the above (a paraphrase from Orwell) I no longer post to the forums -- PM me if you need help or anything.
This is also true. I get this way sometimes when I DM for friends. I get this awful feeling if I kill off their character because I feel they resent me in real life for it but I am more than willing to do it online because the dice fell that way. If I got a negative review because a player died (most likely their own fault), then that would also suck the joy out of it for me. I actually prefer DMIng strangers since it's easier to be a DM.
That being said, I guess the most a DM can hope for is testimonials from past players and put it in their Discord group chat for other players to see.
There have been paid DMs on Roll20 since well before CritRole even started on Geek & Sundry. It's not as new as some people seem to think. And if it's worked for that long, whatever issues may arise can't be that hard to overcome.
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Want to start playing but don't have anyone to play with? You can try these options: [link].
I'd also add, again, that Critical Role and other streamers is a very different animal from paid DMing gigs found on LFP lists or more sophisticated table making markets. One uses the business model of mass entertainment (or streaming entertainment if you think that space has really evolved its own rules, which is a fair claim, I mean Yazzick from MannShorts has invested a significant portion of his musical output to rap about it) where the players are part of the production. The other uses the model of frankly the gig hustle or retainer. A lot of folks talking about "professional D&D or TTRPGs" fail to make that distinction, and as result produce really diluted insight on the two separate matters, or are talking about one but think they're talking about both. Not to mention they're excluding the whole sector of people who actually get paid or gain patronage not playing but providing published resources (and then you got all the ancillary industries from the dice mines to Wyrmwood's different sort of table making from LFPs, to folks like Beedle and Grimm luxury interpretations of existing modules).
Anyone thinking they will reach Matt Mercer level material/popular success through LFP posts on role 20 is just delusional and needs to look at the whole space of ways to get paid within the hobby and focus, and even then it's a lot of hustle with low margins of "making it." I think Pang and I actually had this coversation a month or so ago. There are actually folks who with no gaming experience at all thinking "I'll be a professional DM." Like Dennis said, it's a labor of love and usually takes more than gives back to the "pro" (most pro DMs, would be better compensated if they took all their pro gaming hours and just worked shifts at a FedEx distribution center). It's no more a get rich scheme than any other creative endeavor, I'd actually say the odds are probably worse.
There have been paid DMs on Roll20 since well before CritRole even started on Geek & Sundry. It's not as new as some people seem to think. And if it's worked for that long, whatever issues may arise can't be that hard to overcome.
Not to mention AL had paid components to it since 5e started....
I watched a D&D Beyond Youtube presentation that was out out a few days ago, where the community manager interviewed the latest lead actor on the CR show. This person was introduced as a "professional DM". In that interview, this "professional" then went on to say "who has the time to read?", and "I don't care about logic or physics" (read that as rules). Imagine paying 20 bucks for a 4 hour session of D&D (or ANY online Tabletop game) where the DM says "Look, now that I have your money, I have never read the PHB, let alone the DMG, and I am going to run the game on that basis, with no rules."
Since this is likely in reference to Aabriya Iyengar (who just finished DMing an 8-episode spin-off adventure in the CritRoleverse, between CritRole's 2nd and as yet to be announced 3rd streamed campaign), she's a TTRPG streamer and podcaster who has been involved (and continues to be) in a ton of campaigns and one-shots. She actually does know the 5E rules pretty well (better than the average DM I know, I'd say) and has certainly read the PHB. She does like to be a bit loosy-goosy with the rules sometimes but that's by choice, not because of a lack of knowledge, and the groups she DMs for enjoy that. I'm sure you wouldn't, and that's ok too, it just shows different styles can all work. Moreover, DMs develop their style at least partially in response to how their players react to their games, not in some contextless vacuum where nothing but their own preferences have an impact. If their players don't like how a DM runs things, that DM can either adapt or find himself without players; any experienced DM's style is pretty much guaranteed to be approved of by at least some of their groups.
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Want to start playing but don't have anyone to play with? You can try these options: [link].
$20 per player per session for a 4 hour session sounds cheap to me. $80 for 4 hours work, from someone with a specific set of specialist skills, really isn't much. For that amount of money I'd expect to run a module that I'd run before, as there's no wiggle room in that amount for prep time. If I was charging to DM, I'd ask a bare minimum of $10 per hour per player for a prewritten module, or double that for a homebrew game tailored to the players' preferences. A pint of beer where I live is about $8.50, and while that is on the expensive side of things, if you're hiring a DM for a whole evening then you'd expect to make it worth their while.
But yeah, try out a DM and see if you enjoy playing with them. There's no one-size-fits-all for DMing.
It is an utter disgrace, and being online for the world to see, I would hope that those DM's declare the money to the Inland Revenue.
There are plenty of free games, and DnD is pretty much free to play. The only thing you need are pencils, paper and some dice. Don't fall into the trap of thinking that DM's are some super human, special breed. Literally anyone can be a DM.
If you're going to charge then you need to be offering more than the competition, otherwise people won't use your services.
There's a shortage of DMs (I think there's a reference to there being 1 DM for every 15 players in this thread, which would mean a shortage of roughly 66% - and that's assuming DMs are geographically spread out, which is unlikely to be the case). Competition is only a consideration if there are sufficient competitors.
That is true, however, I suspect it is a vast minority of the total pool of D&D players who are willing to pay for a game. Most people I know point blank refuse to pay. Incidentally I do. So while there might be more players than DMs, that doesn't mean much if most of those players aren't actually willing to pay anything. As I said, if you're going to charge people to play, then you not only need to be better than all the free DMs, but you also have to find the people who are willing to pay what you're charging, and the likelyhood of that goes down the more you charge.
The vast majority of that minority will be players who have a hard time finding a DM, either one they like or just any DM at all. I'd pay for a game with any of a handful of "celebrity" DMs I like, but I have the spending money for that and I'm not interested in paying a "professional" DM in general because I can find one who'll do it for free or I can DM myself. There is no "all the free DMs" for most of the people willing to pay, as that's exactly the reason they are willing in the first place.
The main reason for a shortage is that many cannot afford to buy all of the hardcopy books and then get hit by the Covid lockdown meaning they need to pay again for all of the books in digital format and also a monthly subscription on here to be able to share those electronic books with their friends.
If you're going to charge then you need to be offering more than the competition, otherwise people won't use your services.
There's a shortage of DMs (I think there's a reference to there being 1 DM for every 15 players in this thread, which would mean a shortage of roughly 66% - and that's assuming DMs are geographically spread out, which is unlikely to be the case). Competition is only a consideration if there are sufficient competitors.
That is true, however, I suspect it is a vast minority of the total pool of D&D players who are willing to pay for a game. Most people I know point blank refuse to pay. Incidentally I do. So while there might be more players than DMs, that doesn't mean much if most of those players aren't actually willing to pay anything. As I said, if you're going to charge people to play, then you not only need to be better than all the free DMs, but you also have to find the people who are willing to pay what you're charging, and the likelyhood of that goes down the more you charge.
The vast majority of that minority will be players who have a hard time finding a DM, either one they like or just any DM at all. I'd pay for a game with any of a handful of "celebrity" DMs I like, but I have the spending money for that and I'm not interested in paying a "professional" DM in general because I can find one who'll do it for free or I can DM myself. There is no "all the free DMs" for most of the people willing to pay, as that's exactly the reason they are willing in the first place.
The main reason for a shortage is that many cannot afford to buy all of the hardcopy books and then get hit by the Covid lockdown meaning they need to pay again for all of the books in digital format and also a monthly subscription on here to be able to share those electronic books with their friends.
Yeah, nah. That's not a thing. Or it shouldn't be, at any rate. You can DM perfectly fine without subscription and without books to share on DDB. And it may surprise you, but the far greater majority of DMs out there keep on keeping on without even having an account here. The main reason for the shortage is that most players think they can't DM and/or just don't want to.
I think I agree. The difference between a paid DM that can work the hussle and "all the DMs" isn't necessarily exceptional DM talent. It's most that aforementioned hussle as well as an ability to package what most see as their hobby as a service.
Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.
If you had read my replies throughout this thread properly, then you would know I am not against paying for games. As I said, previously, I currently pay $10 a week ($40-$50 a month) to play D&D with a professional DM. I don't see it as lowballing but simply being realistic. Most people aren't well off or are only on average incomes at best given the current economic climates in both the US and UK. Therefore, for most people, D&D is a hobby or a luxury. Put it simply, if my bills go up and I have to cut back on spending then my $10 a week dedicated to D&D is probably one of the first things to go.
Like anything with economics, it's all about supply and demand. Value is based on what people are willing to pay, not what you think it 'should' be. Out of interest, I asked the four other players in my paid game and the general conensus was that around $10-15 dollars was the ball park for what they were willing to pay. Similarly, you fail to understand where the majority of revenue comes from for professional full time DMs. Someone like Rob Hartley for example, will make a significant proportion of his income from things like YouTube and Twitch ad revenue, which will then also be topped up by things like Patreon donations, Twitch Bits and YouTube Super Chats in addition to what his players are paying him. Of course, if you're exceptionally good, then you might also sell your own homebrew content and modules etc.
There is also a big difference between how much a professional celebrity DM who does it full time can charge compared to a professional DM who does it part time in addition to their day job. The main difference of course being reputation and prestige. Someone like Matt Mercer is obviously going to be able to justify charging way more than your average unknown pro DM, and people are going to pay more because it's him.
I was thinking about writing my own short campaign, running it a few times as a free game where players can give donations to get feedback and what they would pay for the campaign. Then after a few times running it as a paid game then maybe considering streaming it. But again, I'm not sure what the market is for such things.
I know people love to play but if I did streaming, wouldn't I have to pay the players as well. Or do I run a free game I can stream and claim the donations for myself to justify the game is free to play? There seems like a lot of grey areas in the market and as a consumer and potential paid DM, I am just trying to figure out what is best for a player because, in the end, it's about making the players happy so you don't have a revolving door of unhappy customers.
Underscoring or emboldening supply and demand and value just furthers your reductively naive and limited understanding of the market. Of course supply, demand and value are at issue but that's elementary, like saying accounting is about addition and subtraction and balances. I mean you're not wrong, but I wouldn't say your understanding is thorough.
You polled your other paying game mates. Of course there's going to be consensus, you're all in the same situation. Of course your belief in what the paid game market can bear is going to be within your budget. There's venture capital and just regular investors backing some of the paid gaming world. Talent and quality are both factors that influence markets such as there, think music and sports. Yeah, someone who spends $5 a weekend going to garage punk shows probably isn't going to be able to fork out $500 for ten rows away seats to see Tool ... but people do. Again, while sure there's a great bulk of churn in the paid gaming market that's done over LFGs on various platforms and PayPal/***** transactions. But as I discussed, there are plenty of platforms that draw a slightly to significantly higher fee, with more robust quality assurance and thorough feedback/review reporting, and a more integrated payment platform. And then there are folks who through word of mouth or what have you get offers. What "most of the people" do doesn't actually matter once certain price point thresholds are crossed. The market is sustainable if it supports people at that tier of pay play. Can everyone do it? No, but not every musician gets to go on world tours either (big scale difference but the point that there are tiers of "work for money" in this space should be clear). In short the fact that folks can get propositioned $300 for a one shot offers shows there is demand among the supply for those sorts of values.
I'll roll back to Matt Mercer not being a useful analog in whatever landscape you think you have a grasp of, but first the OP chimes in:
Again, this forum isn't really the best space to figure out how to be a professional or otherwise monetized DM, and your conception is muddled. Do you want to run games and people will pay you to run games. Or do you want to stream games and get money from audience/sponsorship. You can't really do both at the same time. In the former, players are paying you to run games, you're basically the MC for the players' interactive entertainment. If you're streaming, you and the players are all producers and performers of an entertainment for the streaming spectating audience. I'd recommend figuring out which you want to do. If you want to be a paid DM, go to a small shop like dungeon master direct or a bigger clearing house like start playing games, the latter has some GMs who actually allow free spectators (under the presumption that the spectator is a potential customer) and see what they do to command $15-45/per player a session. If you want to stream, watch streamers, find games you like and approximate their style and then dig deep in their archives to see how they got started.
The DMs who are well paid by players got their rate by being good DMs who turned a pastime into a service for their customers. If you don't think of the work of a paid DM as work with the attendant emphasis on customer satisfaction, you're not going to be able command good rates or sustain player interest (kinda like regular GMing but there's money involved). The streamers with good sponsorships brining in hauls through patronage ... they tend to have some experience in a creative field or fields. They can write, voice act, do art, stand up comedy, etc. Matt Mercer was not a guy who decided to DM for money, got some people to pay him for DMing them and thus Critical Role was born. He was a voice actor, with some writing/directing chops too. He happened to have some friends in his (non D&D) professional space who happened to play D&D. They all happened to live in Los Angeles. Well, not happened, actorly creative types in the U.S. tend to congregate to L.A. and NYC ... L.A. in the mid 2010s being the entertainment Mecca that it is was still trying to literally capitalize int the the largely millennial gravitation toward media like streams and podcasts over traditional advertising supported television, subscription/cable supported television and box office dependent movies. There was also the whole let's call it nerd renaissance in pop culture where things like comics, scifi/horror/fantasy genres etc had become the juggernaut audience draws. Geeks and Sundry was one of those endeavors to capitalize ... they knew Mercer (and a few other people) because actorly affinity groups and all and G&S worked with the Critical Role group (and a few other people). The folks Mercer plays with, they never paid him (well maybe there was beer money handed around). If this is all new info to you, and you're serious about the questions you started asking, it's just better to look at what's actually being done first hand, and decide whether you have the capacity to integrate or innovate within that market, than it is to research the possibility by polling a few randoms on D&D Beyond, a community that again largely isn't really the most robust proponent of any sort of monetized gaming, other than the services D&D Beyond sells.
Coincidentally D&D Beyond is doing all sorts of live plays this week with "professional gamers" whatever you settle your plan on, it'd probably be more benefit to watch those games than it is talking among your focus group in this thread. The experience base you've been conversing with is just too limited or counter to the concept to really be a useful sample.
Whether paid or not, the one common factor I believe all DMs have is confidence.
Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.
If I was a personal trainer, and I arranged to run a 4 hour boot camp session for a group of 5 people, the idea that they'd each pay $10 would clearly be laughable.
You are happy to pay that, and the DM is happy to accept it, and that's fine. I am glad that you are enjoying your game, and I assume the DM is too.
The rest of what you say is flawed, however. People have different income levels. I spend more on a bottle of wine, or my lunch than you're prepared to spend on a weekly D&D session. Simply stating a few facts: I have a $45 / month gym membership. I spend $100 per month on petrol. My mortgage alone is around $1700. But I am around 40 years old, I have a senior management job, and $10 is pocket change to someone in that position. $50 per session on D&D on a Friday night would save me money, compared to going out on the town. I very much appreciate however that when I was in my early 20s, and certainly my teens, I couldn't possibly have afforded $50 per week on a D&D session - even buying the PhB was a major investment of my funds (I have no idea how any young person affords MTG cards). But D&D is no longer the preserve of teens and college students. DMs who played in the 80s and 90s, are still playing. Older players are earning over $100k dollars a year, and are also DMs - and the older and players who love the game the most are the most experienced DMs.
Nobody should have to pay for a DM, but DMs don't have to provide their time for free, or for an amount of money they won't notice they earned (People earning $70k per year and up probably won't if they lost $50). If you're paying a DM, then you have to ask yourself - what happens when this DM, who we're paying $10 for 5 hours+prep time, is offered $20 instead by another group? That is the supply and demand that you're talking about. The better someone is at DMing, the more time they put in, the more they will be able to charge. Anecdotes about what you and your friends can afford is not relevant.
If you check back to your own reply, after stating this you immediately just went on after this to tell my what you and your friends think it 'should' be, contradicting your own point.
Again, I can easily afford $50 a week for D&D - staying in playing D&D on a Friday or Saturday would actually reduce my weekly expenditure at this rate, since I wouldn't be spending $150 going out eating dinner and in the bar.
In terms of why people should pay individually:
And so on, and so on. The difficulty is that you might pay $15 to go to a boot camp fitness session once per week, but it's and hour long - not 5 hours long. I do appreciate I'm coming at this from the position of someone with comfortable disposable income (because I am old, and I've got a career, and when you're older you probably just have more money), but I can also see some of your position as well. Because D&D is fun to run, there will be DMs out there who are willing to run games for much less than I would want; but if we're talking about having systems for rating DMs, the inevitable conclusion of that would be that the most in demand DMs would be able to charge more, and more, and more as time goes on.
Well I could technically do both if but not with the same group. Also I don't have access to game shops where I can watch people play games in English as I live in China at the moment and D&D isn't that popular even here in Beijing.
Now I myself already run paid games but I wanted to know where I could get info about DMs I wish to play with. I paid with a DM (whom I won't name) but he ran a $15 game and it was good for a few sessions but he was using the players to live out some sort of power fantasy and had a female player raped and had a male player sexually impaled for trying to save her. I think stuff like that should be things people know about DMs when you are looking to pay.
Of course the best way to have people get a feel for you is streaming or posting games on YoutTube but at that point, it limits you from running that campaign unless was insanely popular. I am a DM that masters a campaign, be it a module or homebrew, flesh out the world over many times running the campaign and then move one to a new one being able to advertise that game as a potential campaign players could play.
As I stated earlier, I'm making a campaign now, hence my need for playtesters later and then I can get a survey and fix what wasn't good and emphasize what was. It also gives me an estimate of what the players feel the game was worth.
TLDR - Having skim read these are the points I picked up on - please be more conscise if you want people to address all your arguments.
I think the fundamental difference in our positions is that you aliken paid DMing to a skilled profession whereas I and others would argue it is more akin to a hobby / entertainment. Obviously both points are valid. Some obviously do make it as a full time professional DM and there is certainly a market for the $300 one shot, but I would argue that while this does exist, it is much rarer.
The 'should be' comment is not contraditive - I was saying it's not just what you think it should be, but everyone, and obviously everyone is going to have different ideas and values. My friends and I think $10-15, you obviously think something higer, again both points are valid. And yes, people are going to have different economic situations. I suppose I should have expanded and said I have spoken to many different people in my experience of playing D&D, some who won't pay any, and some who pay higher, because obviously if you poll people willing to pay a certain amount there will be a consensus. My overall point was drawing on my experience of many different situations, but obviously that is subjective too.
Ultimately I think our starting points are far too far apart to come to any agreement so we will just have to agree to disagree for I think we will forever be going in circles.
I think you just have to accept that once entertainment is mentioned, sure it can be a hobby but it can also be monetized (I wouldn't say professionalized, though I suppose some of the emerging platforms may get better at quality assurance). You're right in your situation, but the gaming world is a lot bigger than your situation.
Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.
So to sum some of my points, if you want to make your own campaign world etc. Don't consider it "play testing." You like playing the game, right? Have fun with your playtesting, and just play with it with your regular group. No money on the line, no delusions of financial rewards etc. If you actually produce a project worthy of publishing, it's totally fine to go to try to publish it without compensating your game group/playtesters. On the other hand, if you're using their creative work like characters or homebrew they devised, then you need to negotiate some stuff. Otherwise, just list them in the product's acknowledgements. But really just play and don't worry about the business of gaming. If you think you got the sort of crew that would be good at "selling your world" through live play, that's next level stuff. Set up a game and see what your group, and your world are good for.
As to assessing DMs, again, online formats are great because on some platforms you can spectate / not play to see if the DM is worth your while. If you're talking about playing at a table, as DM who might have openings in one of my games (I don't normally get paid) I'd be fine with someone saying, "Hey Midnightplat, I'm interested in joining your game but as basically a complete stranger I'm a little nervous about committing a significant time investment (and in your case some $ too) would you mine if I drop by and watch one of your games before I actually sign up." I, and I think many GMs would be really cool with that. If it looked like you were having a good time I might even say "hey stranger, things are about to get interesting, we got some NPCs affiliated with the party if you want to jump on one and actually roll some dice for the second half of the session." Regardless a good DM should make themself available to see if you're a good fit with the table. This can also just be done with a conversation, I mean you and the DM will be talking a lot over the campaign, figuring out if the DM is someone you enjoy can usually come from a 20 minute chat. At the end, you should be feeling, "yeah, this person sounds cool, I'm in" otherwise, try the next DM.
Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.
Oh absolutely, it's why I wrote earlier that not every musician gets to go on world tour (it's a mix of talent and business at that level) my comments toward the OP were completely neutral toward the prospects of their capacity of doing so and achieving TTRPG "stardom". And again, as I think I made clear, the most successful of D&D streamers/entertainers I'd argue already had substantial or at least significant professional experience and success in creative/entertainment fields (Mercer voice acting, Colville worked in video gaming, and I don't think their outlier in the AAA so to speak roster of folks making bank in TTRPGs ... I've got mixed feelings as a piece of writing of Colville's essay on what "becoming a thing" in D&D did to his sense of self etc, but it's worth reading in this regard if you're in the OP's position and coming at this with little exposure entertaining the public). I think the fact that it ceases to be "fun and games" is why plenty of talented gamers prefer to just stick to the fun and games aspect of the hobby. I mean writing yet another apology to your patreon or kickstarter network about delayed shipping containers (and getting flamed on Twitter anyway or wherever despite the situation being out of your control) ... that sorta messes with the fun of the pastime.
Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.
I mean I'm not looking for stardom in TTRPG, it's a part time thing that I am looking to do while I pursue other things. Also being a player without paying is actually quite hard because free games fill up instantly.
I've seen it proposed that going with a for-pay GM and a bunch of strangers (to start out the campaign, anyway) is superior to gaming with friends, because it's easier to boot a problem player (hard to do if it's someone you work with during the day, or your wife's bestie or something), and you can potentially weed out the group so that everyone is compatible in the game style they want to play (also not going to be true of people who are already friends) and so on.
I still view D&D as something I do with friends -- it's the reason why I do it. But I guess if your main goal is just to "play D&D" then the strangers w/paid DM model might have some advantages.
It's just not for me.
WOTC lies. We know that WOTC lies. WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. We know that WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. And still they lie.
Because of the above (a paraphrase from Orwell) I no longer post to the forums -- PM me if you need help or anything.
This is also true. I get this way sometimes when I DM for friends. I get this awful feeling if I kill off their character because I feel they resent me in real life for it but I am more than willing to do it online because the dice fell that way. If I got a negative review because a player died (most likely their own fault), then that would also suck the joy out of it for me. I actually prefer DMIng strangers since it's easier to be a DM.
That being said, I guess the most a DM can hope for is testimonials from past players and put it in their Discord group chat for other players to see.
There have been paid DMs on Roll20 since well before CritRole even started on Geek & Sundry. It's not as new as some people seem to think. And if it's worked for that long, whatever issues may arise can't be that hard to overcome.
Want to start playing but don't have anyone to play with? You can try these options: [link].
I'd also add, again, that Critical Role and other streamers is a very different animal from paid DMing gigs found on LFP lists or more sophisticated table making markets. One uses the business model of mass entertainment (or streaming entertainment if you think that space has really evolved its own rules, which is a fair claim, I mean Yazzick from MannShorts has invested a significant portion of his musical output to rap about it) where the players are part of the production. The other uses the model of frankly the gig hustle or retainer. A lot of folks talking about "professional D&D or TTRPGs" fail to make that distinction, and as result produce really diluted insight on the two separate matters, or are talking about one but think they're talking about both. Not to mention they're excluding the whole sector of people who actually get paid or gain patronage not playing but providing published resources (and then you got all the ancillary industries from the dice mines to Wyrmwood's different sort of table making from LFPs, to folks like Beedle and Grimm luxury interpretations of existing modules).
Anyone thinking they will reach Matt Mercer level material/popular success through LFP posts on role 20 is just delusional and needs to look at the whole space of ways to get paid within the hobby and focus, and even then it's a lot of hustle with low margins of "making it." I think Pang and I actually had this coversation a month or so ago. There are actually folks who with no gaming experience at all thinking "I'll be a professional DM." Like Dennis said, it's a labor of love and usually takes more than gives back to the "pro" (most pro DMs, would be better compensated if they took all their pro gaming hours and just worked shifts at a FedEx distribution center). It's no more a get rich scheme than any other creative endeavor, I'd actually say the odds are probably worse.
Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.
Not to mention AL had paid components to it since 5e started....
Since this is likely in reference to Aabriya Iyengar (who just finished DMing an 8-episode spin-off adventure in the CritRoleverse, between CritRole's 2nd and as yet to be announced 3rd streamed campaign), she's a TTRPG streamer and podcaster who has been involved (and continues to be) in a ton of campaigns and one-shots. She actually does know the 5E rules pretty well (better than the average DM I know, I'd say) and has certainly read the PHB. She does like to be a bit loosy-goosy with the rules sometimes but that's by choice, not because of a lack of knowledge, and the groups she DMs for enjoy that. I'm sure you wouldn't, and that's ok too, it just shows different styles can all work. Moreover, DMs develop their style at least partially in response to how their players react to their games, not in some contextless vacuum where nothing but their own preferences have an impact. If their players don't like how a DM runs things, that DM can either adapt or find himself without players; any experienced DM's style is pretty much guaranteed to be approved of by at least some of their groups.
Want to start playing but don't have anyone to play with? You can try these options: [link].
It is an utter disgrace, and being online for the world to see, I would hope that those DM's declare the money to the Inland Revenue.
There are plenty of free games, and DnD is pretty much free to play. The only thing you need are pencils, paper and some dice. Don't fall into the trap of thinking that DM's are some super human, special breed. Literally anyone can be a DM.
The main reason for a shortage is that many cannot afford to buy all of the hardcopy books and then get hit by the Covid lockdown meaning they need to pay again for all of the books in digital format and also a monthly subscription on here to be able to share those electronic books with their friends.
Yeah, nah. That's not a thing. Or it shouldn't be, at any rate. You can DM perfectly fine without subscription and without books to share on DDB. And it may surprise you, but the far greater majority of DMs out there keep on keeping on without even having an account here. The main reason for the shortage is that most players think they can't DM and/or just don't want to.
edit: without, not with
Want to start playing but don't have anyone to play with? You can try these options: [link].