Hey Veeky Forums I've been listening to some of the successful business people say that you have to love what you do...

Hey Veeky Forums I've been listening to some of the successful business people say that you have to love what you do. I love GMing and I wanna find a way to make money from it. How do I do it? Is it wrong to offer a service to people for money? How good would I need to be? How much do you think the players would pay?

Thought about making a community CYOA YT channel?

>How good would I need to be?

Probably going to depend on how much you're charging. Part of the problem with asking money for it, though, is that you're likely going to have to give up some of your GM'ing freedom - in many games, the GM is the one with the final power of veto and, while ideally the GM and the players see one another as equals for the most part, most players will begrudgingly yield to the authority of the GM. Or leave the game. Or post shit on Veeky Forums about how their GM sucks.

So replacing your players with paying customers might just lead to more entitled, bitchy players. Consider how many little shits there are on Roll20, and how awful they are - the kind of players that a GM wants at their table are already playing games. Now consider the sort of player that has to pay somebody else to GM for them.

I think by keeping the charges low for each player I can make more then the minimum wage I make now.
Entitled players is always a problem but I see what you mean. Starting out I'd likely lack the references to offer a paid service to people I'd be able to choose. I think a properly laid out contract about what is acceptable and what isn't would be important, especially when we all know how weird table tops can get.

CYOA a shit but if that's your love go for it user.

Rukai a shit

No there's nothing wrong with wanting to make money as long as everyone in the exchange comes out better than before.

However, practically speaking I've heard horror stories of people GMing for a living and being forced into a contractual obligation to GM for the WORST people.

The financial barrier to entry will not guarantee you well adjusted players with a social life, a stable job, and just want the most out of their free time. There are many instances where you could the absolute worst fucking people imaginable who are only willing to part with their neetcash because every other group kicked them out.

The main issue is this: those people's job they have love for is coincidentally lucrative.
I love masturbating but i'm not going to be able to make it as a chatcam masturbator cause i have neither the look or the rope.

I love getting drunk and while i can make quick cash doing bar tricks and drinking contests those aren't exactly lucrative.

You MIGHT be able to set yourself up for cheap shit like $10 a player or an hourly fee but you better be damn good for that or else they can just search out a market flooded with free gm's.

Yeah, last thing you want is being contractually obligated to run an ERP game for a cabal of morbidly obese gayfurs.

That'd actually be a cash pot. Sadly thats who you'll get. Weird creepers who can't get a GM any other way.

Prepare for some magical realming because when people pay they also demand

I only used the image cause I'm posting from my mobile and all I have on my phone are bad memes to send to my normie friends on FB

I fully expect the challenge. I might start with some more dungeon crawler esq things in order to avoid letting people stick their dick in every NPC they come across.

A 2.5 per hour per player seems like a reasonable amount for me to start with. I mean, with a normal 5 player party I'd be making minimum wage. I see GMing and TTRPG as a art and business that isn't being exploited quite as much as it could be, if I can make it to offering 3.50 per player per hour then start contracting GMs out to people for 3.25 per playerhour and skim the 0.25 off the top then I could start contracting out other like minded people.

Think about the greentexts I could write for Veeky Forums though!

I can deal with a little magical realm. Gonna need a contract that says no explicitly sexual things though. I'd rather not have to sit through another voice session of neckbeards ERPing with the GM.

Get a real job.

fyi I will provide twice the quality as this faggot, will provide references, and charge half as much and guarantee a number of sessions ahead of time, and will learn any system.

TY free market for reminding me why start up businesses fail.
How did you get started with a pay to GM career? What references do you have and how do you present them to players? I was thinking about preparing and running some free games and recording all of the voice/text/rolls and images for a highlight real and so that players have a preview of my quality but I dunno enough about the industry standard.

Thats pretty low and you're not really making minimum wage. you'd make $12.5 an hour for how many hours? Do you honestly know any group that would play for 8 hours straight? For how many days? Now throw in all the offhour unpaid work you'll be doing to keep the campaign worthwhile. You want to stack groups like appointments? How many are going to actually stickt to an 8-10pm game when they really want a 4-6pm. what happens to flakers? It just seems vastly unsustainable as a business especially when the market is not only flooded but built on the free gm's.

And now you have a cutthroat competitor who already comes off as a vastly better and more experienced provider and he's cheaper to boot.

Fuck BOTH of you I'll learn any system, generate entire campaigns worth of narrative between sessions, bake cookies with genuine love (no artificial bullshit), guarantee every player time in the spotlight and a fun campaign, AND I'll pay YOU to be in the campaign!

12$/hour is minimum wage where I live. If I run two 4 hour sessions then I have 8 hours of work. People live in different time zones and have different schedules. Also I didn't mean to suggest I was gonna stop my fulltime job to just become a DM until I actually built up a customer base through dedicated service. The market isn't flooded with free GM's either, look on roll20 where games have 120+ applications. I see a niche especially when it comes to quality, dedicated GMing.

Whelp I guess nobody can have a business playing soccer or acting because people do it for free.

I'll bring brownies made with love.

If you're gonna have to magical realm for the kind of people that hire you because they can't find one for free, consider becoming a prostitute. Same thing but the money's better.

I've watched anime and been to /k/, i know your brownie games involving "love".

I would but I think my SO would object to that.

is there anything like this?

Back in my day I used to run games for little kids at a local community center. Lucky me, I live near one of the richest neighborhoods in the state and rich clueless mothers have no idea how much to pay for their kids extracurricular activities and no idea how to check if they're legit. Made a good 800$ a month, which ain't bad for 6 hours work total for someone who's in high school. Got found out after two years or so.

I have a friend who does that professionally, and he gets paid way more (made 3000$ or so last month, I know that because yesterday he invited me drinking off it), but he works his ass off all day long juggling ten different groups of like twenty kids each. No idea how he manages it but he really enjoys it, so no problem with him. Real big family so he gets along nice with kids, too. Don't think I could've handled that.

OP let me be straight with you, this is not gong to make you a living. Half the allure of ttrpgs is their lack of cost. Now I understand that you are probably a cut above the rest when it comes to GMs. I reached that level after DMung a LOT. I have just about mastered my game and I could probably get away with charging money. I am running four or five different campaigns right now.

My advice? Dont. It will end up disappoining you and possibly kill your love of GMing

You're approaching this from the wrong angle. You're looking to DM a game for money, nobody is going to pay for that. You have to sell your services as a player, not a DM.

Think about all the friendless weirdos with tons of dosh who would pay (or who have friends/relatives/associates who will pay) to have you sit with them and put up with their autistic bullshit for a couple of hours.

Remember that movie "The Toy" by Richard Prior?

Is he some kind of pedophile? How many fetishes has he introduced to these kids?

Believe it or not, outside of Veeky Forums, most people are capable of thinking about things - even children - in a non-sexual manner.

So what your saying is I should open a 'companionship' cafe like the ones they have in japan?

that sounds suspiciously like "brothel"

If you imagine the brothel from Planescape:Torment, sure.

>Is it wrong to offer a service to people for money?
Only if you're a dirty commie.

OP, there are professional GMs, but they do not make money from their GMing.

Instead, they make money by selling their adventures. Their GMing is the playtesting that makes their product worth buying. So sharpen your pencil and write. It has the potential to make you a living.

...

My city had a maid cafe couple years ago. And we're not some fancy city, we're dirty slavs. Basically regular cafe with vidya, board games, and staff in cute outfits. You could ask a meido to play with you. Usually when you were short one person for a big game, hogging the meido to play with 1 on 1 was frowned upon. (Touching staff was strictly forbidden.) It wasn't all that much expensive compared to regular cafe. They also had butlers, but I don't recall any one of them being particularly cute. It was closed down after about a year, the guy running it had no business savvy and picked a bad location that wouldn't get any regular customers except for people already in the know. I think the similar idea could work when better organized...

This reminds me, I line the Philippines and I don't think there's much P&P Roleplaying here. Or so I thought until I saw an ad on Facebook and a Convention for DMing and P&P Roleplay. I don't remember but I think they had entrance fees or something? I could be wrong. And it wasn't some weird small event, I think it got a decent amount of followers, going near at most 500? Plus it took place in this big city too

I mean, cuddle cafes and companionship cafes are popular with the people that can't get a date. I dunno how effective they'd be in america though. I guess with the fact we're facing an increasing disparity in sexual activity the market is set to be tapped like a hookers ass.

I like the idea of combining a maid cafe and a boardgame cafe. Now we're getting somewhere. Set that up in a nice location near some transit so the neets don't need cars and I'd be rakeing in neetbux.

This OP, otherwise your "professional GMing" is only going to be lucrative when you find a group of friends who are all horrible/niche players, but one of them is your typical loaded furry, so you'll make like $300 a night running their game of 4 edgelords until the campaign gets ruined and they never bother to pay you again.

Also I'm interested in selling adventures. I'm currently working on putting my original overarching campaign into an adventure format, i just have no idea where/how to sell it.

Blogging or youtubing is a crowded market, but it's still a more realistic way of making money through your DM'ing abilities.

Minimum wage is 160 rupees where I live.


Compete with that.

Go and take photos of Colette sperging out.