So I am thinking of starting to GM for money. I come from a relatively poor country...

Bastardizing a form of creativity you enjoy, so you can make money off it, has a way of sucking all joy from that activity in general. Speaking from experience here. If you're willing to take that risk, all I can say is good luck.

Are you going to GM internationally in English or just to people who speak your language? I don't exactly expect people from a poor country to pay for GMing.

>They're called whores.
Indeed. And whoring is a large, profitable and very popular business around the world.

QED he can make a job of it.

I mean, if you look at Roll20 people clearly pay for it.

Just be prepared to do a lot of special snowflake / magical realm shit / autism to the max shit, if they're coming to you to GM something no one else would, you know that it aught to be shit

You CAN run your own game and make people play for it, but that's significantly harder of a sell. If you plan on doing that, just run official 5e modules, they seem to be popular

What's your current occupation?

There is nothing wrong with doing this, however expecting people to fork over their own hard earned cash for what is essentially a very subjective experience is asking for trouble. I have some suggestions to make it profitable for you and enjoyable for them.

>Play a few more games and stream them
People will be able to view your general style and approach to gaming, and see if they can penetrate your thick slavic accent.

>Do not ask them what you want, post what you want and let people come to you.
If you chase players, offering them whatever they want there is an increased chance they will have higher demands of you. If you present what you are offering you can alleviate a lot of soaring expectations.

>Trust your gut for players, if you suspect somebody will be a shithole, don't let them in.
This will be your business, you are for all intents and purposes self employed, if you truly can support yourself doing it, you must be professional and mature otherwise word will spread. We are a small community, those paying for GM services even smaller.

>Keep it simple, straight forward and to the point
This one is somewhat subjective. These people are paying you for a service, some may expect you to keep the game on track, as little small talk as possible. Get in the game, get them through it at a respectable pace and conclude it. However, on the reverse side, they may enjoy the side tangents and talks and chats, in which case make it clear they are on the clock.

In all serious honesty, I would pay $5/hour for a GM to run. Is that per-player or for the whole group?

Of course, it would have to be something I'd really want to play if I was going to pay.

I am a baker

per player.

intentionally GM in english obviously.

this seems reasonable, I think the first and third bit is most important. I am considering just runing fifth edition and running modules to keep it simple. I usually never run modules because I hate how railroady they are & because I like making my own content, but I think this will be the most reliable to run.

If you can find the people willing to pay for it, I see no problem with that: good luck to you.
That said, I suspect you are going to quickly learn that the actual GM'ing and campaign preparation might end up being the smallest challenge you'll be facing. In reality, I think 90% of your "work" is going to consist of policing, defusing group conflicts, dealing with assholes, and general diplomacy. I hope you are actually good at Human Resources kind of jobs, because god knows you are going to need those kinds of skills more than anything.

It might be a good learning experience, if you ever want to look out for an administration job in the future, by the way.

Nothing sucks the fun from an activity like making it your job. A few weeks into whore dming you'll grow to resent it and your work, the shining standard that earns your money will drop. If I'm going to Pay for a dm I'm paying for one who'll pander to me with A+ content week after week without fail or hiccoup

I am confident I will do a good job. In my country the hobby is relatively small and only 25 years old, the big shots who smuggled it in from the USA are still around & they are basically hailed as legendary GMs.
Since the community is small word gets around, and apparently I am on a good word with basically everyone so I have some confidence in this.

>They're called whores.
It's the world's oldest profession, user. Who are you to shit on ten thousand years of culture?

he's probably not a whore

Well, yeah - that is another thing I wanted to warn you. I come from one of the smaller Slavic states myself, and well... let's say discovering the differences between "geeks" in Eastern Europe and Western world can be a little... shocking. Maybe that is not going to be your case, or you already learned this yourself, but in general, people who play things like DnD/have interests in fantasy/sci-fi in Eastern Europe are DRASTICALLY different from people enjoying the same hobbies in the west. If you haven't yet encounter that, it might be a bit of a nasty shock.

you mean they are SJWs, right? Because that's been my basic experience with them.

>you mean they are SJWs, right?
Well, not necessarily, though that might be something you run into as well. Rather, I mean that - wishing no offense to anyone - tend to be complete idiots, autists, incredibly poorly sociated people a lot of the time.
I don't know if this is the same for your country: but where I live, Tabletops, but also videogames, interests in fantasy and sci-fi were mostly considered relatively "patrician" things, and most people involved in them were smart folks. And I don't mean smart in the "autistic programer" way, I mean common-sense smart, sociable, college educated and reasonably ambitious folks. The kind of people you can usually fairly well reason with: they usually read stuff outside of the genre, have some kind of other hobby, tend to be curious.
In the west... well, let's say my experience is been different. The ratio of people being completely unreasonable, obsessive, very poor at basic social competences, often just REALLY dim, fucked up, resentful or somehow mentally challenged is really disturbingly high in my experience in the West. The lack of curiosity is what always shocked me the most when dealing with tg-related hobbyists especially from America.
Of course, everything I'm saying is based on ultimately anecdotical experience, but I'm not the only one who experienced this kind of shock in my country.

Yeah that is what I was expecting you would say, but I have played with autists before IRL too. I played with a dude which almost exclusively plays female characters, and they are either damsels in distress or sarcastic whores, I played with a kisless virgin /pol/tard that couldn't stop screeching about blacks being subhuman despite there being maybe two black people in all of Serbia, I've played with one of the worst that guy's ever and I've played with someone who can't go a minute without spouting memes. This is what I expect to see at the bottom of the barrel when I GM for money.

oh honey, there are far easier and more profitable ways to make money online

Well, if you are prepared for that, all I can say is: Best of luck to you! Hope it works out for you.

>in general, people who play things like DnD/have interests in fantasy/sci-fi in Eastern Europe are DRASTICALLY different from people enjoying the same hobbies in the west.
Okay now you just gotta tell us, preferable as story time, about these differences!

like what?

He's refering to camwhoring. Isn't the pattern of jokes hilarious?

Unrelated: A Canticle for Liebowitz is a good book.

Living in the US I'd say this is about 50% right. Half of the people I play with fall into the category you describe, especially the lack of curiosity thing. After 3 years of Pathfinder I finally got my group to play another system... Which is another d20 system. But hey, now at least we're wizards IN SPACE!

The other half of people I play with are pretty varied in their interests and much more socially integrated. They read sci-fi and fantasy stuff, but also classical literature, non-fiction, and philosophy. It's still hard to get them interested in things - I've had a copy of (6th ed.?) Call of Cthulhu by Chaosium for 7 years now and haven't even had a reason to print off a character sheet, much less look at the rule set. It makes me sad.

Unfortunately I don't have any European games to compare to. I lived in Germany for a couple of years, but worked a lot and lived hours away from a game store, so the only people I played with there were Americans.

I think that Roll20 actually hires DMs for games (blog.roll20.net/post/110188978920/were-hiring) but don't know if they're currently looking for any. There's also a resume, I guess, where someone is advertising DM services for pay (app.roll20.net/forum/post/2685241/professional-dm-slash-gm-for-hire). I suspect you won't have much of a problem finding people to pay you to GM for them.

Basically what he said
1. Make videos of one of your sessions to show your work so people can see if it's worth it. If I see your 3 hour game session and your DM skills is at the level of Chris Perkins, I might hire you just by your skills level alone.

2. Make sure everybody follow certain rules so gameplay is more streamline and everybody get most of their time out of it. Time is money so if your party is wasting 1 hour and barely got through the front door, it's going to hurt your business.

3. Players will make or break your business. If you can get somebody famous at the table, it would greatly help your business. In order to have a steady income, you must have happy and cooperative regulars.

4. Do a good West March style campaign. If you have the same 4 customers everytime, chances are that you are going to have to run a campaign that easily for the new customers to hop in and leave.

As far as I know, in the EU the people that play tabletop RPGs are generally well adjusted geeks who program something and have a decent social circle. Slightly less attractive than the norm but I've never encountered unbearable autism. Some players are just interested in playing a few systems, some are super into tabletop roleplaying in general and will try anything once. Board games and roleplaying conventions are becoming very popular here. They're also usually not shy of spending cash on their hobby.

It's sort of parallel with the LARP scene, the US one was full of maladjusted, completely autistic retards hitting each other with foam sticks, the EU one seems more adult, with people dedicating hours to making costumes, not breaking immersion, spending several hundreds of euro's in props and clothes, and people actually training for battle formations and LARP warfare.

Run online one shots, charge nerds a few dollars to play. Then set up a youtube channel and upload videos of game, monetize that shit too. Cash on the barrel head, nigga.

Careful, you might get banned from the hobby forever.

I'm reminded of that one screencap about some Korean's shitty Chinese friend, and how they started howling "FIVE THOOUUUUSAND YEARS OF HISTORY, DO NOT CRITICIZE" because of his stupid antics.

>Half of the people I play with fall into the category you describe
Actually, I did not want to say that all, or even majority of people are like. It's just that the ratio between "feaks" and fine people seems to be rather different. You will no doubt find the freaks even here in Eastern Europe, but they are really mostly an exception, while in US I experienced coming across one group after another being like that: to a point where it seemed like a pretty normal thing. Even media reflecting the hobby and hell, let's not kid ourselves, lot of people around here seem to act as if this was relatively natural thing.
Where I live, it's not - obese people with basic hygiene or social convention issues, autists, weird fetishitic freaks - those are not something you EXPECT to see at a table top session here, while in US, it rarely suprises people to meet them there. Of course there is STILL obviously plenty of normal or even great folks enjoying the hobby, even in US. It's also worth keeping in mind that such a thing as negative bias exists and I certainly might have been a victim of it - both by romantizing my own country, and by remebering and focusing on the negative experiences abroad.
That said, I don't seem to be the only one with this kind of an impression.

Funny that you mention LARPS, because here, LAPRS are not even viewed mainly as a fantasy "let's wear costumes and beat ourselves up" thing. LARPS have become very popular around here, but they are mostly small scale psychological exercises, where a bunch of people are thrown into some kind of difficult scenario, usually locked in a room or single house. They are also usually very tightly scripted and the characters are pre-designed. The most popular larp here is "The Holy Christmas Night" in which the players roleplay a post-WWI family. I myself worked on several educational larps that were organized for highschool studients, in which the kids played characters in say, Yalta conference.

>the LARP thing
What you described is what we call "swedish larp" here due to a certain LARP game from Sweden where people could play as triangles and rectangles. So stuff that is esoteric and too removed gets that label. Fantasy "let's beat each other up"-tier LARP is still alive and kicking in France, Germany, the UK and Belgium afaik, but the themes seem to have grown up with the players as well. We have had a few WWI and WWII LARPs and recently some frenchies tried a Warhammer 40k one. But they are generally meant to be played over the course of a weekend at least.

Veeky Forumssports centre here. Welcome to our twitch stream for the session zero character rolls.

Im 40, forever DM and take the hobby quite seriously and so do my players. Stop playing with shitty players (usually under age 18 to 30). Young kids take it seriously but are immature and older guys with families tend to Treasure their limited free time and you get only the most dedicated hardcore players. I’m painting with a broad brush here.

On principal I’m opposed to paid GMs and would never ever pay. I’ll gladly pay for materials, food, etc but not to pay the GM a salary. I also can’t fault a man for trying to improve himself financially. But I wouldn’t be one of his customers.

>Be forever DM
>Always joke about hiring hookers to play D&D

CUT MY LIFE INTO PIECES

If you have a thick slavic accent you are probably not going to get any buyers from outside of your country.

Toughest part is going to be the sale. People are not used to paying for GM, so you have to convince them it's worthwhile. Maybe start by youtubing some of your own sessions to show off what a "good" GM looks like and convince them there is value.

For the record, I agree the value is there and people pay for entertainment all the time, so it's not impossible. You just have to convince them that you as a GM is $20 or $50 or whatever more valuable than Charles over here who charges $0.

If you're easy to understand, at least, the accent could be as much a strength as a weakness. Accents can be a stumbling block for GMing, but they can also add a certain mystique. A lot of actors have made it in english speaking movies while having other accents for instance.

Again, videos of your sessions will help here. You can also train yourself to minimize your accent... a lot of movie watchers in the US never realize Hugh Laurie is british or Rutger Hauer is dutch, for instance. On the other foot, guys like Ken Watanabe or Peter Stormare wear their accents on their sleeves, but make it a selling point.

You'll just become another man's bitch

If my dad gets pay $100 just to sing at a bar for a few hours, I can you should be able to make money off of D&D. They both are enterainment.

Also how thick is your slavic accent? Can you find a youtube close to what you sound like?

>So stuff that is esoteric and too removed gets that label.
We usually call it "small scale larp" (literally: "a small-room-larp". I would not call it necessarily removed from reality. In fact, the opposite is true - people are roleplaying usually in the context of very real or plausible historical or social scenarios, very often based on real world events, or at least things revolving around very relatable issues. The idea is to exercise empathy and ability to handle conflicts, moral dilemas, and force yourself to percieve various situations through the perspective of your character (e.g. experience or approximate what it would be like to be an aging soldier in between WW1 and WW2, or to approximate what kind of pressures and issues were at play for people who were the key architects of both Soviet and US space programs - stuff like that.

"Historical" larps also exist, those are generally reconstructions of major historical battles or events (or an attempt to briefly reconstruct historical lifestyle), and "fantasy larps" (the traditional costume and foam-made weapons ones) exist too, but the last category is mainly something that children participate in.
It's the psychological, small scale (and often very stressful) larps that are most broadly known nowdays, as they became quite popular as a form of experience holidays or even as a team-building exercises in companies, schools and vocational clubs.
I suspect it's a relatively short-lived fad, to be honest, but it got pretty deeply ingrained into public awareness by now.