Professional GM

[telerib]

No, I'm not about to move my games to a subscription basis anytime soon. No, I'm not leaving the wonderful world of space robotics. But I wondered what the math behind the daydream of "making my living as a GM" would look like.


Real back of the envelope stuff here. Let's say an income of $30K is desired, plus $10K for insurance and other such things previously provided by one's employer. Assume slightly longer 50-hour weeks, 50 weeks a year, and there's a wage of $16/hr.

Further assume a 4-hour game with an average of 2 hours of prep work. That's $96 of my time, to be paid for by your gaming group. If there's four of you, that's $24 each; if six, then $16 each. Possible discounts for long-running campaigns (taking a hit to total income for the security of guaranteed income). I wouldn't run with more than six.

I'd need to run just over 8 games per week. My weekends would be gone, because Saturday and Sunday would be the preferred, prime spots for running. But I'd have lots of time during the week, even assuming that's when the prep work is going on.

I'm not even going to contemplate the vagaries of system and style and delivering what the customer wants; as I said, I don't intend to actually do this. If for no other reason, I'm not sure where one could find an adequate customer base. You'd need a lot of role-playing geeks, with disposable incomes, who were entirely dissatisfied with their local GMs. It's hard to compete with free, after all.

But with a price of around a nice restaurant dinner (with beverage, appetizer or dessert and tip), it makes me think it's somewhere in the realm of the possible, if not the probable.

Comments

[curiousangel.livejournal.com]

I wouldn't think that it would be a sustainable longterm business model, but it might work out as a sideline, maybe. If the right person were willing to run, and I got to be involved with setting some of the basic parameters, I'd be willing to personally fork over something on the order of $100-150 for a medium-length campaign.

[telerib.livejournal.com]

Setting those basic parameters... that would be the bear, wouldn't it? Clearly, there'd be a menu of systems to choose from. There might even be some sketches of "GM Modes" to chose from (Killer GM, Monty Haul, Puzzle Game...). But after that...

What does the customer want?

The customer wants a good game, and quite probably might have an idea in mind for his PC and where that PC should go. But if the customer is totally allowed to script the progress of the adventure, we're not really RPing anymore. But-but, I'd be totally open to someone saying that he wanted such-and-such a character arc ("looking for revenge but losing his soul in the process," say).

In a free, volunteer-GM game, the players can have their characters' hopes dashed and, well, too bad. Does payment get them a greater say in the outcome of the game? Are they entitled to their "happily ever after"? And even if their mouths say, "No, of course I want to earn it!", are their hearts saying, "Like hell I'd pay good money to see my treasured PC die!"

The basic questions of setting the limitations within which the GM can operate with a degree of freedom to surprise the PCs...OK, now my brain has gone to Other Places and come back with the question, "Can the idea of safe words be applied to this problem as well?" which means it's time to get off lunch break and go back to work.

[curiousangel.livejournal.com]

For me as a potential customer, I'd like to have a system picked out, and an idea of the sort of game we'd play, and some input about the type of things to occur during it. As an example off the top of my head, I'll use the GURPS Traveller campaign idea that I've been kicking around for a few years now...

Obviously, the game system is defined (GURPS Traveller). I was hoping to run a game where the PCs are the operating crew of a small warship retained by a medium-sized shipping company to protect their interests in a bout of unpleasantness with a rival corporation in the area. This has some obvious corollaries -- the PCs probably won't be spending significant amounts of time conducting scientific research missions to heretofore undiscovered Ancient sites; the adventures will involve a great deal of space travel and various forms of combat; the PCs probably won't be leaving a defined area for a "Grand Tour of the Imperium", and so on.

There's still a whole ton of things that can be done in that framework -- political shenanigans, fighting Vargr pirate raiders, commando raids of dubious legality, attempts to steal valuable data, and so on and so forth. Still, as the one who shells out the dough, I'd expect to get to set the basic framework. I'm fine with PCs getting the opportunity to shine or to fail based on their own merits, but it's too easy to throw a challenge at them that they just can't handle. I also prefer that there be graduated levels of failure that can be tied to the PCs' efforts or lack thereof -- if they come up with a good plan, cover all their bases, roleplay well, and just massively hork some key dice rolls... I don't like the idea of killing them off for that.

I'd go along with the concept of "safeword" in so much as there needs to be feedback on a regular basis about how the game is going, and if there need to be any changes made, either by the GM or the PCs. If the GM is telling his Grand Story, but the PCs are bored... not good. If the PCs are happily pillaging their way through his carefully designed political campaign... also not good. If the story or the session is a bad fit for the PCs... again, not good. My classic example was in Moe's earlier In Nomine game, where for one session, the PCs wound up being thrown into some kind of anime-mecha situation. Unfortunately, I was playing a Mercurian, and the talking stuff is not so much gonna happen when your PCs have all assembled to make (and crew) a giant robot to fight the bad guys. I was so dreadfully bored that I was sorely tempted to bail out early and say something like "Call me when we're going to play In Nomine again and you've gotten this anime shit out of your system."

[hueffmea.livejournal.com]

Not the first time I've heard something very much like this before. Last time I hashed it out with someone we decied it would be best to announce the game the plot and sell "Player Slots" Each character would come with a cost to be payed in weekly installments. Even though you might want to make a character from a perfessional standpoint it would be better to use pregens. That way you could have the game finished before you started. You could also have miniatures, props, and other goodies ready. A plus side to this would be that you could run the same champaign many times and all the props or costume pieces that you made you would be able to reuse. Another bonus would be all of your books, props, and costumes could be written off as business expenses for tax purposes. Nice huh?