Be a Gamemaster Part 2: Show Me The Money By Jeff Womack

Hi. I'm back with Part 2 of Be A Gamemaster. This installment is entitled, Show Me The Money and will cover the subject of paid games. Yes, you can actually earn $$$ for doing what you are probably gonna' do for free anyway.

Who exactly pays for TTRPG sessions? Believe it or not, all kinds of people! For starters, players who desire better scheduling and more choice. Paid games sites offer tons of campaigns and one-shots at times that are convenient for you. Players who want to sample a ruleset before investing in it often visit paid game sites as well. And if you're a "forever GM" this may also be a great way to play for a change. For those players with oddball work schedules it's their only real avenue. And lastly, some folks just don't have a group nearby.

Are their people out there who don't dig the idea of paying for a TTRPG session? Yes. Are they vocal about their opinion? You bet they are. My advice: ignore them. Paid games are a relatively new aspect to this hobby and some folks haven't gotten used to it yet. Give it a few more years for the entitlement to wear off.

Is there some little bit of yourself that would feel guilty for charging someone to play in your TTRPG campaign? Probably. I know that I rejected the idea multiple times at first! It took one of my players to convince me to give it a shot and I'm glad I did. So here's my bit to convince you: what's your time worth? Add up all of the moments during the week that you spend planning, mapping, writing, looking things up in books, etc.. And then you turn around and give all that away for free. Your players show up, faces smiling, expecting to be entertained by you. You put a lot of effort into your hobby. Would you produce a movie and give it away for free? Write a book? No you wouldn't. And yet you're doing it every time you host a TTRPG session with your friends.

Still not convinced? Okay, how about having a side hustle that you really enjoy? Extra money for credit cards or student loan payments? Rent, mortgage, groceries? And my final argument: more TTRPG books! Yes, you can have a hobby that finances itself!

How do you even get started with having players pay for your games?!? That answer is simple: at paid game sites. A simple Internet search will turn up one name above all others: StartPlaying.games. They're the 600-LB guerrilla in the room when it comes to attracting paying players and the route that I choose. The site is always evolving also, so new tools are being introduced all of the time. Keep this in mind: SPG is a middle-man, a broker, not a place to actually host your games. You will still require a virtual table top or some other setup to run your campaigns online.

Okay, so let's get into this thing now. If you've been hosting games online using a VTT and Discord I have some good news...you're almost there! You're on very familiar ground, as all of the problems which plague you with free online games will also plague you with paid online games: internet outages, bad connections, players that forget what happened last session, players who can't find whatever on their character sheets, and the biggest one of all -- players who drop out. Yes, you will still have these problems plus a few additional ones. There is some evidence that there are actually fewer problem players in the paid game arena. Keep that in mind too.

If you're going to get started with SPG you will have to setup an account and start inputing your personal information. This will include your real name and address for tax purposes. Once you're done all of that, go ahead and create your public profile and start thinking about how to talk your friends into giving you reviews. These reviews will be "unverified" because they didn't occur from games brokered through SPG. These first reviews are instrumental in getting your first paid games, so don't be afraid to shame your friends into creating accounts and providing you with glowing reviews (I did).

And now, what ruleset to run? Some perform better than others and D&D 5e is always king, followed closely by Pathfinder 2e, Pathfinder 1e; Call of Cthulhu; and then it falls off a cliff. There are plenty of rulesets being offered but fewer games per ruleset once you get past the top three rulesets. Opinions on whether it's wise to float a campaign for a system that only has twenty or less games being offered vary. Some gamemasters view it as less competition for any particular timeslot and others view it as a total gage of interest and walk away. Personally, I've not had much luck offering campaigns for any ruleset that has less than fifty games offered. That's not to say that you won't, however. Here are a few words of advice when it comes to selecting a ruleset to run: It's a player's market.

So you're set on ruleset X now. It's your favorite one anyway so you'll really enjoy running it. What scenario are you going to run? You have lots and lots of ideas for original campaigns and several filled notebooks? Good! Here's where we have another divergence of opinion: some gamemasters that I talked to claimed they had no problem attracting players to their original campaigns while others have said the opposite! Some insist that the term "homebrew" is the best way to deter players. Okay, so here's my personal take on this: I've tried both original and published scenarios for a variety of systems and have found that an already published adventure has the advantage. Here's my second piece of advice: It's a player's market.

Your last two big decisions are price and timeslot. If you're just starting out, don't charge much! Don't make your games free either! If you offer a free game it will not count towards your "Total Games Hosted", nor will any reviews be "verified". Charge the minimum which as of this writing is $5.00 per person. The average price is $15 or $20 but you aren't going to command those prices without some verified reviews and at least a few dozen games hosted. What's the magic number? Some say 50, others say 100. Remember, it's a players market!

Your choice of timeslot can be either personal or geared more towards a particular audience. There's enough players browsing SPG that it really doesn't matter. I've floated games at 10 AM and filled them. 12 PM, same. 2 PM, same again. Now, if you want Europeans mostly try the afternoons. Aussies, very early mornings (2-4 AM). For a US centric player base, use the evenings (7 PM) and weekends. Sunday is supposedly the heaviest day for paid games on the site but I have never filled a table on Sundays. Go figure. Yes, it's a player's market! You're catching on!

I want to touch on the game listing now. It's got lots of fields you will need to fill out. Here is where you can use some AI assistance. Both the art and game's description can be handled by Copilot, Gemini, or another AI of your choice. Or you can produce your own art and description if you want to. I have found that the blurb on the back cover of an adventure isn't often good enough to attract players. And some game companies (I'm looking at you, WotC) get very reactionary about their artwork being used to promote your game. Some companies don't give a care.

So let's talk about player safety now. Opinions vary here as well, with some swearing by it and will make you sign an agreement before participating in their campaign, while others ignore it as best they can. Personally, being Gen X, I fall into the latter camp. Stop crying and get back on your bike! The biggest tools here are X Cards, Lines & Veils, and Stars & Wishes. If you're overly worried about triggering someone during your game then you should probably look into these a bit further and implement one or all of them. I've been doing this since 1980 and haven't seen anyone go bananas yet...and I've put my players through some fairly sick stuff. So I don't stress player safety in my games at all and I still manage to recruit. But, it is a player's market! I suppose when we have a hugely neurotic player base I'll have to be more accommodating. We're not quite there yet in my opinion.

Now that you have everything setup let's talk about the problems of delivery. There are some really big sins that you could commit and in doing so, you risk bad reviews. Bad reviews early on may kill your whole chance of ever recruiting. But if you're doing this for money then you're doing it professionally. Being professional also means being...well, professional.

There really are only three big sins you may commit and they are all of equal importance. The first is not showing up for your own game! Sounds dumb, I know, but it happens. It happens so often that SPG now has a "money back guarantee" if your GM doesn't show. If you need to reschedule, then reschedule and don't worry about it. It is totally within the GM's power to postpone a game if they need to.

The next biggie sin is not being prepared. Know the adventure! Have NPCs made ahead of time, maps too! Show that you put some effort into your campaign. And by extension, know the game system well enough to run a basic session in it. Know the big rules: fighting, healing, and skill use. Save being set on fire and drowning for sessions where that sort of stuff is in the plot. And it never hurts to have some cheat sheets near at hand during the game.

Remember, your "total session count" and reviews speak to your professionalism. A higher total session count says that you are capable and able to deliver a session while your reviews say how much fun the players had. Entertaining material, delivered well, is about all players really want.

And now for the reality of paid games. Ready for a big pale of water to the face? Here it comes! Its not an easy matter to get players to join your games, even with dozens and dozens of games under your belt. Some games float along without anyone joining for a month or more. And some fill up in a week. Like I keep emphasizing, it's a player's market; the player picks the game not the other way around! If you're not getting players who sign up then you are not offering something that they want, period. You can resort to seat fillers, which is a real or fake account that signs up to get rid of that "0" Players stigma. I've used them and sometimes it helps, sometimes it doesn't. Lately I haven't been using any seatfillers...I prefer to have the game fill on its own merits. It works. Sometimes.

I hate to tell you but you're going to lose a few players in the beginning. So what's the cause of this phenomena I like to call Fast Player Attrition anyway? Remember games at your dining room table? Remember how stable they were as far as player count went? That's not the case with online games. There's just too much to choose from and it all looks so wonderfully good. And sites like StartPlaying.games make searching for games very easy. You can find a game listed by ruleset, time slot, price, or VTT to name a just a few parameters. Does this result in lots of game-hopping and system-sampling? Yes. My advice, get used to emails from SPG with the subject, "A Player Has Left Your Game" and the reason being, "My Schedule Changed." Maybe it did, maybe it didn't.

As a consequence of the above, you will want to begin a campaign with as many players as you possibly can! Never use a three player minimum. Three players will quickly become two players and then your campaign dies on the vine. If you can possibly start with five or six that's the sweet spot.

All right, I've saved the best for last! So you probably want a quick route to riches. I know of one method and it might just work. Here's the "fast lane" for building up a following of paying players quickly. I wish I had tried this when starting out! Offer inexpensive one-shots of a few systems. You can try free if you want, but that only attracts players who aren't likely to pay down the road. Try the $5 to $10 price-point to begin with. Again, you want to build a Discord server with players who have shown their willingness to exchange some $$$ for your effort. Don't stop doing this until you have many players available: 40-60 is a good number.

Whether you offered inexpensive one-shots and built your Discord server or not, let's pretend that you have been successful one way or another. You now have a core group of players who have proved that they will pay for your games. This is your gold and you need to protect it. Keep them in your Discord server and give them discounts and other rewards for being such good players. Talk to them in your channels. Be their Daddy GM! When you want to launch a game on SPG (or another site), give your Discord posse first dibs on discounted seats. The players who join from SPG get to pay full price. That's how you get a game count in the hundreds if not thousands.

Back next issue with Part 3: Advanced Techniques. I'll be teaching the quick way to plot and the not so quick way to plot. See ya.

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Jeff Womack is a long-time gamemaster and general nerd. Will haunt a comic shop any day of the week.