At the beginning of this year, I started to take GMing on startplaying.games seriously, scheduling games for every weekday and trying to run all I can.

I’ve just zoomed past 50 paid games and it’s about time that I dug into the numbers and did some calculations. It has taken me 6 months to get to 50 paid games, but at my current run rate I would reach 100 paid games in another 11 weeks – which is progress!

All told, I’ve been paid out $1750 for those 50 games. That averages $35 a game. I’m pleased with that – I usually charge $15-$20 a seat and I do discount if players say they can’t make the full amount but want to stay in the campaign. I don’t get the full ticket price – startplaying take a cut and on top of my seat charges, there’s a booking fee charged to the players.

The past few weeks, that average has been ticking higher and that makes me feel optimistic that it’ll continue.

Now, a game is around 3 and a half hour’s game-time with perhaps another 45 minutes prep time.

So that means I’m working (if you can call it that) for something like $8-$10 an hour. Hardly a living wage. I do have one table that regularly fields 5 players and at that point, it makes much more sense. It is really a way to make pocket-money at the minute rather than a living. It’s a little bit better than I get at the Box Room Café in Cambridge – although I do get a very tasty free plate of cheesy chips for GMing there.

The prep-time is coming down as I’m getting used to the adventures I’m running but I’ve noticed recently that as I run more games in a week I need to spend a bit longer refreshing myself on what happened in the last session. Having said that, my competency as a GM has grown massively and I think I could get away with less prep work than I typically do.

I would really hate to give the impression that I’ve turned up unprepared though – I’ve been in a few games online where the GM seemed to be winging it from start to finish and it showed badly and I didn’t carry on. But, that said, I’ve got much better at winging it too though with a lot of preparation in the background – I think that’s to the players’ benefit because they really can do what they want and I’ll figure out a way to support it. There have been a couple of sessions recently where I thought “wow, I really do know what I’m doing now!”

I wrote about my initial impressions of startplaying a little while ago and my criticisms still stand – I am in the dark as to either what is making people join or not join my games. I would really welcome just a bit more analytics data from them so I can test and tweak accordingly. I also wonder if they’re really doing the best job they can marketing to players outside the US – some examples of locale blindness include defaulting to showing games at peak US times and bloody mm/dd/yyyy date input fields.

As for expenses – I have a few. I pay for an upgraded discord server, owlbear rodeo vtt and a chunk to dndbeyond.com for adventures and source books. These add up to maybe $300 over the last six months.

It’s not much more than a hobby for me and I’m lucky to be able to do it between childcare duties. I’m not sure how to make it pay better – perhaps I need to schedule at US- and insomniac-friendly times, maybe even raise my base prices. I have very little information to go on to make these decisions well.

I would love to be able to turn this into a full-time gig – I suspect I need to learn a bit more about marketing and figure out some scalable ways to do that. But, I’ve enjoyed this six months and am going to stick with it for the immediate future. You can join one of my games here: https://startplaying.games/gm/whitebeard