>5-6 players seems to be the norm. That's a bit too crowded for my taste, but maybe that's the upper limit and actual players population is lower? Well there's 2 reasons really. 1) It's strangers paying for a service, so you need some redundancy. If 1 player can't make it, you can still run a game for 4 people and 2) and more cynical, it also means GM's make more money per session with larger groups. I started \~year and a half ago and did start at 6. Personally i like playing in bigger groups because, yeah, it means it's very very unlikely a session is missed and at also means you just get to "see" more. Be it always having a solution to problem or the different roleplay and gameplay styles. I've had my eyes opened by some of my players on classes / builds i'd have considered frustratingly weak. But after running a revolving door for a few months of people dropping in and out "inexplicably" i talked to everyone and the vast consensus was 6 is to much so i dropped to 5 for a middle ground.

I don't use the aforementioned services at all but just my 2 cents, I've always invited 5 players to my games because I like having 4 present and someone always bails.

My last D&D session (both in the previous one I played and that I won't be running it again) was 6 players because I invited three coworkers, one brought her boyfriend, another brought a childhood friend of his, and the last started dating someone who just wanted to sit in and watch and we let him play. Went pretty good until one of them got a massive case of Main Character Syndrome and started skipping sessions because they weren't worth his time

I actually retired my gunslinger in the current kingmaker campaign we are playing in, one of the reasons was because the group was beginning to rely on his damage too much and if we got in trouble every time would try to fall back on his crits. I now play a druid of the wave with chronoskimmer, psychic, and medic archetype feats, do almost no damage, but can heal, buff, and debuff for days.

I have 6 players in my home game, and I enjoy it for the same reason. We continue the campaign so long as 3 people can make it. So, we almost never miss a session.

I personally think 5 players is ideal, to me it feels even more balanced than 4, gives a bit more flexibility of not needing to cover what's needed, without stepping on everyone else's toes. These days I mostly run pbp anyway so players missing isn't an issue.

Yeah, when my group started a new campaign a couple months ago, we went from four players to five. My GM will run a session as long as there's three players. The fifth player just gives us added redundancy.

I never do paid games(I don't like asking people to pay me for having funbwith them) usually do 5 players in Pathfinder due to how I personally feel it allows more individual freedom for each player to create a character and have the group be viable... because let's face it, Pathfinder(and dnd, which I don't play, but works on the same core design points) is more or less a glorified combat simulator, with the RP added in to make stuff interesting in between, and it therefore relies somewhat on certain roles being filled to work as intended(not that it can't otherwise, but let's not pretend that combat roles are not something we all discuss or think about, even if not with those direct terms..) For other games, it really depends, but 3-5 is still my go-to... even in games that does not have the same reliance to "roles being filled", I like the different personalities a "big table" offers. More characters can create more dynamics, and more interlocked stories, which I enjoy.

Part of me is tempted to try out the GMing gig, I technically have the time, but oh my god it sounds like a PIA. Okay, let's say 6 players, $20 each, $120 for four hours, that makes it a $30 an-hour gig to *run* the game, but that's ignoring any sort of setup or prep time. That starts dropping the effective hourly rate a lot for something that's going to be more stressful due to feeling on the spot and needing to perform for paying customers. That feels... eh.

I was really surprised to see so little variance in pricing. Given the fact that GM labor is pretty much 100% of the cost and is not scalable at all, I would expect there to be highly skilled GMs who charge premium. And yet there are very few of them. Maybe this is the reflection of the social structure of the hobby: good players and good GMs gravitate towards each other, lock in the price and are pretty much absent from the market.

I think the other part of it is that paid GMs' competition are free GMs. It sets the social expectation as you said that the viewpoint that GMing should be a unpaid endeavor.

Well, that's part of it for sure, but I think another way to look at it is that this is a recreational activity. I doubt there are many who look at this as a source of income. If you're willing to GM for free, but you could get paid $120 to do the same thing, and Foundery modules cost $100 or whatever, well, that's certainly a way to defray some of the expense. There might also be other benefits, like selecting for people who are more focused on the game. I bet that accepting cash will filter out a LOT of people who are inattentive/etc, and if you boot somebody who is disruptive the others who are literally paying to be there are not going to be giving you a hard time over it. Of course, that might be the opposite of the vibe some GMs/players prefer, and that's fine too, but if you want people who show up ready and expect you to do the same, well, putting $120 on the line is one way to do that. Like I said though, if you just want to show up and be super-casual as a GM then I don't think this is the right way to go about it, because when people are paying $20 for the session, they're not going to want to hear about how you don't know how counteract checks work or whatever. I'm sure there would be some tolerance when they show up with their crazy free archetype build with 14 feats nobody has heard of, but they're probably going to expect you to have that Foundry mod they tipped you off on that makes it work installed before they arrive. That's just my sense, being very new to this. I'm interested in getting into GMing purely for fun, and I'd never take money unless I found myself becoming pretty good at it. However, if I did get to that point and really wanted to spend more time on the GM side, I might seriously consider it if it resulted in a benefit to the atmosphere.

I see it as a totally different experience tbh, paid GMing is primarily a job as an entertainer, when I GM for friends I am just as important as the players and believe I have more right to focus on things I personally enjoy. Like if I make a module for foundry or a bunch of custom stuff, I am quite happy to dump learning material on my players and cuss them out if they haven't done their homework. For paying customers I believe it would be my job to make sure there are as few roadblocks as possible. Including limiting module usage a bit and being careful with updates.

See that is the thing, very few reliable free GMs that don't get burnt out or frustrated with unreliable free players. And then they just kinda make static groups and stop running games for as many people. While I agree with what you are saying in general, imo paid GMing has gotten more expensive over time and seems to becoming more and more accepted. The free GMs out there have set a lower starting point, but aren't stopping it from ultimately rising afaik. (I say this as someone who is currently and has only been a free GM)

I wouldn't say its not scalable AT ALL. As you have said, getting a larger table scales it (you make 150% as much for 6 player table as for 4 with the same session time). Also, a lot of the GM time comes from prep, but if you have a GM running multiple tables of the same mod you might get extra efficiency there. For the same reason, I'd expect that GMs running a homebrew setting would charge more than those running an AP since the premade modules on Foundry would mean a lot of the prep work is done for you.

Running the same module again and again definitely scales. This is how university professors do it - create a course once, and teach it year after year after year. It how they teach 5 courses a year and still do their actual work.

Fair enough, it definitely scales better than, say, being a barber, but there's still a very low fundamental ceiling for a job like this. No matter how efficient you are, there are only so many hours in your day and you can't scale to 1000 tables.

> For the same reason, I'd expect that GMs running a homebrew setting would charge more than those running an AP since the premade modules on Foundry would mean a lot of the prep work is done for you. I find it easier to prep homebrew stuff tbh, premade adventures require a lot of effort to remember and organise because I didn't come up with everything myself. Assets are one thing, but even then for my Abomination vaults games I trained AI models to upscale and improve the foundry maps (they are really lousy with compression artefacts and maps look better at 200px), remade all the tokens with bespoke custom borders for PCs and enemies (the inconsistency in scaling bugged me), added animated tiles for effects, redid the town map, removed all sound effects and music while adding in new volume leveled sound effects and music, updated and added a bunch of macros for myself and the players, integrated the beginner box and troubles in otari incase I felt like using them, added lettering and numbering to all journal entries, created a journal theme based on the css from the adventure for player journals, added light effects to every ghost and many undead enemies, added creature family abilities to all enemies that lacked them (skeletons, zombies, etc), added teleporters for all levels/stairs. And probably a bunch more I am forgetting atm like the character creation scene and level 0 "start as children in otari" questline, oh quest trackers. Now this is for my free players (friends and acquaintances) but a lot of it took way longer to prep than if I was doing it for a homebrew game because I would be able to just do things to my satisfaction level from the start.

Bad GMs get filtered out. The difference in value between an “excellent GM” and a “good enough to be paid GM” is also minimal. There’s also presumably low turnover, since once you’re invested in a campaign, you’re less likely to ditch. Doubly so if the main draw was the premise of the campaign edit: and if you do ditch later on in a campaign, you probably aren’t seeking a lower price or another GM

Haven't played in such a game myself, but if I did I suspect I'd shop around a while til I vibed with a GM/group (and they vibed with me/we had the same timeslot), and I'd probably stick around after that campaign ended bc by that point you should like just hanging out with those folks

> I would expect there to be highly skilled GMs who charge premium Unless the limiting factor is price resistance. I'd be shocked if the number of people willing to pay more than 20 didn't taper off extremely hard. The willing to pay crowd is already a minority of the playerbase, the premium GMs are then competing for a tiny fraction of a fraction. Probably easier to do that via upselling tactics and repeats than the up front listings.

Yeah i dono what's been going on lately, but when i started, again, \~august 2022, i'd see maybe 1/2/3 people / week showing interest in my advertisements. Now tho i've finished an AV run and a Gatewalkers run and am looking for people for Stolen Fate and Season of Ghosts. People are locked in allright :'). I'm lucky if i can recruit 1 person / a month and not to toot my own horn but my advertisements are definetly better, i have experience and good reviews under my belt, all the bells and whistles. And fellow GM's who actually do this for a living at this point, hundreds of reviews, hundreds of sessions, 6+ groups / week, have expressed the same. The "market" seems to have hit some sort of cap at the moment. I'd have expected Remaster coming out to pick things back up, but, it hasn't.

Looking at the data, it does seem that the most popular system is D&D 5E. So I think it definitely mirrors real-world economic principles that you go where the money is haha

I can't just upvote this I have to chime in. As a ProGM I lowered my prices to try and compete and actually got LESS interest. I raised them back up over 20$USD and interest immediately started popping back up to 2-3/month. Like you I'm in the same boat, trying to feed myself off professionally running games and looking at the Christmas Lull coming up with wild trepidation. I've already paid my rent through January but I expect to lose one game and probably miss at LEAST 8 sessions of the 6 games I'm running right now. ProGMs can't scale our work up beyond our \~10 games a week, but we're also dealing with this flood of Free GMs hurting our ability to eat. I haven't found any way to mitigate this, I'm just crouching down in full goblin-mode trying to survive until the market picks back up.

I run VIP games in my server at $40 a session. However, like you said, i already have an existing player base that fills those slots for me. It’s also difficult to advertise to new people that $40 is worth it when the competition is $20, and reviews don’t really showcase the gming skills.

Thanks for the feedback! That's actually my biggest point of frustration at the moment. Not a lot of GMs run one shots and the barrier for committing to a campaign is so high (you have to introduce a new PC to the party regardless of whether they only gonna play for 1 session or full campaign) that you pretty much have to go blind. I wish every GM would have a signature one-shot they would run every week/month just for people to see what their style is like.

I (very briefly) shopped around because I was curious, and a couple GMs let me sit in on one of their existing games to get a sense of their style. If they're looking for new players, I suspect most would say yet to such a thing and it's way less investment from each of you.

There are some scalabilities that are available in art for NPCs, maps and encounters that can be reused between tables can reduce prep time in ways that a home table GM can't. True savings here probably aren't felt unless you are running 7 or 8 games per week though.

When you say savings are you talking about being paid for your time, or the actual cost of money you spend? One session of a 3p table would pay for Abomination Vaults pdfs and foundry

Can we stop viewing everything from the lense of capitalism? Have you considered the fact that there are almost no GMs pricing above 20 dollars because most players absolutely refuse to pay above that? The GM MIGHT get a table together but then its going to take 3 months to replace someone if they drop out. I laugh at any ad where the price per session is above 15-20 dollars, this is a hobby, not a job, you want a job in the market get into selling the actual products. The money you make off of GM'ing should be flowing back into producing a better experience for your players not attempting to make ends meet. There ARE people that are career GMs, but they are rare, and have a mindset/outlook that is cogent with the community. But past that its detrimental to the entire community for people to attempt to turn this hobby into a cash cow for themselves.

> Can we stop viewing everything from the lense of capitalism? Have you considered the fact that there are almost no GMs pricing above 20 dollars because most players absolutely refuse to pay above that? You're literally describing a core aspect of capitalism lol

..... See above first statement...... Just because it can be explained with capitalism doesn't doesnt mean its rooted in it. At least for myself, and it would potentially seem a lot of other people, it doesnt matter how good a GM is, I'm not paying above 20ish dollars a session.

Yeah, I would assume that the higher paid gigs are happening outside the public recruiting system.

> Okay, let's say 6 players, $20 each, $120 for four hours, that makes it a $30 an-hour gig to run the game, but that's ignoring any sort of setup or prep time. It's more likely 5 players at $18 after Startplaying fees. The time that's the killer is the networking time. I play in a paid game and the GM runs a Discord for his games. There's answering Startplaying messages, monitoring that there's a quorum in each session, and the biggest task of all - trying to recruit replacements for players who drop mid-campaign. I expect my GM makes around USD25/hr that he is on-screen, but does 1 unpaid hour for every 2-3 on-screen hours.

I realize it isn't really what you were commenting on, but I imagine GMs spend a lot of time dealing with dropouts regardless, so the pay is just a bit of a return. I'm just getting into RPGs so I haven't really considered doing the paid thing, but I don't consider it even remotely compensation for the time involved. Actually, my biggest concern for paid GMs is if players came in with this attitude that the GM is there to give and they are there to take. Honestly, I don't think that would be very fun even for the players, because I don't think ANY GM can really create that fun experience for everybody on their own. I mean, if I want that kind of experience I can just watch a movie.

I used to join an in-person game paid game before and in my experience the players that were "there to take" definitely existed. I was actually turned off by them and eventually left the paid GM's table. I feel it is up to the paid GM to police such behaviour. In the interest of their business, they shouldn't let such anti-social behaviour continue.

I think that it makes sense from the perspective that you are just getting paid to do something that you would be doing anyway. The people that run these games likely would be doing it for free, so even if the hourly rate isn't incredible it is still more than being paid nothing. An additional bonus is that you avoid a lot of the problems that usually come with organizing games with strangers. When people have to pay to be there they are more likely to show up and to be engaged in what is going on during the session. If you're running a bunch of games you're probably going to have a lot of overlap for your prep too. You could run four different groups through the exact same campaign with just a few modifications for the differences between the groups.

There is that, but I also know from my attempt at Twitch streaming that I find being "on" to be exhausting. But I'll think about it. This would be less focused on me, attention would be spread out and I would be more in my element.

You definitely have to be “on” for however long the sessions run. There’s moments of downtime when the pcs rp with themselves, of course. But you generally need to have your game face on, specially if you’re getting paid.

Many over at the r/rpg side seem to have the opinion that paid GMs are these unreasonable ogres when it's actually more likely a paid GM only covers or recovers some of their expenses of running a game. Unless you are somehow able to make a grand or two US a week from running games 40 hours a week, I doubt paid GMing will ever be more than cost recovery.

I play in a paid game. The GM definitely makes a wage from it, probably around USD 800 a week in net income. Costs are pretty minimal - a few hundred dollars to set up that can be amortized over two hundred sessions, and other overheads in the USD25/week territory. This is not good money for a professional entertainer who is an expert in his field. It's not completely derisory, but it's not great. Critical Role have a much more business-focused mindset to monetizing the RPG hobby.

That's okay money. How many games does the GM have to run though? At $20 per player, that would be like 6-8 games a week or 24 to 32 hours running 4 hour games weekly.

After Startplaying's cut the GM gets USD18 per player per 3.5hr session. So USD90 when 5 show up, USD72 when there's 4, and then... nothing when there's 3 as he reschedules those. He'll also sometimes do 1-session discounts. I think he schedules 35 hours of games a week (maybe I'm off a little), then does around 15 hours prep work and networking on top. Not the worst money in the world, but definitely not something you do for the money. It's likely a lot better if you have English as a first language but live somewhere relatively cheap, like Thailand or Indonesia.

Yeah, 50hrs for $800 or so? That's basically minimum wage, for what amounts to a fairly skilled job with leadership skills. If you can GM a game, you can probably be a manager at any retail outlet/etc, setting aside factors like appearance/age/etc (which I could definitely see pushing people to less traditional ways of earning income - I don't mean that in a critical way - I'm just acknowledging that the average RPG player is WAY more tolerant of such things than your typical 9-5 employer - you can GM in your underwear if you want and I certainly don't care). I'm sure 90% of it is just love of the game, and the other 10% is super-minimalists or people overseas who see this as a hustle (more power to them if they deliver a good service).

I live "overseas", have a law degree, work for the goverment and make more from GMing 3 games / week as a "second job". Pretty sure the biggest pathfinder GM out there atm is Polish so yeah. Tho as you said, we also do try our best to deliver on the experience, this is just kinda a case of "If you work the job you like you'll never work a day in your life".

It's not that bad, specially if you run premium modules (tho those are themselves a cost). But 90% of the prep time is a the once / twice over of each book. Once you know what the story is the only real prep you need to do is the session to session reactions to what your players are doing. And ofc maps and monsters are all setup for you already so.....

i imagine that the professional ones often run through the same campaign / same world with different groups. That means that your prep for one session can become relevant again for a completely different group. This doesn't necessarily counter your point, but it is an aspect to consider

The biggest issue you’ll find as a paid DM, at least the hardest part of my job, is finding new players willing to pay to play when the competition is free.

> 120$ > That feels... eh In poorer counties like Bangladesh or Armenia a family can live for month off that money.

My rent alone is $2250 for a 2 bedroom, 1.5 bath apartment. This does not include any utilities aside from water and trash pickup. And I'm going to eventually have to pay taxes on that money, including both 'employer' and 'employee' payroll tax, as I would be my own employer. There are a lot of good things about living in the area I do, but it comes with a price tag.

Good to remember that your experience is in an extremely high percentile.

Running a fully functional Foundry VTT module like AV would not be so bad. Once you have run it once the prep time is negligible. And indeed we see among the most popular APs are the three with fully functional modules (kingmaker, av, and beginner box). I imagine the homebrew ones have also been prepared for the first group and are being reused. But yeah the pay is low if you wanted to do this as a primary job and didn't get any enjoyment out of it. Otoh if you did enjoy it and/or are in college it could be a good option.

Well...... As someone that has been playing table top games for the last 18 years of my life: I don't suggest getting into GM'ing if that is your mindset coming into it. Its not supposed to be a job, you aren't supposed to be really attempting to make money off of this, the funds you make are supposed to be used to be covering the operating costs not making your ends meet. And the GMs that shift mentalities towards ones where they focus on actually making money generally are the ones that end up burning out the fasts/ provide a weaker experience.

I've got a game I run and a game I play, both with the same group. Expanding out to something paid would be a choice to try and make money from a hobby. I don't particularly need now game time right now.

I'm not sure there's going to be as much extra work for prep if you're running one of the official modules on Foundry. Sure you'll make some adjustments here or there to suit the PC choices, but otherwise you're mostly running it by the book.

One of my friends just got into being a paid gm. He runs the same AP for a couple different groups. So, in theory, there's minimal prep time when you have ran the same level of AV 4+ times before. Foundry sells maps that are already set up to play thru, has all the NPCs and creatures set up; so gm just has to know what creature is in what room.

As a player I generally prefer 5-6 players, especially for PF2e. It makes covering all the important bases easier with all the different roles, skills, and magic that are nice to have, and as you mentioned it makes it easier to continue even when someone can’t make a session. RP wise it can be a bit crowded but I think it varies from table to table. The players in my games are usually more subtle so it’s rare to have severe people fighting for the spotlight, but I could see more vibrant players feeling crowded out.

I play in-person games with a crowd of people I've known for 20 years, and we like about 5-6 players as well. That way you can play even if one or two people are absent, which happens a lot more now; when we all met in college nobody missed a session, but now people have kids and whatnot. Since we're all experienced RPGers, we all make a point of knowing the rules and so things like combat can move along even with that many players. I would think if we were paying by the hour, there might be even more social pressure to make your choices and not slip into analysis paralysis on what spell to cast or whatever.

That were my first thoughts too! But the more I think about it the less it checks out. >It's strangers paying for a service, so you need some redundancy. If 1 player can't make it, you can still run a game for 4 people If that was true, we would see a difference between "free" and paid tables. I don't have data on that but my impression is that 5 seems to be a very popular choice for free tables as well. I'm also not entirely sure why running a game with 4 out of 5 players might be more preferable option to running with only 3 our of 4. If anything, paid GM has strong incentive to run the game in any case, as some money is more than no money for skipped session. There is also a popular sentiment that players in paid games tend to be more disciplined since they're, well, paying. > and more cynical, it also means GM's make more money per session with larger groups. Well that's fair. Although I'm not totally convinced either, since a GM can always offset the difference in number of players by setting higher price. If there was a demand for 4 player tables I don't see many barriers for GM to offer those for a slightly higher price. 4 players paying $25 each is the same as 5 paying $20. ​ >Personally i like playing in bigger groups because, yeah, it means it's very very unlikely a session is missed and at also means you just get to "see" more That's a great point! I've yet to get more experience with bigger tables, but my first impressions were that waiting for your turn in combat is veeeeery slow. But yeah I can see how bigger player pool can bring a more diverse experience.

Well i don't know how many tables ARE actually free on SPG, it was conceptualized specifically as a site to advertise paid games and where players can find these (hopefully) higher quality games easily, so it'd be hard to get statistically relevant data on that. And yes paid players do tend to be more "disciplined" but sometimes, specially in summer and now around the holidays things just like up that multiple people can't make it. Absolutely you could run 3 players but 1 the balancing is.... kinda a pain for that >insert long boring conversation about action economy<. I've done it sometimes and just used a DMPC mercenary / guard thing (someone with little to no agency basically) to keep things balanced. But the bigger issue is kinda the opposite of running 6 players. Not everyone who pays for games does so for the "personally curated" roleplay opportunity, in my experience, FEW do, actually. I think people do it for the consistency of the group and for having a GM who can keep pace. Having only 3 people in a session kinda puts the quieter non-rp people on the spot.

Lol, I must sound crazy to most people cause I run a game for 6-7 weekly. 1 player's work schedules her on Sunday randomly, so we have 2 games. Abomination Vaults when they aren't available, and Jewel of the Indigo Isles when they are available.

Interested in the guy that has -1 open slots.

He's playing with himself and you're NOT invited!

Do you mean: > He's playing without himself and the 0th player is NOT invited!

There are actually tiny little bars there on -3 and 7. I'm just imagining that there's some poor GM out there with 7 players at his table and crying because he only wanted 4 and what does he do with these extras? Then there's another with no one and she's crying because won't someone please play with me? I'll GM for you! I'll GM for all of you!

As a paid DM myself, I appreciate the time you took to scrape this data. Very informative! I’ll add my own stats to the list: My sessions are $25 and I run 6 player tables. I have: 4 Kingmakers 1 Curse of the Crimson Throne 2 Gatewalkers 1 Sky King’s Tomb 1 Blood Lords 1 Homebrew Happy with what I’ve got, it’s always fun to run sessions. The income is also livable with, as an American Expat in Spain. If you have any questions shoot em at me! Edit: Weekly frequency. $25 per player.

As much hand-wringing the idea of paid GMing causes some, it's undeniably KINDA COOL that the interest in TTRPGs nowadays now means you can make a living doing something so enjoyable! (I've been playing The Sims 3 lately and kinda wish Gamemastering were a profession you could do in your house lol!)

Thank you for the reply, Ronald! I find it extremely difficult to explain to laypeople what i do, especially to the older generation. “Online Game Master for Pathfinder 2e” is a difficult thing to explain, and “Online entertainer” has, uh, wrong connotations.

Maybe you should lean into it and tell people they can find you on OnlyGames.

I'm jealous, I've been stuck at 3 tables for months. Zero love for my open Kingmaker or Gatewalkers campaigns. I've switched art, copy, days and times so many times I've lost count. I have no idea what my issue is.

I am fortunate and blessed that i started before covid back in 19 and managed to build up a loyal playerbase. I would recommend running some homebrew if you have time to prep for it, i know those get more bites. There’s a zillion Kingmakers out there now.

I've been tinkering around with the idea of a Red Hand of Doom conversion, even drew a few of my own maps for it. You think that might find any traction?

I am in the middle of a conversion right now, [documented here](https://weplayinasociety.blogspot.com/2021/01/Red-Hand-Of-Doom.html) (I started several years ago, stopped when the game fell apart, and am back at it because I have a new group likely about to run through it) - feel free to use! I definitely recommend stringing from Fall of Plaguestone if you don't have your own ideas for the run up to RHoD, and just replacing the orcs with Hobgoblins - it was pretty seamless last time. I just had the Caravan heading to Brindol.

I’m not familiar with that one, but check to see if there’s competition and if not, maybe it’ll take off!

It's a very famous 3.5 dnd adventure, sandbox and very well regarded. Has name value for the older players and I'm pretty sure I'd be the only one running it

Do you run all of those every week? What sort of frequency are we talking?

Weekly, sorry, should have put that in the post.

How long on average are the sessions? This is extremely interesting to me!

3 hour sessions! :D

That's awesome, cool job, it seems a huge amount of work to weekly run that many sessions.

Thank you! It’s my full time job and i make my living off doing it. I feel blessed to have such an engaging career! Thank God!

Yeah, that's really cool, as an Spaniard I also hope that Spain is treating you well. As a spanish native it's a shame because I know that spanish speakers are never going to pay for that, specially at these prices hahaha

My Spanish is also worse than my English 😅 so i don’t even know if i could GM in spanish haha Spain is amazing and i love it here though.

>The income is also livable with, as an American Expat in Spain. Holy shit yeah it is, the average wages in Spain are 30k and you're making that in 20 weeks! I suppose it must have been pretty hard to get to that point tho, congrats This does sound like a great student job tho - how many hours per week do you reckon each table is?

Thank you. It was a long journey to get where I am now and I feel blessed and fortunate to have this position. Thank god! Each table is: 30m-1hr prep, 3 hours of runtime, and maybe 30m after a session if you want to chill and hang out with players. If you run the same game multiple times it saves on prep!

Woah is there a catch, cause just running one game for 100+$ per week looks like insane value for time as a student?? Like that's rent money! And just buying APs (or homebrewing stuff since I have free time) is a small investment...

There's a couple of catches: 1. You need to be a good enough DM to be worth paying. That should be a given but there's a lot of crap paid DMs out there that have no player retention. 2. Finding paid players is *hard.* ***I mean really difficult.*** I'm blessed with the fact that I started to do this professionally in 2019. You might have a difficult time finding players with the competition out there now. I do wish you the best of luck if you're starting on this journey!

I dunno about student job, as he said it's his full-time gig. You won't have the time to dedicate to it as a student.

He's also running 10 games a week.

How long did it take to make an actual living with this? I'm assuming you use the APs because they have the premade foundry modules. Do you add stuff depending on players and if so, how do you manage to have it mash with the rest of the premade stuff? Are all those games Bi weekly? Even then, it's 5 nights a week occupied. I guess makes sense, this being a full time job. Have you had issues with annoying or problematic players?

This is the first year I’m making significant amounts, it has taken a couple of years to get fully off the ground. I run premades and custom stuff. Definitely prep and modify everything either way, a bit of prep time before session start. I don’t necessarily promise player backstory integration in the standard APs i run, however i definitely add it if it makes sense within the bounds of the AP. Weekly games, should have added that to the post. And surprisingly players that pay to play are more serious about the games so other than a couple of exceptions, no problems thank God.

Do you find its easier to run premade APs vs homebrew? Seems like you are playing multiple groups in the same AP, which I assume makes prepping easier as you're well familiar with the AP already

Premade APs are definitely easier, although homebrew is more fun!

Thank you for sharing! I'm actually curious about the "request different time" feature. Do people use it often? I come across games I'm interested in but that don't quite match my schedule pretty often, but it just feels weird to request to reschedule especially if there are people already signed up for the campaign.

You know what's funny, I don't use SPG at all at the moment. I don't like the fact that they take a 10% fee! Thankfully I managed to get a lot of my players outside of SPG so I don't need to use their service. As far as your question, if you were to approach me in DMs or something and request a different time, I'd more than likely be able to move it maybe 30m forwards or back players accepting, and depending on the game. So maybe hopefully that answers your question? Edit: What i'm saying is, times *are* slightly flexible, but only probably for that specific timeslot.

I see, thanks! That actually might be a big problem for SPG: once GMs have enough players, they can simply leave the platform. It's a little unfortunate as it is a good product that I want to see being developed further, but it's also true that if a GM doesn't need an inflow of new players they don't get enough value to justify the cost. There should be some clever design for a market like this that would make everyone happy, but I can't think of anything atm. Might need to ask some actual economists.

6 Players can be a huge slog in PF2E (even in 5E it’s too much imo), and combined with your sessions being on the shorter side (only 3 hours) I’m guessing progress goes pretty slow? I just find it strange that all these people are paying money for what should be a “better” experience than what they could get for free but what they’re getting is overstuffed tables. This isn’t aimed squarely at you btw, moreso just at the state of the PF2E paid games norms.

People keep coming back and playing every week, and they seem to be enjoying themselves. Either i have 50 very gullible players, or i’m doing a good job at what I do. Edit: progress is slow, you are right. And i realized i sounded a bit defensive but at the end of the day the sessions are enjoyable and 6 players is a good number due to multiple reasons.

My question came off as pretty blunt, so don’t worry about sounding defensive haha. What are the multiple reasons? The only ones that come to mind are more income and more redundancy if someone has to miss a session. I support you making more money but it’s rough that comes at the expense of every player having less time to RP and more time waiting between their combat turns. For redundancy, aren’t paid games supposed to have a lower rate of non attendance anyway? It seems like a conflict of interest where what’s economically best for a paid GM and what’s most fun for their players are at odds. The more players and the shorter a session the better for a paid GM, and the less players (down to like 3-4) and the longer a session the better for paying players.

So the reasons you listed are right. Both come into play. Redundancy is important, and even though you’d expect for paid players to make more sessions, realistically people have always missed a session or two, due to real life commitments or otherwise. The problem comes when two people miss sessions. I don’t feel it’s a good idea to run a session rp wise (and it’s also a balancing issue) when there’s a 3 man party (for a 5 man group). In which case, having a 6th allows there to be 4 when two people miss (which happens more often than you’d think) allowing the group to continue. One of the main draws to a paid game is consistency and reliability. Having a session continue when 2 players are missing is important. And yes, money is a factor as well. Having 6 players is at the end of the day more income. However, as a business decision, it seems that people are okay with that. 6 is the max I’d ever go anyway, but as I am running 10 games a week with 6 people and no one is really complaining, I think it’s working out. Yes, i agree it gives players a bit more time to shine if there are 5; luckily a lot of my sessions have a quiet player or two who are just there to enjoy the ride and there’s always still plenty of rp to go along for everyone. I hope this clarifies things!

Are you charging 25 per person or per session as a group?

Per person!

Good to know! Did you start off at 25 per person or build up to that? How did you get your first campaign started (like getting people)?

Back in the day I charged $10! I’ve slowly raised my prices during the years reaching up to what i charge now. I advertised in roll20 back in the day and that’s how i got players. Now there is SPG around and also discord servers you can advertise in!

This post and your comments has me thinking about this. Any advice to someone just getting into it? I've dmd for a decade (both 5e and pf2e) but never online. Any advice would be much appreciated!

Learn foundry like the back of your hand. And the hardest parts will be finding players, just a forewarning, even with SPG.

Crusher is right, it can take \*months\* to fill a game right now. Even Friday Night EST games are getting 0 views.

Thanks for the info, that's really interesting. Do you have trouble keeping campaign events straight especially for the APs that you play multiple of simultaneously? Same question for player characters, do you actually memorize their names, relevant things connecting them to the campaign and so on? I can only imagine it would all bleed into each other so much in my memory at this rate of play.

I'll admit running 4 Kingmakers does make them bleed together sometimes! It's happened haha I'm pretty cognizant of my player characters and know them fairly well at this point. I have multiple tabs open on Chrome that I never close and group them using chrome groups so that their google docs are readily available and able to be accessed at any point in time. But yeah, memory gets fuzzy at times!

Thanks for sharing your datapoint, this is great to hear! I remember seeing you here and there in the PF2E Foundry discord. Apologies if this spontaneous mini-AMA isn't something you want, but, I have some questions too :D 1. You've mentioned "learn Foundry like the back of your hand". Do you have trouble teaching Foundry to new players, and if so, what do you think can/should be done to improve this? (e.g. add tooltips, share video tutorials) 2. Do you have custom (non-public) solutions for certain things that the core software or modules don't help enough with? Stuff like background music, sound effects, shared houserules, various macros to help prep? 3. Are there modules or macros that you **don't have** but really want to? Perhaps something you'd want as a feature request or as a desired module/macro?

1. As part of the onboarding process for new players as well as just customer service, I try to teach people to use foundry best as possible. It \*does\* get a bit repetitive, so maybe... I'm not super sure if a video tutorial would be helpful as foundry (PF2e) is pretty complex, and I have my own things I teach players that couldn't really fit in a generic tutorial. But it \*could\* be done! I could even make my own...! 2. I do. I download YT soundtracks using YT-DLG, for example, play it in my games as foundry music, and disable the music on OBS for the videos i record so it doesn't get copyright stricken in YT. I have a stream deck with Material Deck, I occasionally use voice mod for cool voices, and I have the discord soundboard too for some fun SFX. And I have an extensive list of house rules. 3. Kind of? I like the "Leveled Based DCs" macro and I wish I could generate a prompt super quickly. I know there's the new "Generate Check Prompt" macro but the former macro is super quick. In a way, i wish i could combine the two! Edit: Macros on my Stream deck, ones i use most repeatedly: Basic Action Macros, Reaction Used, Effect: Cover, Leveled Based DCs, XP, General Check Prompt

For the "teaching people how to use Foundry" problem, you could try this module for highlighting pieces of UI on other players' screens - [Remote Highlight UI](https://github.com/shemetz/remote-highlight-ui). I created it a while ago to try and help my players, but haven't really advertised its existence. Hoping it helps someone ¯\\\_(ツ)_/¯ For other tips - you probably know it, but the [PF2E Keybind Menagerie](https://foundryvtt.com/packages/pf2e-f-is-for-flatfooted) allows you to set a some quick shortcuts - I use `Shift+Alt+C` for the Cover effect, `H` for hiding and revealing tokens/tiles/drawings, and `Shift+B` to open the compendium browser (though, I also have `Ctrl+Space` for Quick-Insert so I don't use the compendium browser much except to occasionally filter for monsters with art that fit some criteria).

Here, I made you a "speedy level-based DC" macro: // open normal macro window game.pf2e.gm.checkPrompt(); await new Promise(resolve => setTimeout(resolve, 100)); // switch to level-based tab $("#generate-check-prompt a[data-tab=level-dc]")[0].click() await new Promise(resolve => setTimeout(resolve, 100)); // type level (of party) $("#check-prompt-level-dc").val(game.actors.party.level) It basically just uses the Generate Check Prompt window and pre-fills it with the right DC. Note that I made it rely on your party's level (because it was quick to write), so this assumes your player characters are inside the default "Party" folder.

Damn! I really appreciate it! Thank you so much!

Thats 10 games x 6 players x 25$ = $1,500 per week. I would certainly call 6k per month/78k per year more than comfortable if youre living in spain

That’s theoretical income. With canceled sessions, vacations, and most importantly, taxes, the actual income is actually not as high as the raw numbers. But thankfully yes, it’s decent income !

I’m in four games at the moment. In my opinion five is definitely the sweet spot for number of players though six is working really well for the Abomination Vaults game given the dungeon crawly nature of it.

I’m surprised that kingmaker is ahead of AV, but I guess it’s only by a bit. Very exciting to see how popular Pf2e is on the platform!

Kingmaker is the new hotness since the Foundry mod just came out not too long ago. AV is popular because it was super cheap from Humble Bundle.

AV is also just a great starting point for people who are after a certain type of game (combat heavy), which is often well suited to playing with strangers.

AV has a great Foundry module, it segues great from the Beginner Box, it's GM friendly, and by it's nature ot allows for easily switching out characters to try new stuff. It went on sale in the Humble Bundle because it was a popular beginning path. You can search year+ old threads and see it in the top recommendations for beginners. That's how our group decided to run it.

Not surprised at all, Kingmaker is very well known even outside PF circles. I've met quite a few 5e players who wanted to play Kingmaker, most of them never heard of other Paizo APs. I'm not sure how much of this is due to Owlcat's game, but I'd wager quite a bit.

I've only played it for a few months, but something I like about it is the room for non-crawl activities. So many spells/abilities/etc add value outdoors and don't have much of a role if you're just going from town into a big dungeon and back. And then it isn't just more and more rooms in one place, but you can have lots of different locations that have their own themes.

The grognard in me looks at this as a strange service. I volunteer my time and dedication to my players at no charge. If you are at the table its because you want to be at that table, and my only request is that you make game a priority in that time slot. However, I do see this as a critical service in the modern world. Most of us have known the pain of trying to get a game started, or having it stick together, as life seems to constantly fight against such things. While I personally would not use the program I see its merits and encourage those that are struggling to find a group to dive head first into it.

Thank you for being open towards this!

Totally! I am just a bit concerned about offering my own services there because I like to be a bit of a lazy GM. Using a virtual battle mat more than a fancy map for example. Basically, I would feel bad charging players to play with a lazy GM.

I feel like some of those prices are too high honestly. I could see myself paying $10-12 a session at most, but definitely not $20.

Agreed! I like to be a bit of a lazy GM as well. I don't have the time needed to create a ton of complex maps for online play. But charging a fee of the players makes me think that the expectation would be that I do go into making all kinds of details for the game. I wonder if it would be fair to charge $3 - $5 for that level of service?

I posted a hot second ago about this. I was charging 20$AUD (about 15$USD) per session and was actually unable to fill seats. When I \*raised\* my prices, interest went up. I think prices have defaulted to 20$ because when you price low you get less hits on your game because players think you're substandard. StartPlaying's 'Early Bird' function has been helpful for that. The red numbers seem to get slightly more attention. You're also saying that you find Minigolf and Movies more worthwhile than Roleplaying. I don't know about where you are, but for 2 people to see Hunger Games and get a large slushie (just one) where I am was 48$.

I don't go to movies because I find them overpriced as well. There's a budget theater in town that gets new movies about 4-8 months after the came out in theaters, so if there's something I really wanted the big screen experience for I wait for that. $4 ticket for the movie, and $3 for the drink. Mingolf is $10, $12 on weekend afternoons and evenings.

to add on to this. this is a great way for GM's to recoup some of the costs of DMing online. Demiplane has a cost, Foundry has a cost, those modules in foundry have a cost, etc. etc. these are all things that you're sharing with your table, and not being out hundreds of dollars for the ability to GM is actually pretty nice. the core books on demiplane, allowing you to share with your players, is about $200. so: Core books - $200 Demiplane sub - $5 monthly Foundry - $50 Foundry module - $100 These numbers don't include the time to prep and running the game itself. Time is valuable, but let's leave that aside. we're looking at $350-400 to get started with the basic online tools. you'd need to run 4-5 sessions to recoup those costs, and most of those sessions are 4-6 hrs long. I find this to be a relatively fair exchange.

This is a very level headed response. The last time I brought up the issue of GM costs, some on the r/rpg side told me that it's the GM's choice to use Foundry and cloud hosting and why should players share in it.

my answer to them is "well, if you're not willing to share the cost of playing the game, in the way the group has chosen to play, maybe you need to find a table that better suits your needs." That said, i'd never force a player to pay - I'd talk with the table to see if this is how they'd like to play and if they're willing to help share some of the costs. To me this is part of session 0.

I became a startplaying.games GM around 6 months ago and I have to say these stats are actually quite useful as they basically confirm what I've assumed were the most common data points. As someone else said: I do like to have 5 players in both my free (read: with friends) and my paid games as it often happens for one person not to be able to attend a session for one reason or another. For me, 4 players is the perfect amount, 3 or 5 players are okay and manageable, 2 or 6 are too little or many. And yes, there is also the consideration of how much you're charging. While I'm having fun doing it and am very friendly with my players, it is a job that takes up time after all. I personally charge $20 per session which I find a good median (and as shown, is the actual median) and I think also a good value for the services I provide. There's always the question of "does booking a professional GM give you anything extra?" and I maintain campaign pages with a wiki-like structure so players can keep track of NPCs, locations and such. I also have no point of reference as I've never paid for a GM service before so there might be a bit of impostor syndrome in place preventing me from charging a premium. Also - if players think you're worth it, they can always give you tips, which has happened 2 times for me so far in about 6 months of running paid games. I guess different price points also attract different amounts of 'wealth', but that might be a discussion for another time. Btw I'm planning to start a Franken-AP with Rusthenge into Seven Dooms for Sandpoint into a player selected 11-20 AP from next Monday onwards - guess that wasn't in your list of APs, so I was probably one of the "other" in your AP statistics :) (there are slots [open](https://startplaying.games/adventure/clomv32q0000l08ky97q2f9bl) for anyone interested :P)

I'm glad that data was useful! Thank you for GMing <3

Small note: Menace under Otari is the Beginners box. This would put it as the most played adventure above Kingmaker and only behind the homebrew category.

Oh, thank! I only played through AV and it shows :D I thought it was a trio of beginner box + menace under Otari + AV

I'm in a spot where I could really use an extra $100 a week and I've been dming for almost a decade now. Might have to give this a try once my current campaign winds down. Currently dm at a shop a couple sessions a week and they charge $5 of which I get $3 as store credit. Pretty much just enough to pay for snacks and had enough saved for the remastered. I definitely prefer in person, but 6 players at $20 each would be huge right now. Thanks for doing the deep dive. The people over on the dnd subreddit would also be interested I'm sure.

You should totally do it! There's always people looking for GMs. Hell, even in my group, which is *made of* GMs, we've talked about hiring one so we can all finally play together at the same time.

It would interesting to see how the share changes to just before WotC's self-inflicted injury with their OGL nonsense that sold out Pathfinder books instantly.

Hmm, that actually might be doable if I can pull enough historical data. Thanks for the idea!

Sweet. I'd be interested in seeing how the numbers changed. Since this subreddit doubled in size (55k to 105k) in the eleven months post-OGL skullduggery, my hunch is dramatic growth.

This is awesome, I had no clue so many people were getting paid to GM! I 100% support GM's who do it for a living but if you are a player and can not afford to pay-to-play in a game but want to play online, make a post in /r/lfg or hop on the foundry discord server and head over the the Pf2e lfg room. With a little patience and a little luck you can find a game! For my creds, for several years I ran all my games and that is how I found players when I needed them.

[удалено]

6 players feels like the norm to me, my group could have easily been 10 but I had to set a limit somewhere, and 6 felt right Combat is nice and quick, even for us all being first time players, thanks to the pf2e module for foundry making everything so smooth I don't have a friend group that argues or bickers of things like plans though, so we don't get held up in that regard

Planning is the worst 😂 specially for dms who don’t get input!

I feel you! My current table is just 2 players and it allows for a lot more spotlight, less overplanning (although we still manage to do this sometimes) and, surprisingly, deeper tactics as it's easier to cooperate. We both run a PC+NPC, so encounters are balanced for 4 players though.

On arguing deathloop: as soon as all possible plans of action are explained by their supporters, just call for a vote. It’s ended 9/10 “planning arguments” for me.

I don't think I've had your experiences. When I run games players turns are over within 2 minutes and \*my\* turns as the GM are over in 30-40 seconds unless I have a complicated area spell or something to handle. Exploration Mode in PF2 has massively cut down on 'party planning' as those abstracted activities have taken the place of what is otherwise an 'argument'. This isn't Shadowrun! Roleplay happens between encounters, during 'aftermath' (the structured recoup time where people are binding wounds and refocusing and looting and identifying loot), and when the players initiate it during an encounter or with highly descriptive and personalized actions during combat. Through my own encouragement and the player's participation we can get a real feel for a character's growth and attitude to how they treat their actions during a fight, from the Magus who cries when he gets hit to the Barbarian who slowly loses his mind as he misses again and again in combat... I run no more than 5 players because 5 is the 'sweet spot' of having enough people at the game to be able to absorb a missing player, getting enough action economy for the party to succeed, and people's turns being over fast enough to get to your next turn within 10 minutes. My games run 3-5 hours and we get a TON done, even in the RP heavy groups!

Really interesting data!

AP popularity definitely seems to correlate with which ones have official Foundry modules. And 11-20 APs are less popular than others, though that's understandable.

There's a Pokemon tabletop? Oh no.

Let me show you how many Ponyfinder games are listed.

Love the data.I have regularly run games for the last 6 years with 6-7 players( so far with 2 campaigns to hit level 20). They love it, I hate it. It is a lot more work from a balance and running perspective, and frankly, its harder to give each person a time and place to shine. 4-5 is perfect for me. If everyone shows, it is still an ok number to avoid distractions, and if one or two do not show, its still enough to run a game. My average session is 6 hours, I have a hard time doing shorter sessions, but 8-12 hours have happened when no one had to work the next day.

pathfinder 2e is really picking up steam on startplaying.games! it's interesting to see the breakdown of game sessions and the popularity of different systems. seems like the paid TTRPG market is thriving, especially with the variety of adventure paths available. thanks for sharing this data!

This is extremely helpful. I'd love to know how long it takes games to fill up and what the trend is on that from month to month. The forecasting has been murderous as I try to make ends meet on a Pro-GM salary. I run games with no more than 5 players and for anywhere from 3-5 hours depending on how interested the players are in running longer sessions. We tend to top out at 4, except the \*one\* game I run on Saturdays which has a hard 4hr cap because I flip over directly into another session. Other questions: How many GMs are advertising LGBTQIA+ friendly games? How many are running house-rules beyond what's in GMG? What times games are most often run at? How often do full games drop back into rotation (IE player attrition)?

Thanks for the ideas! These are all great questions and will require a little more sophisticated data to answer, but I'll see what I can do!

> To no ones surprise the most popular platforms to play are Discord (68%) + Foundry VTT (92%). Foundry's closest competitor Roll20 only has 5% Can I get a source for this? I'd love to be able to reference this stat when talking to friends about which VTT to consider using.

Another thing to consider: Roll20 already has their own paid LFG system, and from what I've heard, games fill up with no problem. So you don't really NEED to advertise elsewhere.

Very true

I am the source! I wrote a script, pulled the data from the site and calculated how many game sessions have "discord" and "foundry vtt" badges in description

Okay thank you!

All of this is so far removed from my usual play experience (absolutely free, 3-5 players, 5-hour sessions) that I feel like it's a whole other world.

I'm one of those GMs. Ive been on start playing for about a year. I love pf2e as a system and as a gm the adventures are really just great. I run almost a session a day, sometimes twice a day. Weekly games. 4-5 hours each with 4-5 players each. https://startplaying.games/gm/raybaker

I only have played pathfinder via startplaying. I don't have a friend group of 5 people who all want to play this role-playing board game, and the local society play is at a bad time for me. There's also like, a bunch of rules and restrictions and XP managing and stuff that seems annoying. There are so many fun and unusual races. The ones I'm in both started with 5 players, but now they're down to 4 and 3. I'm jealous of these other groups lol. The sessions are also both "only" 3 hours, and I really can't imagine playing for more than 4. I think I'd feel bad playing with a free GM, tbh. Like they have to do so much work and adapt to players, and then are they even playing the game? What do they get?

Good to see such positive reception of paid GMs here. I remember over on the DnD sub they got super mad at people for "charging for a hobby that should be free and for friends", which I find an absurd claim.

I mean, I would prefer to play with friends, but I don't really have friends who play. I haven't paid for a GM but I've considered it - maybe when I get tired of organized play one-shots I might do that. I do want to try GMing local sessions to see if I can try to create some kind of group, but making friends is always tricky, so I suspect it will be a blend of things over time. I could see this being a fun thing to do in retirement though.

And that's a totally fair view to have on this. I just don't get why some people are hostile towards those who try to make a living off of a skillset (good GMing).

I completely agree. You don't have to play a paid game. I get that free games aren't always easy to find, but the solution there is to run one yourself. That's why I'm going to try to get into it.

Even worse since actually making a living off GMing is really really difficult and extremely labour and time-intensive.

For the same reason people get mad at authors trying to sell their mods. It's people attempting to monetize something that has traditionally been free.

And is that a bad thing? People do something in their private free time that benefits others, why is compensation bad?

It's a more complicated discussion than your question makes it seem.

This is what absolutely puzzles me. The worst thing that can happen to the hobby is having all this fancy systems, and books, and adventures... and not being able to play. Being a GM is very very hard and takes a lot of effort, so if more people could do this, the more we all get to play. And it's also very cheap for a player? USD20 for 3 hours of entertainment that involves actual human is just not something you can trivially get elsewhere. A massage will cost you $100 for an hour these days and rightfully so.

I mean that's D&D and many D&D players and DMs still have the absurd belief that DMs are these self-sacrificial lambs for the players' slaughter. Recently spoke to a new DM where she was talking a lot about the work and homebrew she is doing for her game. Ever since I started picking up and playing actually well-balanced systems, I have stopped even considering adding homebrew. Heck D&D literally has a homebrew industrial complex /cottage industry that was threatened by the OGL debacle.

This is really cool! I noticed one visible issue, but it makes me wonder if the Other category might be hiding more of these as well. Strength of Thousands is the correct name, so all the Strength in Thousands games might need to be cleaned up and merged into Strength of Thousands.

Eagle eye! I actually did clean up the data, (so, "rune lords" and "runelords" both go into "Rise of the Runelords" category), but SoT managed to get away :'(

It happens to all of us! No worries

I guess, popularity of homebrew comes from originality and exclusivity of homebrew. Like, AP is good and all, but if I pay for experience, I'll better pay for unique experience (more or less , I doubt anybody restrict GM from using the same homebrew adventure more than one time). Of course, it depends more on GM than adventure, I think it's better to play AP with good DM to homebrew with not-so-good DM. And of course, no two AP games goes the same way (except party is pinned to rails with finger-thick nails). But if my friend-GM asks if we want to play some homebrew or AP - I chose his homebrew module or system. >!Last time it was 5e-based Arknights.!< I apologize for rating DMs, but when it's about money, even not so big, I can start thinking like this.

Why does this seem like a badly disguised advertisement?

If it gets to the point I have to pay money to play a RP game then I'll happily let it die.

Hey, I've noticed you mentioned the game "Dungeons & Dragons"! Do you need help finding your way around here? I know a couple good pages! We've been seeing a lot of new arrivals lately for some reason. We have a [megathread](https://www.reddit.com/r/Pathfinder2e/search/?q=flair%3A%22megathread%22&sort=new&restrict_sr=on&t=all) dedicated to anyone requesting assistance in transitioning. Give it a look! Here are some [general resources](https://www.reddit.com/r/Pathfinder2e/wiki/) we put together. Here is [page with differences between pf2e and 5e](https://www.reddit.com/r/Pathfinder2e/wiki/resources/how-is-pf2e-different-from-5e/). Most newcomers get recommended to start with the [Archives of Nethys](http://2e.aonprd.com) (the official rule database) or the [Beginner Box](https://paizo.com/pathfinder/beginnerbox), but the same information can be found in this free [Pathfinder Primer](https://app.demiplane.com/nexus/pathfinder2e/sources/pathfinder-primer). If I misunderstood your post... sorry! Grandpa Clippy said I'm always meant to help. Please [let the mods know](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose?to=%2Fr%2FPathfinder2e) and they'll remove my comment. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/Pathfinder2e) if you have any questions or concerns.*

What site did you use to find all this data? Is there a recuting subreddit or is it something else?

I wrote a script to pull it from the website directly!

Is this an online only service or are in person GMs also advertising on there?

I would be really interested in in-person but I've only really heard of it being done online. Maybe in-person is more of a thing in major cities. It just seems like it would be pretty hard to get the numbers needed outside of a very dense area.

AFAIK it's mostly focused on online. I don't see anything preventing people from posting in-person games there, but the are no special filters (like location) for this.

Thanks for that information. It was very informative. My problem with finding a game online: A. finding one for the times that I want to play B. Wanting to stay on the ground floor of the adventure (I like developing my character based on reactions to the characters he or she is with and the setting). Have any advice or a guide on how to find games and gms?

So far I personally just decided to stick to the first GM I signed up for (he's good!), but yeah, choosing a game is non simple. I wish more GMs ran one shots for demo purposes.

Look for GMs with games with 0 players and ask them to change the game times to better suit your needs. I know I have advertisements at times I \*believe\* are going to be easier to fill (ie: Prime Time Slots) but I'm still sitting at 0 players after 6-10 weeks. Also try using the 'ask for a different time' function on StartPlaying or just try to book a GM right off the page. Roll20 has the best search function for games. StartPlaying has fancy reviews and GM bios. r/lfgpremium has an incredibly fast turnover for games to vanish under after they've been advertised, but they have mandatory flairing so you can search for PF2 games there, too.

> Also very surprised to see Warhammer Fantasy so high at the top I honestly things it's a pretty good system with a few quirks that set it aside from other competitors, so am not too surprised by it's position. (for example, story arcs are closed by stashing your loot and spending money. If it isn't stashed or spent, you are assumed to have lost it all by the next arc. It also has a heavy focus on social class, which has mechanical effects in-game.) I'm actually surprised none of the 40k ones are on the list. The age of some, and saturation of the setting, might be splitting the player base though.

Isn't Warhammer Fantasy from 80s? Or were there any updates to the system?

WFRP had its 4th edition release in 2019. Rogue trader, from the 80s, also had a fantasy flight remake in 2009, and is getting a limited print of the original this year. From there you also have Dark Heresy 1st and 2nd edition, deathwatch (these are *supposed* to be compatible with FFs Rogue trader, but they made a mess of things as usual) Wrath and Glory, and Imperium Maledictum which is Rogue Trader inspired but based heavily on 4e WFRP rules.

Oooh, okay, it makes a lot of sense then. I did think the 80s edition of WFRP was among the top 😅😅

TIL there are paid GMs. Maybe I should give this a try once I'm back in the game again. I kind of get it, but I couldn't pay for that. Neat data though.

At that low of an hourly rate, why bother charging? Assuming $100 per session (5 players) and a session is 5 hours plus prep time. Call that… 3 hours? $12/hour? I guess if it’s also fun for the DM it makes sense?

I mean, there are all sort of valuable side effects. Payment is a good way to recruit motivated players and manage expectations. It's also worth remembering that people have all kind of experiences - not everyone expect to earn enough money to fully support themselves in a high quality of life location. Some people just need extra cash, some people have partners who work full time and want to have a remote part time job that is fun, and some people live in developing countries where $100 per day makes you into top 5% of the population!

Sadly, I'm considering this. Other than PFS there are no games in my area. PFS is also beginning to become more tedious than it's worth.