THERE IS NO SILVER BULLET | Your Pro GM business plan
In search of the fast-track? Welp. Sorry to say...
NOPE.
But here’s how you do the work:
Discover your strengths.
Leverage your strengths.
Stop listening to people who don’t have a credible track record.
Fail humbly.
Fail more.
Learn from your failures.
Capitalize on your successes.
You need your business to have longevity. Therefore, you need to focus on a few different things that are important:
What sort of games can you run and still have fun?
Focusing on your strengths is important to providing a great experience.
Run too many of the same campaign and you’ll get burnt out on it.
Run too few of the same campaign and you’ll be doing more prep on average for all your games.
What sort of games can you run without the time/pay ratio being out of whack?
It makes no sense to run 4+ hour games with an average seat price.
Your compensation needs to make sense at an hourly rate.
You need diversity of experience (different campaigns/settings) available to up-sell.
Your players won’t play Curse of Strahd 6x a week, but they might play in 6x different Ravenloft campaigns. (I only run CoS 5x a week now, but it’ll soon be 3x. Balogh, top-ranked GM, runs Exandria 6-8x a week in different homebrew campaigns.)
I have several players who play with me 3-4x a week. These are your super fans and will strongly consider any offering you have. They replace your “seat fillers” over time.
Theros used to be a “dead setting”. I saw maybe 1-2 Theros games on SPG in March. When I coached my friend Kenzie onto SPG I encouraged her to start running Theros games because it would hit the underserved market. She now runs 4-6x Theros games a week because there is a hefty demand for a GM whose strength is that setting.
Finding your business plan is at simple as discovering more about yourself. It’s not what everyone else is running. It’s what you’re great at.
Happy gaming.
Wow this is great.