I tried this service and ran 2 campaigns with different groups of friends. It was amazing. DND was something I wanted to try for a long time but the barrier to entry was (at least, perceived to be) really high.
Great to see this finally launching. I'll be recommending this service to anyone who's interested in dipping their toe into DND. I also love that you're making being a "Professional Dungeon Master" a plausible future career choice. :)
> I also love that you're making being a "Professional Dungeon Master" a plausible future career choice. :)
Professional DM'ing will never be good for anything other than making some money on the side unless you're charging players an unreasonable amount of money. Yes, there is an imbalance of potential players versus DM's, but at the end of the day the only thing preventing anybody from being a DM is getting over false assumptions that "it's not as fun as playing a character" or "I'm not Matthew Mercer and thus I'm going to be a bad DM". If my introverted and self-critical ass can DM and have players enjoy the experience, so can whoever is reading this.
I DM a weekly 2-hour session, beyond the actual time spent in the session I spend ~45 minutes prepping every week (and I'm running published modules right now, not homebrewing, so that's just time spent reading ahead, writing session notes, etc.). Paid DM's generally charge $25 per player for a four hour session, and their prep time is included in that - given that even running the same module for multiple groups still requires prep time and longer sessions moreso, you're only making $15-25/hr before banks, taxes, etc. take a cut. Not only that, but being paid means you have fairly high expectations placed on your skills that nobody would have for the friendly DM running a game for fun.
I don't have anything against paid DM's, but unless you are literally providing an insanely polished experience that has potential players willing to drop $50 each for a session you're not going to be making a living off it that justifies the time spent beyond some extra pocket change.
There’s no way this is true in 5-10 years. I’m in a $20/person/hour campaign now. A future celebrity/influencer/streamer/professional improv comedian GM could easily be pulling in 6 or 7 figures.
Sure, if you have a premium product you can justify those rates - but your market is also shockingly small for said premium product. There's literally only two reasons for paid DM's to exist - A) they offer said premium experience or B) there's a huge imbalance of players to DM's. Not everybody wants to pay the money it would require to have a Matthew Mercer as their DM, and if more people just realized that being a DM is not the intimidating/tedious/boring job they thing it is there wouldn't be such a huge imbalance.
I guess I don't want to say you cannot make a living off being a paid DM, but you will have to be in the top percentiles to justify your price doing so and compete in a shallow market. Everyone else is on borrowed time until the player:dm balance naturally normalizes, and speaking as a DM myself I do my utmost to convince others to give it a shot because it's an incredibly enjoyable and rewarding experience.
Maybe? I definitely agree that paying for it changes perception a little bit ( you expect value ). But then, our sessions ( pre-covid ) have not been exactly a cheap affair ( between various manuals, accompanying pieces, dice, 3d printing/buying avatars, arranging babysitting and last, but certainly not least, food for the group it turned out to be oddly expensive hobby, though still cheaper than guns ).
I guess what I am saying is, when all those costs are considered, premium GM at $25 does not sound unreasonable. I am not sure if the market would accept more, but then.. DnD has become mainstream. I would not bet against it.
> But then, our sessions ( pre-covid ) have not been exactly a cheap affair ( between various manuals, accompanying pieces, dice, 3d printing/buying avatars, arranging babysitting and last, but certainly not least, food for the group it turned out to be oddly expensive hobby, though still cheaper than guns ).
Well, yeah, people need materials to play - that's just a given and it doesn't change if you're paying a DM or not. Realistically though, you're talking about playing in the single most expensive manner possible:
* D&D Beyond content sharing reduces the cost of manuals since they only need to be purchased once (no more fighting over the PHB or making everyone buy their own, plus associated splatbooks with character options)
* Dice are $20 for a 1lb bag, and while everybody having multiple sets is useful you technically only need a single d4, d6, d10, d12 and d20 per player (d100's are just d10, roll one twice)
* I don't get the obsession with mini's. But I also think if you're going to run grids you're better off buying a Foundry VTT license and throwing the map on your TV, which will set you back less than the cost of a single mini in most cases; I generally stick to theater of the mind for in-person sessions and use Sly Flourish's Zone-based Combat when there's an encounter that takes place outside of a 30x30 area
Babysitting if you're a single parent or have a spouse that plays and food don't have any good options to reduce cost, unfortunately.
Note I'm only trying to say D&D is as expensive as a hobby as you want it to be. To play anything other than the three box sets that include the core rules (Starter Kit, Essentials Kit, D&D vs Rick and Morty) you literally need the PHB, a bag of assorted dice and an adventure (published or your own). Hell, you can skimp on the PHB and play with the SRD5 document and need nothing but dice.
> I guess what I am saying is, when all those costs are considered, premium GM at $25 does not sound unreasonable. I am not sure if the market would accept more, but then.. DnD has become mainstream. I would not bet against it.
Except it's a premium DM at $125-150 per week, all players considered. For those that don't need babysitters (because they don't have children, have a spouse that will watch the children, or they play online) that's way more than buying pizza when it's your week. I'm not going to say the price is unreasonable given that's $6.25/hr (less, considering prep time), but it's not enough for anybody to make a living on without severe short-cuts being made in prep work (thus ruining the point of a paid DM in the first place, since anybody can do it if they get over whatever perceived problem is preventing them from doing so).
I agree overall with your economic analysis, just one thing to point out:
You might be able to get _some_ economies of scale if you homebrew your own adventure and reuse it with multiple groups.
In terms of other ways to scale your per session income is to allow people to just watch the sessions you're DMing(a la Crit Role), but at this point you're a content producer (not to mention the players might not like being watched by others).
Stopwatch is building a new social network. Interesting product with some new ideas. Small remote team of 4 and some great investors. We’re currently pre-launch.
We're looking for an additional iOS engineer to help build the app.
If you’re interested in learning more please email jon@stopwatch.com.
Not as far as I'm aware, but people have started asking for the same thing for US and Australian companies. I might end up expanding NBM to include other countries, provided I can reliably source the data.
I'm curious.... is there some sort of crazy image recognition tech going on here or does the website owner need to somehow identify what's in the image for the ads to work? If it's the former then this is seriously impressive.
Unfortunately (in terms of programming credibility), it's done manually. The process is extremely fast though -- just seconds to do a highlight, and a built-in search that hooks into all affiliate networks (Commission Junction, Linkshare, Affiliate Window, Share-a-sale, etc.) along with allowing custom links.
Huh, the startups who tried to do this before you (and died) didn't do it manually. Some crowdsourced it, some did recognition. Do you think your timing is better?
Actually, if you price us up against other _linen_ bedding you’ll see that we’re incredibly competitive. Something comparable would cost upwards of $600.
Once you factor in the fact that linen lasts up to 10x as long as cotton the price becomes much more stomachable.
This is something I'd genuinely like to know more about. Ikea sells an (ostensibly) 100% linen duvet + pillowcase set for $80; aside from the two sheets, what else makes up the delta?
Just because comparable goods are more expensive, doesn't mean you cant cut the price to 1/10th. You're including margin with cost. These are separate variables in pricing.
Maybe slackstation has an incorrect view on achievable base material costs but your retort doesn't answer this.
What does your margin end up being? I can imagine that cutting out typical retailer margins, stocking fees, insurance, etc... can cut a $600 bed set to $350 pretty quickly.
This is actually the pain point we were trying to solve with mod. Each time we'd fill up a notebook we'd manually take pictures of every page and save it to evernote. If you've ever done this you'll know...
- It takes FOREVER.
- Pictures are blurry / out of focus / misaligned
- There's a limit to the number of pictures you can attached to a note in evernote so each notebook ends up needing to be spread between a few different evernote "notes".
- Evernote really isn't designed to consume this kind of content. (We have an app designed specifically for this: http://app.modnotebooks.com/demo)
Hey Jon, really appreciate you posting about these pain points. I have been trying to get behind your notebooks since the launch last week, but as a user of the Moleskine notebooks I'm just not seeing the value add you guys are promoting. Hopefully you can help me see through my own myopia.
My workflow usually takes me through a few pages of a notebook, which I then scan immediately afterwards into an Evernote note, specific to whatever I was just working on. I often recap with dictation, and possibly add some new thoughts, but I'm never adding more than a few scanned pages at a time. So for me, it never feels like it takes "forever", nor do I have issues with image limits.
I guess, for me, and probably for many other people, we have felt like the real-time nature and benefit is lost. Maybe I don't fill notebooks as quickly as the next guy, but by the time I do, I usually don't have any need to search through most of my earliest pages. By sending the notebook away once it is full, the scanning seems to add limited additional value to me. And barring physical destruction of the notebooks, the archival value of being able to ship the whole notebook for scanning feels a bit forced to me.
Plus, I write primarily in script, and the OCR works just fine, so I don't feel the images are necessarily blurry/out of focus either.
I understand you have many users already on-board with the idea. And that's great. I'm not trying to say your product or concept is invaluable. You're a project I want to support, I just can't personally get behind you with my current perspective. I'd love to hear your thoughts on why someone with my perspective might want to switch to your notebooks.
For me the value is in knowing everything is backed up and saved. I very rarely actually need access to my old notes and sketches from previous notebooks but there’s a lot of sentimental value there for me.
If a note I take is actually time sensitive or needs to be referenced soon, I still have the physical notebook to reference.
I have (low quality photos of) sketches of old ideas that later become companies. The notebooks themselves are long gone but I love that I still have some kind of digital backup.
I’d eventually like to get the price of mod notebooks down so they’re on par with other notebooks that don’t have the digitizing bundled in (it’s already pretty close).
Jon, the sentiment makes a lot of sense. And anyone reading HN should know the importance of having a backup/archive system setup before it's needed. I guess that really is the ease of mind that I would consider buying.
Between writing my earlier message and reading your response here, I think the idea of having a strategy less dependent on myself is in fact compelling.
Well, shoot. Now it looks as though I am of the mindset that I will buy one just to give it a fair trial. Thank you again for another quality and personal response.
