How many people here would be interested in paying for a Professional DM? I understand it may depend on price, etc.
so, therefore-
What would you consider a good price for a session?
What would you expect from such a DM?
Would you expect them to follow the rules as exactly as possible, or be more flexible?
How many others do you think you know that would be willing to pay for high quality campaigns?
Please give answers- I respect you may be busy, but I am at a point where I need to decide what to do, and starting a business, particularly a gaming company is a dream of mine. I just need to make sure it will realistically work out before I begin investing in it.
I could probably be interested, and I suspect a lot of other people would be as well. The majority of game-finder threads I've seen have been dominated by players looking for groups and DMs, and a decent DM that lacks players is pretty rare. People will pay money for fun, believe you me.\
Personally I could see paying about 2 USD per hour per player - I'm pretty low-income myself, and others would be likely to offer quite a bit more, but still, for 6 players that's $12/hour which isn't bad. Depends on your cost of living though. if you're in Seattle then that's not going to be much more than a supplement; If you live somewhere like I do, central Montana, where the cost of living is a lot lower, then you could get by doing this 20 hours a week as your sole source of income - you'd be in about the same financial boat as I am now, but be able to afford an apartment and amenities and have some cash left over. If you're in Uganda or something, well, you'd be living fat and happy and could hire a maid. When you're working from home, location matters!
One thing I'd suggest is to save logs/recordings of sessions you run and show some snippets of them as examples of your style and skills, that'd give people a taste and maybe get them more interested - or at the least, show them a bit of what you're like behind the screen.