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Being a professional DM requires business skills, excellent DMing, and the ability to find and keep clients. It’s hard work, but rewarding if you can do it all well.
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So you want to be a professional dungeon master. Well, this is the simplest way to become a professional dungeon master: get someone to pay you to be their dungeon master or game master.
It’s a little more nuanced than that, but at its root, that is how you become a professional dungeon master. After having published over 180 podcast episodes over the last 3 years and having started our own professional dungeon master business, we believe we’ve learned what it takes to become a full-time, high-quality professional dungeon master, rather than just someone paid to DM once or twice.
In this article, we will go through the ins, the outs, and the upsides and downs of the professional dungeon master life. We’ll first help you figure out if this is really the life you want to live, or if you might find greener pastures somewhere else.
We’ll help you create a list of skills that you need to develop in order to be a professional DM and we’ll give you a roadmap to get there.
It won’t be easy, but then again, nothing worth doing is ever easy. But we’ll be there with you every step of the way.
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If you’re new to the game (pardon the pun), a professional dungeon master is someone hired by a group to be their DM. As I mentioned at the start of this article, it is someone who gets paid to be a DM.
It is much more than that, however.
Like so many other things we see on TV, YouTube and Instagram, being a professional DM looks a lot easier than it really is.
At its root, it is like any other service business. It requires marketing, sales, customer management, service, and everything else your standard business needs.
So the first question you need to ask yourself to determine if being a professional dungeon master is right for you is whether you want to run your own business.
That means you’ll be your boss, and be responsible for making ends meet. If you don’t get any new professional dungeon master jobs, that’s on you and not anyone else.
Everything it takes to run a business can be learned or developed except for the desire. If you don’t have a desire then you might want to go read one of our other blog posts.
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That said, if you are interested in being your own boss and running your own business, you’ll likely want to know if can you make a full-time living off of this.
The answer is yes if you do it right.
ZipRecruiter states that the average yearly professional dungeon master salary is around $84,000.
But let’s be real. That takes time to get there and you have to be smart.
Just like any other business, you need to factor in your own skills, the market, your price and how it all fits together.
Based on Google’s SGE: “A professional dungeon master can charge between $75 and $125 per hour, depending on the type of game.”
In reality, there is no floor nor ceiling to your game prices. There is only the need to justify the price with value. With a price of $5 per session, that’s not difficult, but once you start charging $500 per session, then you need to start thinking about what differentiates you from competitors.
Assuming a lower price of $75 an hour, that’s 1120 hours of game time you need to Dungeon Master to reach $84,000. Assuming an average session length of 3 hours, that’s 374 sessions in 1 year. That figures out to be 32 sessions a month (roughly), or around 8 sessions a week.
Does this still sound fun to you?
Luckily, it’s your business, so you get to choose how much you want to work and therefore how much you want to make.
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Let’s talk for a second about some of the career paths available for professional D&D dungeon masters.
At the end of the day, the “career path” is just one: get paid to be a dungeon master.
In reality, what that looks like differs for a lot of people. So let’s talk about a few options.
Because the third option is very difficult (you should still try it if you want to), we won’t talk much about that one in this post. We’ll talk more about the other two options, but even more so about number 1. The principles related to being successful in the first option will help you in option 2 so option 1 is the nut of this post.
There are likely other career options, but they will be less common and you’ll have to create them yourself. Maybe you could get a company to hire you as their personal dungeon master across all of their employees. It’s possible. Follow the money and be creative and you’ll be able to make it work.
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Naturally, if being a professional dungeon master were lucrative and easy, everyone would do it. Most often you’ll find that either things are lucrative, easy, or neither. Sometimes they are both but those opportunities usually don’t last long. You’re going to have challenges along the way. Here are some of the most common challenges you might find. Some of these have solutions and some of them unfortunately don’t.
The biggest challenge you may have is the idea that most people would rather be their own DM than pay someone they likely don’t know to be their DM.
The unfortunate part of this challenge is that there isn’t much you can do. It’s just a fact of the target market. You are looking for people who like Dungeons and Dragons, who want to play, who don’t have a DM, who have disposable income, and who are willing to give it to you.
A definition like that naturally moves some people out of your target market. In a way, that’s a good thing. It means you know you won’t waste time with people who aren’t willing to be customers. At the end of the day though, this is a real challenge and you will have to work harder to find those people who are in your target market.
Speaking of, let’s talk marketing. While D&D has a lot of transferable skills that you can use in other areas of life, marketing is not one of them. You’ll become more creative playing D&D and learn to think outside the box which will help but the specific tactics of marketing (and sales to a much lesser extent) are things that D&D won’t really be able to help you with.
So as you decide to become a professional dungeon master you’ll need to also learn the crucial business skills of marketing and sales, otherwise finding clients won’t happen.
I know I use the word “value” but what I really mean here is “price”. When you tell people, “I charge XYZ per session,” you will get a range of responses. Some of those responses will be incredulous. “How could you expect someone to pay that much for one of your sessions?”
You’re going to need to be able to justify the price with the value that you bring. Do you give everyone custom minis? Do you help them build their homebrew world? What do you do that makes your experience unique and worth the price they pay?
When it comes to almost any endeavor, especially business, you need a fair degree of patience. Alex Hermozi has said that patience is just doing something productive while you wait. When it comes to finding clients and building your business as a professional dungeon master, you will absolutely need some patience.
I hate to be the bearer of hard-to-believe-and-accept new, but being a professional dungeon master doesn’t mean that you will get clients immediately. It doesn’t mean you’ll get clients at all. You have to work for it all and that means investing your intellect, your time, and your energy.
So I would recommend learning general business skills while you wait for clients. This includes marketing and sales, as well as how to network with other business owners. Remember, you’re a business owner, not just a dungeon master (that is of course unless you’ve been hired by some other company, in which case, congratulations).
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The next thing any prospective professional dungeon master needs to do is make sure their skill is up to snuff. This is likely the easiest and the most difficult one to do.
It’s easy because in most cases, you are good enough right now to be a professional dungeon master. If you’re reading this, it’s a better than even chance that you could provide a great D&D session for a paying customer.
That said, the chances that all of us are good enough to justify the prices we each want to change are fairly low. To charge the price you’ll need to charge to transition this from a side hustle to a full-time thing, you’ll need the skills of a master. If people are paying $500 a session for your games, then they need to be able to look back afterward and see how your experience was much better than one they could provide for themselves, about $500 better or more if possible.
That’s a high standard for sure. But the nice thing is, once you get to that level, your level of competition with other professional dungeon masters will theoretically reduce. So start building your skills!
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Anyone can be a dungeon master for free for their friends. If you don’t practice being a dungeon master before going pro, you’re likely making a big mistake. You’ll want to make sure you really enjoy doing it before you do it.
One way to gain experience and test out whether or not you’d enjoy the lifestyle of a professional dungeon master is to empty your after-day job schedule for an entire month. For that month, after work, you will only book professional dungeon master sessions. Next blast it out on social media and to all of your friends and family that you are now offering professional dungeon master services, and for the next month only, your services are completely free.
If everything goes according to plan, you’ll have at least a handful (depending on how much you tell people about it) of sessions, which should give you some great experience. You’ll also get a feel for how it feels to be a professional DM and whether or not you’d like it.
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Let’s now talk about the skills that a professional dungeon master would need. If you want more on the subject of skills a dungeon master needs you can check out our podcast episode about Dungeon Master Skills. For now, I’ll only touch on a few different skills.
As a dungeon master for hire, a big aspect of your business will be to have a full workload. That means volume.
In order to service as many groups as you’re going to need to service, you’ll need a lot of material and you’ll need simple processes. The fact of the matter is that you’ll need to get good at using source material to service the number of customers you’ll have.
This isn’t just the ability to read through source material and then regurgitate it in a soulless fashion. Instead, you’ll need to learn how to take in the material from sourcebooks, and then use that to inspire your campaign. While you can just run the pre-written campaigns as written, it’ll be a much better experience for your players as you adapt the game to them. This means you use the sourcebooks as a source to supplement your natural game creation abilities.
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Next to using the sourcebooks, you’ll need to become an excellent world builder and storyteller.
These are both different skills and the same.
To be a great storyteller, the world you weave with your words must be enticing, therefore have something new to the listener, but relatable, therefore have something familiar.
For most Dungeon Masters, the art of worldbuilding is why we became the DM. We wanted the god-like power of defining dynasties and creating cosmos.
But for the true master, they take it to the next step; storytelling.
Anyone can build a fun and interesting world.
But the true professional dungeon master knows how to create a world with interesting characters and, in the case of TTRPGs, facilitates the development of interesting characters (PC and NPC alike) within that interesting world.
Storytelling goes beyond what the world is like to what the characters do within that world and more importantly why. Storytellers know how to weave themes throughout their works so that, looking back, the players can think about what the current experience is telling them about the human experience. A good story takes you someplace and then brings you back to a different person.
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As I mentioned before, storytelling is about weaving a world to facilitate interesting character development. On one hand, that character development comes from the hands of your players.
They will create the PCs and drive their own stories.
On the other hand, your job is to create a world full of engaging NPCs who live and act in the world in normal and natural ways.
To be sure, there are throwaway characters. If the party enters a town they’ll never see again to talk to a barkeeper they’ll never meet again, you don’t necessarily need to make it the most compelling interaction. Sometimes you just need to do an errand and then proceed along your way.
Still, there is an argument to be made for never building bad habits and creating one-dimensional characters because you think they are throwaway characters that might build a pattern of laziness. After all, it’s the players who decide which characters are throwaway and which stick with the party forever.
So master the ability to craft compelling characters even with the minor cameos that any individual might have.
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At its core, a dungeon master is a manager of people. I don’t mean that the Dungeon Master is the boss of the group but instead does have to manage many inter-group relationships.
Things can get very complicated between people and from time to time, as the DM you’ll need to be able to handle complex group dynamics. Things that happen outside of the game can often affect the things that happen in the game, simply because there will always be bleed of the real world into the fantasy game.
Learn how to work with your party to investigate issues and then how to solve them in the right way.
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One of the hardest skills for any small business person to master is finding new clients. This is no different for a professional dungeon master. I’ve already talked about a couple of ways that you can start, and in a later section, I’ll dive a little bit deeper, but this skill is crucial.
If you can’t find clients, you won’t be a professional dungeon master, it’s as simple as that. In addition to everything else you’ll have read in this article, I just want you to think about one thing.
You have advantages. We all do. So use those advantages to your… well, advantage. What I mean by that is that you should take stock of what you have going for you and lean into that.
Do you spend a lot of time at your local game store? Use that. Put up fliers there (if allowed) or talk to the owner and see if they can help you out.
Do you have a large business network? That’s something you can take advantage of.
Think about what strengths you have and use them to the utmost.
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To a lesser extent, you’ll need to learn how to negotiate prices, contracts, and terms with clients. For most of your clients, you won’t need a contract. You’ll simply just send an invoice and they’ll pay it and it’ll be done.
For certain clients, you might need a particular contract stipulating the terms of the contract.
Regardless of the form of agreement, you’ll need to know how to advocate for yourself so that you get the best terms for you. In that process, you can’t push away clients so you’ll need to know how to navigate the negotiation of new deals.
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One of the biggest parts of becoming a Professional Dungeon Master is finding clients. As I said before, if you do not master this, you will not create a stable business.
Let me reiterate, in becoming a professional dungeon master, barring a few instances, you are building a business. You need to treat it like a business. You can’t look at it with the same eyes you would your normal dungeon mastering. You have to be deliberate and do things that are going to make a difference.
So let’s talk about some things you might try to find professional dungeon master clients.
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One of the first things you can try is to sign up for sites like https://startplaying.games/. These are essentially just listing sites where anyone can sign up as a professional dungeon master and start attracting clients.
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If you are going to try to use sites like Start Playing or Fiverr, consider reaching out to anyone who you’ve DM’d over the years and asking for a 5-star rating and review. The more reviews you can get overall the better.
You might also consider starting with lower prices and then slowly scaling up as you build a stronger reputation.
Lastly, consider offering a few people a trial session to jump-start your business.
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The simplest way to meet new clients is to go where they are and talk to them. Go to your local game store and ask the owner if it’s alright if you leave business cards or fliers offering your services. You could even ask them if they’d be alright partnering with you in some way. We Geek Together does this in their Provo store and it seems to work really well.
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First, get to know your local store owners and understand how their business works. Doing this will help you realize whether you can ask them about putting fliers up or even spreading the word about you.
Next, spend some time getting to know some of the regulars and just making sure you understand the culture of the store.
Then put up your fliers and business cards. Make sure to create some sort of start-up offer, like half price for the first 5 groups of something.
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The internet is a very powerful tool. You can use it to your advantage. Start by creating some sort of a platform (social media or a website) and then make sure to make the platform as good as it can be. For social media, this means you’ll need to create content that isn’t just promotional and is interesting to your target audience. For your website, you’ll need to learn how to showcase your offerings appealingly. Then you’ll need to learn how to leverage SEO (like what I’m doing with this blog), PPC, Email, and other channels. This is just general digital marketing at this point but because it is a business it is something you’ll need to do.
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At the very least, you should have some place where people can reach you directly. If you do intend to use this method, then pick one platform and go deep on it consistently for a long period of time. Don’t let shiny objects distract you. If you do Social Media, then do social media. If you do SEO then do SEO for a long time.
Spend some time every day working on it and also working on your skills so that you can get better at it. Be prepared for a very long time of work.
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Another method that you might consider is just directly contacting potential clients and offering your services. This is analogous to cold or warm calling someone and asking if they might be interesting. You’ll need some pretty good sales experience to do this as well as a very disciplined personality. You’ll get a lot of rejection.
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Try to reach out to people who would be willing to at least chat. Make a list of individuals who 1) have the expendable money to spend on DM services and 2) have at least some sort of need or interest. A good target would be managers at companies that might want to do team-building activities or things like that.
Then write down the script of how you will talk to them and what you will say. Make a list of objections and write down ways to overcome them.
Then start contacting. Make a practice of doing a certain amount consistently. Be patient with yourself.
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Rather than contacting people directly who might be interested, you ask people you know to contact those interested parties for you, or at least put you in contact.
Referrals are some of the best-converting leads.
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Create some sort of referral program to incentivize people to spread the word about you. Treat referrals as gold so that people know you’ll treat them right. Always always always ask for referrals.
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After you get clients you need to fulfill your services. To do that you’ll need a host of tools and resources, which could actually fill up an entire other blog post.
For this post, I’ll go over a couple that I’ve found to be useful. Because part of making this your full-time thing involves being able to scale things, I’ve found virtual dungeon mastering to be the way to go because it cuts down on drive time and set-up time on the day of. So with that, here are 2 useful tools for dungeon-mastering online games.
I have found Discord to be pivotal for Player-DM communication. It facilitates text chats and audio and video conferencing. It also is way better at both of those than most of the VTTs out there for some reason. Discord is a must and the best part is that it is FREE!
For me, I love to show maps and visual aids (I use Dungeon Alchemist which is so freaking cool!). Using a VTT allows the players and the DMs to essentially have minis and maps that they can all use and control together. There are a lot of VTTs and they all have different Bells and Whistles. One that I’ve been diving into lately is AboveVTT which is also nice because it integrates directly with DnDBeyond (you may or may not have opinions about that) but I like it most of all because it is also FREE!
Between these 2 tools, you can host any virtual D&D game for free. That said, when people pay for D&D games they expect to get a premier experience so at some point you will likely need to upgrade your setup. At the start though, these two will do.
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In addition to finding clients and fulfilling the services you offer them, a big part of being a dungeon master for hire is to make sure that your clients are happy.
For long-term campaigns, this means constant check-ins and always talking to your players. For one-shots and single sessions, it’s a little more difficult. You can’t fix a session if it didn’t go well.
So what I do is I send my players a feedback sheet in order to always make sure they can tell me what I’m doing wrong. It allows them to anonymously give me advice on how best to serve them.
In your business, you need to devise ways to help you know how you are doing for your games and how to best help your players. This will generally involve some sort of feedback mechanism to make sure you are doing right by your clients.
You may also need to devise some methods for making a client happy when they are decidedly not happy. Only you can decide what will make sense for you and what is worthwhile.
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To finish this article, I want to give some advice for DMs exploring becoming a Dungeon Master for Hire.
Let me preface this by saying that I am in no way a perfect DM. I am not even the best DM for hire. But I have some experience and hopefully, it can help you.
First of all, like any new business, it will take time. It will take time to get better and it will take time to have the ups and downs you need to have a thriving business. You’ll learn so much and you’ll gain so much experience. It will all be worth it, just don’t give up. Instead, adapt and learn how to tailor yourself to fit each situation.
Next, it will take commitment. You will likely have to give up some stuff and you will likely have to do things differently. Be willing to sacrifice what isn’t important to make what is important happen. You’ll see people who won’t believe in you, but as long as you work hard and believe in yourself, things will start to come about.
The last piece of advice is to not compare yourself. Don’t look at any other dungeon master, professional or otherwise, and make a comparison. The arithmetic isn’t fair because you don’t have all the data. If you look at someone ahead of you and think that you’ll never measure up, just stop. There are likely circumstances that you haven’t considered that are involved behind the scenes. Instead, look at yourself and see where you’ve come from and where you are going. That will give you the best measure of how you’re doing.
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Being a dungeon master for hire isn’t what it’s all cracked up to be. It’s not like the YouTube shows we see that we all love. But that’s how most things are. When you boil it down, it takes work and it’s like any other business. To be a successful professional dungeon master you need to learn how to be a great DM, how to attract clients, how to service those clients, and lastly how to keep them coming back. If you can learn to do all of that well, you’ll be a great professional dungeon master. If you’re looking for help along the way, feel free to rely on us here at Session 0 Studios. We have podcasts all about being a DM and also we offer Dungeon Master Coaching if you’re trying to figure out how to do it right. Overall, I just wish you the best of luck and hope that you can create the perfect professional dungeon-mastering business.
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