APOMAGIS

Be careful what you wish for ...

What is it they say?

Do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life.

Something like that. I hope this has been a true proverb for many. My personal experience hasn’t quite added much to the evidence for the affirmative, however ... and I don’t think I’m alone in this, particularly within the TTRPG community.

During the dark days of the pandemic my allied health job was first rendered redundant and then severely hampered. To fill the time, and the financial black hole, I began doing something that, as an old-school grognard, I really wasn’t comfortable with. I started playing D&D online. To my surprise it was actually pretty interesting ... a fresh, new way of playing. It didn’t take long before I wrapped my head around the basic technology well enough to start running games.

I even found a platform where people wanted to pay me. This was a ridiculous concept at first, but I figured maybe the world was changing in terms of lifestyle, priorities, and expectations. Fast forward about a year and suddenly I was making more money as a professional dungeon master than I was in my day job.

So ... what do I do?

I let that success convince me I could live the dream and turn my hobby into my job. I started fantasising about how amazing it would be to live and breathe TTRPGs 24/7 and pay the bills by doing so.

Not my best idea.

Allow me to elucidate on the key reasons why this fantasy may, in fact, be a mirage. Some of you will have had a very different experience and are loving life as a pro DM. Some of you are already thinking, “what an idiot ... what did you expect?” But many of you might find a little wisdom in my cautionary tale.

So, briefly, here’s why I stopped working as a game master after only two or three years.

Too much of a good thing. As a parent I often tell my son that if he has treats every day, they stop being treats. Playing a TTRPG had previously been a regular, special event in my life ... an act of escapism. Doing it all day, every day, rather takes the shine off that.

The evolution of Dungeons and Dragons. Fifth edition started out pretty well, but for my personal tastes it went south very quickly. A vast majority of online clients want to play the latest iteration of the most popular TTRPG in all its hybrid computer-game “glory” ... and I really, really don’t.

Online play will never replace in-person games. While it opened up a new way of playing, and during lockdown the only way of playing, for those of us of a certain generation the heart and soul of the hobby is still sitting around a snack-laden table with pencils, paper, and dice.

Imposter syndrome. After a while I simply couldn’t justify asking people to pay me to run a game. The whole thing started to feel wrong. What led me to become “one of those guys” was the mistaken belief that doing what you love for a job is always the ideal.

And finally, the money wasn’t what I imagined. Doubling the number of campaigns didn’t magically double the income. Instead I found myself putting in hours and hours of work for games that never quite took off, players who didn’t always turn up, and a dream that slowly began to sour.

It was kind of nice to have tried and failed though ...