At my local Con's (KublaCon and DunDraCon), the Registration Fee is $50 for up to 4 days of gaming (typically Fri night, all Sat, all Sun, till noon on Monday), and there are no Table Fee's (some LARP's do have a fee, but it's usually VERY minimal).

Assuming 6 games within that time at $6 a pop ($36 total), even if Reg. Fee's were $15, I'd be paying more for a weekends worth of gaming than the flat fee.

...and if I wanted to do something other than game at a Con, I'd go to Comic-Con instead.

We are lucky here in the UK as the only con I know that charges players to play a game [other than the disastrous GenCon UK] is Conception.
They do not have an entry fee though and collect all the money made from the game tickets for charity, a total of £13,279.95 last year.

All other cons charge an entry fee but nothing extra to play games.

Quote from: Novastar;457376At my local Con's (KublaCon and DunDraCon), the Registration Fee is $50 for up to 4 days of gaming (typically Fri night, all Sat, all Sun, till noon on Monday), and there are no Table Fee's (some LARP's do have a fee, but it's usually VERY minimal).

For GameCon Memphis we crunched a bunch of data from other Cons' publicly available information, including these two Cons, and that's what I'm talking about. Table Fees at smaller Cons actually drive more people away than make up for the lost income from Reg Fees.

Quote from: mxyzplk;457184It's a well known and understood business method - if you offer an event for free, RSVPs aren't worth crap. And with something like a game con (or tech class, or...) you really need to be able to plan on the numbers.  So you charge a nominal fee, and that weeds out (most) of the rubes. You go from RSVPs being 10% accurate to being 80% accurate.

Just going to say that this is common practice in other business types too. I used to run a language school in Japan (and run one now in Hungary too). As a promotion, we used to offer free demo lessons to anyone who wanted; all they had to do was sign up on our website and show up. Attendance rate of people signing up and actually appearing was just over 10%. So, in effect, I wasted my teacher's time and the school's money.

Then one of our secretaries got the idea to charge for it. A nominal fee in Japanese terms (1000 yen). Suddenly attendance rates for the demo lessons went up to over 75%, and of those, about 1/3 eventually signed up for actual lessons. The little money at least paid for the teacher's time, and the eventual signs up were good, obviously.

Never did a survey on it, but I'll guess that with the service being free, no one cared too much. Charge them a bit, and the ones who bother to pay and come are actually serious about it, even for such small money. Which means quite a few would eventually take classes.

So, matches your numbers a bit.

Asking to help cover the costs of your photocopying at a con is one thing; but there are, every few years, some guy on the forum or in real life that is utterly convinced he can make a go of running a "GM for Pay" business.  Often when they find themselves out of work and don't want to look for a real job.

It never ends well.

RPGPundit

Curiousity gets the better of me...

The US poverty line for a single person is $10,890 (per 2011 data).

Now, assuming you spend one day prepping for every day gaming, and take one day off per week for personal time (i.e. go to church, get groceries, laundry, family, etc).

Assume the average table size of 6. Each game is 8 hours in length.

A movie ticket is about $10 for two hours entertainment. So we'll assume you sell yourself at $5/hour, per person (which I think is a HUGE stretch).

52 weeks in a year, but you give yourself a 2-week vacation.

6 people * 8 hours * $5 an hour * 3 sessions/week * 50 weeks = $36,000 a year

So...I guess if you can GM like a fricking machine, and convince people to pay you like they were going to a movie or theatre production for a (typically free) gaming session, you could make a decent, if not spectactular, living.

In my experience Games are 4 to 5 hours in length. Also, most Gamers are cheap bastards(myself included) and aren't going to be paying that much to play a RPG every week.

Part of the draw of Table Top RPGs(from my point of view) is that you spend $20 to $50 on a RPG and get years of play out of it...

I wouldn't want to pay a GM any more than I would want to hire an escort to go out to dinner with me. There are some things I think would be messed up by the very presence of a wage for it.

Yea, for me gaming is about hanging out with your friends. As in "Demented and Social, but Social..."

I wouldn't want to pay to be able to hangout with someone. As a GM, I want people to play in my game because they like me and my game, not because they are paying for entertainment...

Quote from: Cole;457978I wouldn't want to pay a GM any more than I would want to hire an escort to go out to dinner with me. There are some things I think would be messed up by the very presence of a wage for it.

I bet if you could combine the two it would be awesome.

Quote from: Aos;458012I bet if you could combine the two it would be awesome.

I'm not a betting man.

This thread reminds me of KODT. In the background of KODT the character Brian used to GM for pay. He was so good as a GM that he ran games 6 nights a week. He ran the same scenario for 6 different groups. He had everyone involved sign a NDA that stated that the different groups couldn't talk about an adventure until after all the groups had gone through it. I think the story was that he GM'ed Tues through Sundays and all the groups would get together on Monday nights to compare notes and tell stories.

He did it until he burnt out on GMing...