The idea of dealing with players who think they’re a paying ‘customer’ always gets a legit, IRL, full-body shudder out of me when this comes up.

Yeah. I think we have problems with players and staff viewing the games as transactional when are meant to be reciprocal, and making them literally transactional would make it worse.

Would you personally PAY for a STed experience?

Yes. I would be willing to pay a nominal fee or even a subscription to play games that I enjoy that other people have worked hard to provide.

@Yam said in Paid Role-Playing:

Would this concrete exchange make things easier for you

Probably not.

@Yam said in Paid Role-Playing:

or would it be antithetical to the concept of collaborative writing?

Definitely not.

@Third-Eye said in Paid Role-Playing:

The idea of dealing with players who think they’re a paying ‘customer’ always gets a legit, IRL, full-body shudder out of me when this comes up.

I also have no solutions to this.

There’s part of me that wouldn’t be surprised if there were people in the hobby that paid other people to build their character’s wiki pages.

I could be getting paid for this?

That said, I wouldn’t be opposed to games supporting themselves through some ad revenue through banner ads or whatever. It’s only going to keep getting more expensive to buy the machines you need to play, the storage space, the servers to run them on, etc.

I’ve considered a tip jar in the past, but I think that has a lot of the same problems. But some kind of mostly-passive income stream like other sites use? Probably not a terrible idea.

The only reason I do my own is that templates exist if you do some quick google-fu.

Once I was supposed to get paid to TS people on a pay-to-TS-people MOO.

no one will be shocked to learn i have TSed (and done peoples descs) for pay

it isn’t really a thing that exists anymore to the best of my knowledge because the entire “MU Community” is like 30 people with worsening joint pain but it’s rampant on discord, where it’s almost exclusively kids getting paid by predators, and Roblox, where it IS exclusively kids getting paid by predators

In theory, if I did not have a job, wasn’t burnt out, and thought it might work; I’d consider running some sort of pay-me-to-GM for you scheme. But it would have to have strict rules on what the money was exchanging hands for. And that is … something I don’t even know where I’d start with the rules. I also wouldn’t be comfortable doing it while working a full time job, because I’d want to provide something professional that was worth the money I was receiving for it, and that then becomes a case of “would this even be enough to pay my bills” type of question.

All of that theory aside, I rarely ask anything of other people that I’m not willing to do myself. So, if I’m not willing to pay for someone to GM for me… It would feel bad to me to be willing to be paid to GM for someone else.

I think there are ways that it could work for the people who have the funds for it-- like people who pay for D&D. But it wouldn’t be something for me personally.

a pay-to-TS-people MOO

Like one of those sexy time chat lines that were so popular in the 90s, advertised on late-night TV?

I used to ask players to donate to certain charities, but also made it clear that I wouldn’t know if they did.

I suppose you might monetise a MU by allowing connections only from a website with adverts.

I agree with Pyre tho. I’m not generally averse to paying for products I enjoy but if the MU I am playing on is a product it’s going to change my expectations. Then again I’ve probably spent more money for less satisfaction by buying stupid shit on phone games over the years, so… who knows.

In practice, though, it would raise my standards for what I expected in return to the point where I’d want a professional product, as opposed to the hobbyist arrangements we have now.

This is exactly why I would be uncomfortable making any kind of “pay to play” mechanism. It’s one thing to ask people to chip in for the collective costs of something they’re using. In RL, a club that needs to rent a venue might ask members to chip in to cover those costs. Likewise, I see nothing wrong with a MU having a tip jar or something for folks to help defray the server costs. But as soon as you start charging more than the costs, you’ve turned it from a community club into a profit-making venture, and that just feels different.

In practice, though, it would raise my standards for what I expected in return to the point where I’d want a professional product, as opposed to the hobbyist arrangements we have now. And I doubt that’s sustainable with a persistent online world on a price point where I’d feel comfortable signing up. (It works fine in tabletop, because you schedule your time, you outline what the parameters are going to be, etc. But with a persistent setting, you need to guarantee, for example, that a player in the UK or China is going to get the same quality of experience as one on the East Coast of the US, which means GMs guaranteed to run relevant plots at those times, etc. And MUDs probably have an advantage because many/most systems are automated.)

But…I dunno. I think it would depend a lot on the experience and value that was offered, how trustworthy I considered the person offering it, and what the cost was.

If there’s ever an overage, I’ve promised to use the excess money for nice things for the game, such as art commissions.

I certainly wouldn’t pay for the privilege of playing. I would, however, not object to making a regular donation to support the game’s financial running costs. If I liked the game enough to care whether it stays up or not.

But most game runners I know are wary of accepting such kindness as it can often come with the perceived problems, as regaled above, about pay to win or other kinds of bias.

ETA: Which is, I think, basically exactly the same as what mietze said above.

For awhile, a WOD game I was on had a tip jar that actually worked, but it was because the cost of running the game was relatively high, while the ask and the reward were clear and specific.

Kick in… I think it was $2? towards server costs a month and you got a very tantalizing XP. One whole XP! As a thank you. Anything above and beyond the cost of the server was explicitly stated to be beer money for the game admin and coder. Bear in mind, though, that this was a game that also involved having a fairly expensive DigiChat license. The cost of that license was a big part of why that type of game was rare and, even with the tip jar, they didn’t break even on the costs for most months of the year. From my understanding, people were (perhaps surprisingly) actually not dicks as a result, especially because the game owner was fairly explicit about what was coming in and what was going out.

With the cost of an Ares server being $12 a month, though? I honestly forget I have one open half the time.

But most game runners I know are wary of accepting such kindness as it can often come with the perceived problems, as regaled above, about pay to win or other kinds of bias.

ETA: Which is, I think, basically exactly the same as what mietze said above.

I’m not going to yuck another’s yum, but my RL money for bills has enough people trying the, “I pay your salary, you will do what I say” mentality. I don’t want it in my hobby free time.

Just my two cents.

I think though that it would be a burden to most folks who aren’t used to it. And I totally understand why some people wouldn’t. I love it when I get the opportunity to chip in for things though. And while I think (?) most people who know me would be willing to believe I did not expect special treatment or pressure them at all, I think that would be hard for many people to accept from strangers, and I wouldn’t want to cause someone more stress or see them have to deal with people who might say no pressure but would very much have expectations.

It’s hard for people even to maintain garden variety staffing boundaries/expectations, I think that only increase exponentially when money is involved.

I shudder to imagine “pay to win” applied to storytelling.

That’s just James Patterson’s later career, isn’t it?

That said, I’m pretty sure there were some monetized games in the early 90s that were more RP-oriented. Maybe they were closer to RPIs. I think Otherspace had some things you could pay for? Or maybe it was just a patreon style tip jar? It’s been forever, and I was only there briefly, so apologies if I’m misremembering.