i thought about this at some point (i enjoy game mastering and have a lot of campaigns i've written up in notebooks and so on), but I can't see any way to make this actually work. Assume you can run one session a night, for five players each session. It's unlikely you'd be able to run more than one per day, just because your players only are really able to play in the evening. This puts your effective work week at around 20-25 hours.
You would need to have a really high hourly rate to make this a primary source of income, and I'm not sure you can ask players to pay more than 20-30 bucks each per session. You could use this to supplement income from writing or whatever, but I just doubt the market would support an hourly rate that actually paid a GM a wage they could live on.
In some real way, this is just like hand-knit socks. If you knit socks, you know how much time and effort goes into them, but you still give them as gifts. But if someone wanted to buy a pair, would they be willing to pay $150 for them? Probably not, despite the socks often taking five or six hours to make (if they're intricate or interesting).
Similarly, I game master because I enjoy it. I get to play my favorite part of the game (storytelling). I will say: I'd pay to have someone else deal with the (rare, but still nonzero frequency) drama that happens when you bring six people together on the regular. As GM, it somehow ends up being me who has to referee.
You would need to have a really high hourly rate to make this a primary source of income, and I'm not sure you can ask players to pay more than 20-30 bucks each per session. You could use this to supplement income from writing or whatever, but I just doubt the market would support an hourly rate that actually paid a GM a wage they could live on.
In some real way, this is just like hand-knit socks. If you knit socks, you know how much time and effort goes into them, but you still give them as gifts. But if someone wanted to buy a pair, would they be willing to pay $150 for them? Probably not, despite the socks often taking five or six hours to make (if they're intricate or interesting).
Similarly, I game master because I enjoy it. I get to play my favorite part of the game (storytelling). I will say: I'd pay to have someone else deal with the (rare, but still nonzero frequency) drama that happens when you bring six people together on the regular. As GM, it somehow ends up being me who has to referee.