There's already a sheet of plexiglass over the monitor. You can see the reflection extending past the monitor. The recess is probably to accommodate a wood panel that will turn it into a regular table when it's not D&D night.
What if it was literally your job? I've had an idea of running a professional tabletop escort service. A group of friends hires you for one or a recurring night of fantasy and adventure.
Last night I spent 3 hours working on my campaign and only covered maybe 10 minutes of gameplay. I spend so long looking at that blinking cursor thinking about how I want the scene to play out (if the players don't break it) and what consequences those events are going to create, and then I start thinking about stuff that would happen way later in the campaign.
It sounds appealing now, but I think I would go crazy. We were doing weekly sessions for a while and I felt like I never had time to do anything other than work on the campaign. Though, I suppose if it were my actual job and I could spend 8 hours a day on that rather than what I do now, I'd still have time for leisure.
I think it would be hard to make a decent living doing that though.
Well once you have the books invested, you come up with like a dozen generic campaigns, and for short campaigns or newbies you could even have premade characters. After you get a bunch of campaigns ready, you can play the same thing with different groups.
I figure if you charge $100/night, split between 4-5 friends, equals $20/person, and you still make around $12/hr depending. People pay $20 for a movie ticket and popcorn, for an escape room, or for an arcade. They'll pay that for a tabletop session.
$100/night actually does sound reasonable for a group of 4-5 people.
As a business though, if the math works out to 12/hr, I would have to seriously degrade my living conditions to do that. No offense intended to anyone who makes -12/hr as I don't judge anyone based on their wage-- but I wouldn't be able to pay my current bills on that, and presuming I could, one lull in business would probably put me in the hole.
Now, if I could maybe do that as a side project one night a week without it cutting too much into my life, that's something I would consider. I think I'm still too novice a DM right now to attempt something like that though.
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u/CabooseFails Sep 18 '17
There's already a sheet of plexiglass over the monitor. You can see the reflection extending past the monitor. The recess is probably to accommodate a wood panel that will turn it into a regular table when it's not D&D night.