DnD Empire Time!

I have another idea. I am a talented Dungeons and Dragons DM. I want to start a company on meetup.com that sells tickets to a DnD game for only $10. I could have four open seats per game to actually make this worth my time. And I'll host a game once a week.

Problematically, most people would rather just play Mass Effect or watch Netflix, which they can do all month long for the cost of a single game. That's why I set the price so low.

But ok. Let's say this works, and I want to expand to actually make enough money to live on, instead of less than the cheapest rent in my area per month. Now I have to split my earnings with a professionally trained DM, and I figure I have to pay him at least about $15/hour, since being a DM requires intelligence. (He's basically a story-teller.) Anything less, and how am I going to attract people who can research campaigns, memorize characters, environments, and regulate individual player experiences? It needs to be fun, and this individual must also possess good social skills.

I make about that much an hour delivering pizza. So it's not like he has no where else to go.

Games last 2 hours. Now I'm making $10/week/game, minus cost of supplies, marketing, and other corporate expenditures. I'll probably need at least about 20 games/week to make enough to live on. That's too big to start out. How will I account for all the logistical contingencies? In order to initiate this company and slowly grow it, I'll either have to charge more or pay the DM's less. Perhaps I can find DM's who will do this for free just because they like it and claim all my earnings as suggested donations, until I grow large enough...

(That's how the corporate system works. I may make small margins, but with a league including thousands of players, where N = league size and N/4 * 10 = expected weekly earnings + cost of materials, with a large enough N, I can make bank! Unfortunately, most people aren't that nerdy, so my entire target audience for recruitment into my league in this area probably doesn't justify creating the company.)

Mem: Find a way to brainwash people into loving DnD. Stupid Christians. Ted Haggard can go fuck himself in his own ass. That would enlarge the target audience. It's called "marketing," and it basically means creating your own demand.

Note: I'm bitching about this, but I still haven't given up on it! I WILL make DnD America's new favorite pastime! Fuck baseball.

Update: I just printed this out, and I'm about to drive over to the game store to see if I can work with them to do the marketing and make this happen.