Transcript: How to Create a DM For Hire Service for D&D (Part 3)
Part 1 can be found here: How to Create a DM For Hire Service for D&D (Part 1)
Pare 2 can be found here: How to Create a DM For Hire Service for D&D (Part 2)
So if you remember from Parts 1 &2 of the series on How to Create a DM For Hire Service for D&D, we imagine the fact that we have a blueprint. It helps us with pre-planning and ensuring that we’re always going to deliver a consistent experience for our players. When you do things that are consistent, and you have a baseline for how you’re going to run your DM for hire business, it is going to have the effect of paying players becoming return clients. They will want to come back for more. They will share with their friends and give you 5-star reviews. It will get existing players to attend more of your sessions.
This will be the first pass for you.
It’ll be your first draft as we are figuring things out here in the beginning. You will create a baseline, and then we’ll refine it as you gain more experience moving forward. We want to create an offer as part of your service. Something your ideal clients are going to find irresistible, without compromising your values. And those are some things that I’m talking about here in Part 3 today.
There are typically 3 struggles when building a DM for Hire Service.
- The first one concerns the elements are we will include in our paid sessions. That was covered in Part 1 a couple of weeks back. We covered what kind of elements should be included in your paid session. Elements being what do you bring to the actual experience for your players.
- The second struggle is having no way of being consistent. There’s that chaos in your mind and not being able to stay organized. In part two discussed how to approach that.
- Today we will address our last struggle, which concerns what we should to be charging for our services. This is something that is tied directly to the listing you will put out there for your game sessions. The listing that players will see that will bring them in for your paid game sessions. Knowing what your offer is actually going to be will give you confidence on what you’re going to charge. That’s we’re going to talk about today in part three of our series.
Our goal with “Building Your Service”
We want to take you from not knowing what elements you’re going to have, not having a consistent player experience, and not having confidence in what to charge. And turn that around so you know exactly what you’re bringing to the table. You will have consistent five-star reviews from all of your players. And a listing that is going to make you feel confident about what you’re charging for your fees. Let’s go ahead and start talking now about what we’re gonna do for building your offer.
There are 3 actions as a part the “Build Your Service”.
In Parts 1 and 2 of this series, we talked about action number 1. We talked about determining what our preferred setup is going to be.
- Part 1 we were talking about what elements are most important to us. And really, what we enjoy the most when we’re running a game. It is something that our players are going to notice, if we’re enjoying ourselves. They’ll enjoy themselves more if you’re having fun as well.
- Part 2 was creating working procedures. If you remember from that previous Action, working procedures will help to reign in all that chaos and disorganization. Getting out of your head and creating consistency. You will want to create that consistency of incredible experiences for your players.
- Arriving here at Part 3, we’re going to talk about how to build your DM for Hire offer.
There are several things that I will want you to have in place before you can put out that First DM For Hire listing.
- The first thing you want to think about and write down is what you’ve determined your values are. So you’re essentially going to want to make sure that you’ve laid out and determined your ground rules that you care about in your game sessions., You want to ask yourself, what are all the necessary and ideal rules that apply to your table? And I don’t mean game rules out of the handbook or the dungeon master’s guide. I’m talking about rules that you have specifically for your table.
- What’s allowed, what’s not allowed, what things are acceptable? What will you not tolerate? I want you to write all that down because those things are very important to know. Those things are going to be part of your offer, and what you’re going to put in your listing.
- Next let’s think about the attributes or characteristics of your ideal players. I don’t mean characteristics of the player characters, I mean, the actual players who are sitting at your table, the people who are paying to be at your session. What are some things that are important about them? For example, what level experience do they have? What do they bring to the game and how will you handle interactions with them? Do you have a certain preference for how they interact with each other? Or within the game itself?
Those are some things you need to think about. Do those players’ values match with what you care about and what you want at your table? Answering those two questions about values will tell you what’s most important to you. These are things that you care about when you have people gather around a table. As you will see, these values end up being highlighted in your offer.
Once you’ve determined these values, the next thing you want to think about is how to handle onboarding players into your game sessions.
What steps will you take to get player characters integrated into your game world? This includes things like, what’s the backstory going to be for the character? How are they going to work with the overall group? How do they interact with the other characters? Do they have secrets, for example, or other things that need to be integrated into the overall story that you’re trying to tell? Are there some character introductions that need to happen in a Session Zero if it’s a long campaign?
Let’s have a quick recap here.
- First, you want to write down what your values are, what your rules are, what your what’s acceptable, not acceptable at your table.
- The second thing I talked about is what your actual player’s attributes are. How are they going to come to the table? What experience level do they have? Do you want players who are goodie-goodie? Or do you care if people are crude?
- The next thing you’re talking about here is player onboarding. So how are you going to handle bringing their characters into the game world and integrating them in. So those things y’all got to think about. These are important because they will be compiled together into the listing for your paid sessions.
In the interest of making your listing look as attractive as possible.
For your ideal players, we’re essentially going to build an offer. It’s an offer you will put into this listing. In the eyes of your ideal players, they’re gonna see this as an offer. It’s an offer they can take you up on if they want to participate in your game. Let’s talk about essential things that you want to include in this offer. In marketing terminology, an offer is something that people will see as equal value for the exchange of dollars they’re going to give you. That’s why I want you to think of it in terms of an offer because that’s what it has to be in order for them to want to pay you money.
Since your listing will be an offer, you’re gonna want to include all the basics about your game.
You want to list what the game system is including the edition. Let’s say D&D 5th Edition, for example. You’re going to describe what your DM style is, what themes and expectations a player is going to expect when they join, and where they’re going to integrate their character into your sessions.
More importantly, you will want to give your ideal players a reason why they will want to pay to play in your game, and why that’s the best choice for them. This is why it is important you have your ground rules finalized along with the elements that you’re going to use in your game session. All three of the actions we have covered are important. Combine them together when you’re putting together your offer.
You also need to include some extras.
These can be some bonuses or benefits that players will get when they join your session. That’s where you make the offer irresistible shine by adding some things that they wouldn’t expect. Will you share access to resources like published material that they don’t have access to? Will they get a free session zero (if you’re going to do one of those)? There are a lot of other options that can make this an attractive offer. I want you to choose some of those things that you feel will fit best for your offer.
So those are all the pieces that we have here in the last step of our build your service actions. And this one’s a little bit shorter, but I just wanted to separate them out into three separate actions, so that you can take in a little bit at a time and, you know, write down your thoughts and ideas for each of these as you go. So that concludes the third action, and our build your service series.
Putting together your offer like this is just one of the actions of building your service.
We have three actions here we talked about before. And you know, the builder service itself is just one step in a clear 9 Step roadmap, that dungeon master used in our program. This is a program that I’ve created for DM For Hire business in 90 days or less. In the program outline, this is just Step 6 in a larger overall strategy.
Before we sign off, you are invited to the upcoming 5-day Challenge!
We call it the “Get paid to run D&D Challenge”. Imagine getting a paid listing up and ready to take bookings in just five short days. Sounds kind of cool, right? It’s coming up in the next month or so. If you’re interested to find out more about that challenge, click this link:
https://go.dungeonmavericks.com/3stepdmpack
The link is going to take you to a page where you can grab a free download called the “3 Step DM Adventure Pack”. And when you scroll down a little bit further, you will see a yellow section where you can sign up to get notified when the challenge is open for registration.
You can also join us in our free Facebook Group here: https://www.facebook.com/groups/dungeonmavericksguild
That’s it for Part 3 of our “Build Your Service” series. I hope this post has been helpful and I look forward to seeing you in our Facebook community!
