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Tipping is an American affectation
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Jul 9, 2019 05:04
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Lurdiak posted:Jesus remind me never to hang out with any of you skinflints. This is going better than the time someone posted on this subforum about their paid GM and how everyone in the group was happy enough with the paid GM to keep paying them and several people melted down at the audacity of this.
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Jul 9, 2019 05:04
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I've made $400 to run a session, looks like I gotta step up the game a little.
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Jul 9, 2019 05:08
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Nuns with Guns posted:This is going better than the time someone posted on this subforum about their paid GM and how everyone in the group was happy enough with the paid GM to keep paying them and several people melted down at the audacity of this. I remember that. It was a big kerfuffle. People acted like it was an affront against God.
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Jul 9, 2019 05:14
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if the Business Week is running an article about the monetization of social rot, the proper response isn't to talk about pegging the appropriate market value, it's to reject the seeping neoliberalism that seeks to commodify every last bit of time and effort and leisure that we have left
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Jul 9, 2019 05:20
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people wouldnt need to turn everything into a Gig or a Hustle if one job paid enough to live on these days
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Jul 9, 2019 05:24
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gradenko_2000 posted:if the Business Week is running an article about the monetization of social rot, the proper response isn't to talk about pegging the appropriate market value, it's to reject the seeping neoliberalism that seeks to commodify every last bit of time and effort and leisure that we have left That battle was lost a long time ago. As long as the cancer capitalism exists, we need to accept it eventually sleeping will be comodotized.
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Jul 9, 2019 05:24
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Covok posted:That battle was lost a long time ago. As long as the cancer capitalism exists, we need to accept it eventually sleeping will be comodotized. preach!
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Jul 9, 2019 05:28
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If we're going to be honest, paid GM exists because our corporate overlords ensure we are not paid enough to live so we have to scrounge a dollar anyway we can. Unless there is a revolution of workers, that ain't changing.
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Jul 9, 2019 05:36
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For the last couple years I’ve run a weekly 5E game which became, somewhat unexpectedly, a paid gig. For context, these are 3-hour sessions for a group of homeschooled tweens and teens, one of whom is on the autism spectrum with ADHD. Given how distractible, rambunctious, and unpredictable these kids can be, we can’t run anywhere near as much combat as D&D anticipates, and I end up running it in a more improvisational style for most sessions out of sheer necessity. As a result, I prep significantly less than I would for a group of adults who are playing the way 5E’s system assumes you will play. Knowing what I know now, if someone approached me and offered $50 per person per session to run a “real” game of D&D 5E for adults that consisted of anything more than running something straight out of a module, I would make the sign of the cross and run. xiw is right, this is a performance gig combined with between-session creative work, and for someone who’s going to your office and running an RPG for strangers, $500 per session is absolutely undercharging.
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Jul 9, 2019 05:36
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Lurdiak posted:Jesus remind me never to hang out with any of you skinflints. Is it bad that the most I've ever individually tipped is like 5 bucks and usually I only tip 2 or 3 bucks? I do have the sorta excuse that except for a couple month period last summer I've never had gainful employment and the only reason I have any money at all is because I get Social Security benefits, so my finances are normally extremely limited
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Jul 9, 2019 05:38
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Covok posted:That battle was lost a long time ago. As long as the cancer capitalism exists, we need to accept it eventually sleeping will be comodotized. 5e D&D you say?
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Jul 9, 2019 05:43
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The D&D group in my city that sets up a bunch of game nights (newbie night, one-shot nights, ongoing campaign nights, etc.) has started to charge entry fees for everything because of pitiful attendance rates versus number of online RSVPs. Like 24 slots for an event with a wait list a few dozen long but people either ghost or cancel at the last minute in great enough numbers that we're lucky to even have half the expected numbers... even with people who didn't RSVP showing up to try to get in. I get that poo poo happens when you're an adult but when the $5 entry fee was tried for a newbie night it had 100% attendance - 24/24 people. My guess is that a lot of the people who have a passing "oh let's try that game I saw in a TV show/Youtube video/internet stream" thought and slam the RSVP button are going to rather do anything else when the time comes, and there's no opportunity cost to just say gently caress it and go drinking with friends or whatever. But having to put a few dollars on the line filters for the more serious people. Or maybe it's a extension of the phenomenon that causes people to return their shopping cart to the proper place just because a quarter is on the line. I've seen the fees of tens of dollars per session for Roll20 games that Spiteski mentioned and I think that's either a little much to filter out flakes or greatly undervaluing your labour if you're doing it as a service. But as a service rather than as part of a hobby, $500 doesn't sound so crazy given how it takes several hours of preparation per single hour of gameplay to provide a good game. The question I have is, how good does the DM need to be for that kind of fee to not feel like you got cheated afterward?
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Jul 9, 2019 05:52
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BattleMaster posted:The question I have is, how good does the DM need to be for that kind of fee to not feel like you got cheated afterward? A small part of me wants to pay for one of those roll20 sessions just to find out what that is getting you. Like how much work and character is being put into getting people into these games. They all seem like they do one shots or premades or are targeting new players. So I wonder what a paid campaign actually functions like.
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Jul 9, 2019 06:07
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as someone who used to get paid an exorbitant amount to stand at a table and deal blackjack, not only will I accept payment for DMing I will also encourage tipping is what I would say if I lived in a part of the country where there is any demand for tabletop poo poo
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Jul 9, 2019 06:46
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Lunatic Sledge posted:as someone who used to get paid an exorbitant amount to stand at a table and deal blackjack, not only will I accept payment for DMing I will also encourage tipping People getting paid for GMing is something I still chuckle at but am fine with but needing to tip someone for their work is some 3rd world country nonsense.
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Jul 9, 2019 07:02
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If you've ever been to a con game you've paid someone to GM
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Jul 9, 2019 07:23
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I don't think I would ever pay someone to GM but I do not understand why people would care if someone else does
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Jul 9, 2019 07:34
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i'll gm a game for google but they probably aren't going to like my themes of toppling technology powered empires that overwork their people with communism
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Jul 9, 2019 08:39
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do you think a druid has ever died from eating chocolate and then turning into a wolf?
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Jul 9, 2019 08:40
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Flavivirus posted:I’m still working through it but Empress of Forever is really good - queer and female-led sci-fi that’s fun and adventurous and imaginative, like Guardians of the Galaxy with significantly more lesbians. She's definitely picking it up but it'd be nice to know going in. LatwPIAT posted:and I guess some of Charles Stross' female-led books are generally decent and look it took me two series to run out of female authors. >_> Jeffrey of YOSPOS posted:The Traitor Baru Cormorant Plutonis posted:Have you tried looking at Xianxia novels? There's a real big rear end amount of good ones with decently written female MCs. Anyone I haven't replied to specifically thanks for the recommendations! Craft, ancillary, discworld, and barrayar are in the read or reading piles, the rest are going on the to read pile.
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Jul 9, 2019 10:28
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Splicer posted:How plot centric is the lesbianism? She very much wants to read about space lesbians, but in that she wants to read about them being cool people doing cool things in cool places while their gender and sexual preferences take up approximately the same page space and plot importance as it does for Miles Vorkosigan, if not less. The main character is a Chinese-American female gay Tony Stark-alike who gets pulled into weird future hijinks, there's a couple of female love interests so far, but the plot is mainly her working out what this weird future is like, if she can trust the people she's ended up working with, and if she can get one over on the titular quasi-divine Empress of Forever and get back to Earth.
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Jul 9, 2019 10:38
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Flavivirus posted:The main character is a Chinese-American female gay Tony Stark-alike who gets pulled into weird future hijinks, there's a couple of female love interests so far, but the plot is mainly her working out what this weird future is like, if she can trust the people she's ended up working with, and if she can get one over on the titular quasi-divine Empress of Forever and get back to Earth.
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Jul 9, 2019 10:58
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Splicer posted:I personally gave up on Charles Stross after the laundry files book where after various sequences of shrill malevolent incompetent harpies he finally had a competent female authority figure somewhere in the chain of command above the main charact oh wait no she's evil too. Did he get better? I was actually thinking more of Singularity Sky, Neptune Brood and especially Rule 34 and Halting State, which all have decent female protagonists, but the Laundry Files does get better. He introduces a few more female characters to the main cast and lets them have stories or books of their own, and stops writing middle manage into his books as literally Satan. Like Stross definitely has issues when it comes to how he writes female characters on the whole, but sometimes I just really appreciate, like, burned-out lesbian Edinburgh police officer investigating 419 scammers while trying to rekindle her relationship with her polyamorous bisexual ex? I can't guarantee Mrs Splicer will appreciate these books but it was difficult to come up with more than two suggestions. 
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Jul 9, 2019 11:29
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How about N.K.Jemisen?
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Jul 9, 2019 11:50
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Splicer posted:Any specific Xianxia suggestions? And she would not enjoy Kumo I mean I don't know what you're talking about. Peerless Alchemist should be worth checking out, though it is also an isekai since the titular character dies in a modern world and wakes up as a different person in a different world/time. All about martial arts, politics, and a somewhat complicated love interest that combines the two.
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Jul 9, 2019 14:26
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Covok posted:That battle was lost a long time ago. As long as the cancer capitalism exists, we need to accept it eventually sleeping will be comodotized. https://thumped.com/bbs/threads/the-penny-hang-a-viable-accommodation-option-nowadays.63903/
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Jul 9, 2019 15:20
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Humbug Scoolbus posted:https://thumped.com/bbs/threads/the-penny-hang-a-viable-accommodation-option-nowadays.63903/ Goddamn! That's vile.
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Jul 9, 2019 15:22
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There were varying levels too https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_penny_coffin Note, this was started by the Salvation Army,
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Jul 9, 2019 15:23
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Humbug Scoolbus posted:There were varying levels too You know, sometimes I think I'm an extremist. But then I realize the world is extreme and I'm the only sane one.
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Jul 9, 2019 15:29
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Andrast posted:I don't think I would ever pay someone to GM but I do not understand why people would care if someone else does Like, not even "pay the tickets for a game run at GenCon" level?
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Jul 9, 2019 15:37
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gradenko_2000 posted:if the Business Week is running an article about the monetization of social rot, the proper response isn't to talk about pegging the appropriate market value, it's to reject the seeping neoliberalism that seeks to commodify every last bit of time and effort and leisure that we have left Yeah! I've had people ask me if I ever considered becoming a chef. gently caress no! I just want to cook good food and then eat it. I don't want to make it my job. Same for playing games. I just like playing them, and sometimes even writing about them, but I don't want to be a games journalist or whatever. Capitalism wants to keep me underemployed so they don't have to give me benefits or promotions? gently caress those greedy asses, but I'm still going to enjoy my free time, and not feel obligated to turn it into money.
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Jul 9, 2019 16:50
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People, I think, can easily feel either frustrated (why are they being paid for work I do for free, for fun?) or as though they're being criticized (are they saying I should be paying my GM friend for GMing?) because the way it's framed the GM isn't doing anything different from the usual. But, y'know, being a party entertainer is really different from hanging out with friends and rolling dice. I personally think the only real issue with these GMs being paid to run games for strangers is that they should be offering more indie games for GMing, because that would be a real service to the hobby at large. If people started insisting 'you should be paying your GM' I'd find that more worrying in terms of creeping neoliberalism, and I don't disagree that the way this is written about implies that kind of commodification, but that doesn't seem like a real danger.
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Jul 9, 2019 17:17
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Splicer posted:Thanks for all the recommendations! Oh one last bit of book chat, did your wife ever read the Wicked Years series? A chunk of the first book Wicked was very loosely adapted to the musical Wicked. Elphaba/The Wicked Witch of the West is one of the strongest and most compelling leads I've read in a long time. She's only a POV character for the majority of the first book, since that's the one that covers her origin and fate, with the rest of the series mostly following the ripples of her life. But there are plenty of other compelling female and male PoV characters. It even does an interesting job of visiting a few characters in various stages of their lives. It's okay to also just stop at Wicked, I know a bunch of people who couldn't stand the second book's primary POV character, since the main theme is the character who may or may not be her failson attempting to reconcile his connections to her legacy. The third book felt even rougher to read, since this time the main POV character is "The cowardly lion, but his cowardice is a lack of all conviction" so you're constantly seeing the inner thoughts of a character choosing the easy way out and hating himself for it and vowing to be better, then doing the exact same thing again while other characters suffer for it. It has a payoff, but not one you're gonna see coming or that you're going to know to soldier through the story for.
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Jul 9, 2019 18:06
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I read the first two books and enjoyed them while they were going but was always really frustrated by the vague, ambiguous non-endings. I'm not saying this is necessarily a good criticism of the books, the abruptness and open-endedness may have been the point, it's just something that frustrated me at the time.
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Jul 9, 2019 18:41
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theironjef posted:Like, not even "pay the tickets for a game run at GenCon" level? I don't particularly like playing RPGs with people who aren't my friends so not really
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Jul 9, 2019 18:49
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Sherri S. Tepper wrote a series, starting with the novel Grass, with a female protagonist. I recall enjoying it; it's nominally science fiction, with some horror elements, a bit of surrealness, and themes focusing on religion, submission, ethical responsibilities or the lack thereof, abandonment, power structures, and dysfunctional human relationships. I'm also a big fan of C.J. Cherryh, a prolific female author of SF and fantasy novels. Her women characters are excellent, including both protagonists and villains and a lot of characters who sit in the grey areas between. The wikipedia article about her themes I think a good place to start is with her Chanur novels, which follow an alien ship's captain and crew (the Hani are based very heavily in appearance and behavior on lions) with most of the story written from the perspective of Hilfy Chanur, the female captain of an all-female crew (their society is essentially matriarchal, albeit not exactly in the way a human society could be). Early Cherryh, this series is delightful and fun and loaded with truly excellent aliens, some of whom are almost reasonably understandable (the chanur, the mahendo'sat), some are fairly inscrutable, and some (the methane-breathers) are so bizarre that the best you can do is mostly try to avoid them. I've re-read this series a couple of times, it's really great. You could also try her hugo-award-winning Downbelow Station, although IIRC that's not specifically a single female protagonist, I think the book jumps around between a handful of protagonists some of whom are men. That's set in her expansive Alliance-Union Space setting, which includes a couple dozen novels focusing on various time periods and people and events. Many of those novels are also from a female protagonists's perspective. Cherryh is an important enough SF/Fantasy author that there's academic study of her. She's among the early women to bust into the male-dominated SF/Fantasy scene back in the 1970s. I'd go so far as to say that if you're interested in women SF/Fantasy writing, she's required reading.
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Jul 9, 2019 19:25
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:I read the first two books and enjoyed them while they were going but was always really frustrated by the vague, ambiguous non-endings. I'm not saying this is necessarily a good criticism of the books, the abruptness and open-endedness may have been the point, it's just something that frustrated me at the time. Tying back to actual RPG chat, I also think the Wicked series has a pretty neat approach to magic, where there's a big ambiguity about what is and isn't magic and for that part there's just a bunch of weird stuff in the world. There are bits almost everyone agrees are magic, but those things aren't as simple as waving a wand or throwing a fireballs. Even resolving the damages magic causes the world require other elaborate rituals that appease the dead and lessen their suffering. The same way Burning Wheel has cool worldbuilding bits like the whole "being haunted by anyone you kill if you see their eyes" or "straddling horses causing impotence in men" bits, things matter in Oz. Coolness Averted fucked around with this message at 19:39 on Jul 9, 2019 |
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Jul 9, 2019 19:32
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Does having paid the GM affect the social dynamic at the table?
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Jul 9, 2019 20:30
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yea my group loves to gently caress around and get in tangents and all so I imagine we'd feel real awkward doing that with a dude paid to be there and all. Then again 'I have a group of usuals who are all in sync with each other and we often swap around GM duty for campaigns' makes me probably the exact opposite of the intended market for this so maybe I'm the wrong one!
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Jul 9, 2019 21:10
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