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Adding my late opinion here, but I have felt conflicted on paid games. Seeing that Paizo is planning on throwing official endorsement of them is slightly troubling to me but as mentioned earlier, by a fellow "old" person, it's their business and their decision.
When I first noticed Paid threads, I was afraid they would take over but that really hasn't happened (in my opinion). Personally, I would never pay a GM to run a game but I am lucky to have a pretty good circle of friends to play with. There is a decent Organized Play community both on the forums and in person near me, so I have options. Some others do not and perhaps this is a solution for them.
I do think one positive of Paid GMs is that it allows people who are great GMs (subjective, I know) to support themselves by doing something they love and for the community to support. I am glad Paizo welcomes them as part of the community, but welcoming and endorse are two very different things. Providing them space and defending their right to participate in the community free from harassment is a good thing.
What is not a good thing is if the product swings to focusing on servicing the paid GMs, or if Paizo begins to model their business towards taking their cut of it. This is what I truly fear this could mean. I acknowledge Paizo is a business first, and I will stand by that. They are free to do what they want with their products, but if the trends leans into paid GMing and pushing the community to pay to play the games, then I will regrettably have to say goodbye to their product lines and move on to another game community.
One more thought on this, regrettably, long post. While I no longer actively participate in the Organized Play system, I feel that it would be a massive failure and an actual barrier to the community for Paizo and their Organized Play to endorse monetary pay to GMs for participation in Organized Play. Individual stores taking minor table fees and even sharing store credit to GMs to encourage patronage is one thing, but for Paizo to actually endorse charging players to pay GMs directly for Society Play games would be a horrible idea and a massive failure on the part of Paizo. That would signal a shift where paying to play this game is the norm, and possibly a step to far for myself.
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I think the point of creating this thread was to give us a place to talk about it that isn't the actual recruitment thread for the game.
Agreed. I don't even understand what is gained by creating this forum thread. Is there a numerical threshold of unhappy users that, once reached, would cause this decision to be undone?Because if not ... this was all very pointless.
This is absolutely correct! I created the thread because I noticed valid discussion about the topic on the other post, but it was also clogging the point of the other person's recruitment post. I wanted to give everyone the proper space to have their voices still heard on the subject. ^_^
If you look a little closer, that's not actually what's happening. It's not PbP. It's a weekly Sunday online game, that also lets you do some roleplay by post during the week, with responses to that at the end, presumably before the actual session.For those curious, here is an example of a paid PbP game.
Note this link takes you to a StartPlaying recruitment page.
The GM charges $15 per "session," where a session is 1 week of players posting and then once at the end of the week the GM posts results. Imaging playing Kingmaker at 1 action per week where your account is autodrafted $15/week.
Here's what it says. Emphasis mine.
Homebrew rules
Our game will be play by post. Roleplay will be open during the week, but every player should send me the things they'll be focusing on doing during the week. on Sundays, I'll post the updates on the results of your actions
The "sessions" are not actual sessions. They're billing intervals. That's how all the PbP games on StartPlaying that I could find are advertised. Presumably, StartPlaying didn't anticipate PbP, so PbP have to force their recruitment into a "weekly session" format. That doesn't mean it's not PbP run just the way the GM says it is. I don't see anything--feel free to highlight it if I'm missing it-that says it's a live game with inter-session PbP.