Crit Hit Interview #001: Kobold DM on Professional Dungeon Mastering

Welcome to Crit Hit Interviews, a feature where I speak with people in the TTRPG space about the exciting things they’re creating. This week, I sat down with a professional dungeon master and Youtuber who ended a three-year career on a high note.

One of the subjects close to my heart is how TTRPG players and creators make money with their hobby. One of the more common ways I’ve found is to charge players as a dungeon master. While there is a significant portion of the player base who find paid DMing anathema, there are still several people who make a substantial amount of income by DMing for strangers on the internet. (Full disclosure, I work at a professional DMing company.)

It’s also not easy. Whether you’re advertising your games on forums like the DnD website or on places like Startplaying.Games, Professional DMing is a competitive market. That’s why the Aeon Kobold (formerly known as Kobold DM) caught my eye. Aeon (who prefers to keep their IRL identity off the internet) posted last week that he was hosting his last professional DM game and moving on to something else after more than 500 games over three years. That was a number that caught my eye.

By Pro DM standards, that’s pretty good. Aeon said there was even a time when he hosted seven games a week—SEVEN. That’s 21-28 hours of DMing a week plus campaign preparation. How does somebody make a full-time income out of that?

Aeon agreed to sit down with me for an interview and discuss his career. You can find him on Patreon, Twitter, and YouTube.

Crit Hit News: So how did you get into TTRPGs?

Aeon: I started with Fifth Edition D&D way back in college in 2018. I was invited to a group in the middle of a campaign. The DM said “Hey we have some other characters that people played at one point, but not any more. Want to try one? And I looked through them and went, “I’ll just play this one.” The character was basically Spyro the Dragon. From there, I found many other D&D games online and started playing more and more when I could. I eventually swapped over to Pathfinder 2nd Edition and exclusively played that.

When did you begin DMing professionally?

Well, I was the “Forever-DM” for years and had been DMing for my friends through college. Then COVID happened. I left college and moved to Austin, Texas in 2020, three weeks before the lockdowns. That meant that job prospects would not be easy to find. I had to figure out what to do with my time. So I started up Kobold DM on YouTube and made tutorials to help people use VTTs.

At the same time, I began seeing others hosting professional DM games. I knew my players enjoyed my games. At the same time, I wasn’t very impressed with the other professional DMs that I was seeing. “I could do better than that,” I said to myself. And so I hosted my first Pathfinder game on StartPlaying.

What, to you, makes your games more professional than most games?

There are several factors that I try to emphasize in my game. For example, I never take more than five people at a table. If it goes beyond that, people get less value for their money because they have less limelight. I also put an emphasis on utilizing the player’s time well. Some campaigns will fill a game with drudgery like random encounters or fighting goblins by the river several times in a row. I strive to get past all the toil, dig through all the slow stuff and maximize a player’s time doing fun stuff. They are paying me for their time, after all.

What sort of games did you run?

I only ran pre-written Pathfinder games, most notably the Kingmaker campaign and other prewritten stuff like Abomination Vaults. I think I had four games of Kingmaker going at once at one point. Not only did it allow me to minimize the prep by having everything ready for a single campaign, but it also helped me move players around based on their interests to avoid not stepping on one another’s toes. For example, Kingmaker has mechanics that allow players to help manage what happens to the kingdom they’re helping. One group might prefer using that mechanic more than another, so I’d try to players interested in those mechanics over to there. Most players really appreciated that hands-on experience.

Paid DMing has a slight stigma in parts of the online community. How have you interacted with that?

There’s this expectation in RPG online community that they can find an open table on the numerous forums organizing online TTRPG games. But every time I’ve done it, it has been an unpleasant experience. Players were either regularly flaking out, the DMs were hard to work with or there were table conflicts.

There’s also this expectation that TTRPGs are something you can play with a group of friends. And many do, and that’s wonderful. But not everyone has a friend group like that, so paid groups are often some of the more consistent options. As a player, you are putting down cash to play at my table. That incentivizes you to show up and not randomly skip a game. It also ensures that I show up, give you a great experience, and do all I can to make it fun for you.

Last week, you announced that you were DMing your last professional game. Why did you decide to stop and what’s next?

There’s a certain amount of burnout to what has always been a hobby for me. I turned it into a job during COVID, and I could certainly continue if I wanted. I had a lot of fun with my players, and most of my regulars would have been willing to keep playing with me. But I wanted to do something else.

Right now I’m turning my attention to my Patreon where I sell maps, and my Youtube, where I post tutorials and Actual-play sessions.

What advice would you give someone wanting to be a professional DM?

I’d encourage new professional DMs to ensure they have good thumbnails and titles for their ads on websites like StartPlaying. They need to do everything they can to stand out. It also helps to run niche systems. People who got into professional DMing by running World of Darkness games or Pathfinder had more luck getting people into their seats since there was less competition.

Thanks to Aeon for the interview! To learn more, visit his YouTube page. To read more interviews like this, subscribe to Critical Hit News on Beehiiv!