How Dungeons & Dragons game master turned hobby into career

This story is part of CNBC Make It’s Millennium money series, which details how people around the world earn, spend and save their money.

People are surprised to learn that Mari Murdock, 36, is a professional game master, a role in which she organizes and narrates tabletop role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons.

“A lot of people don’t see things like hobbies or artistic pursuits as something that could generally make them money,” she told CNBC Make It.

Granted, she also didn’t expect that running D&D games would turn into a paying job – at least at first: “It was just a hobby I did with my friends in college.”

Dungeons & Dragons is an open-world tabletop game in which the narrative is shaped by player choices, whether through combat, puzzles, or negotiations. A GM is the world builder and narrator of the players’ actions, but he also enforces and explains the rules, much like a mediator or referee.

Since random dice rolls can mean the difference between a player’s character being swallowed by a gelatinous cube or crushed by a herd of centaurs, a good GM will also be an adept improviser who can move the game forward. story depending on the circumstances of the moment. game.

In other words, it’s not an easy task. But as Murdock played table games throughout the 2010s, she became more confident in the skills needed to run a good game. Although it wasn’t obvious at the time, it was what made her led to becoming a paid general manager.

“I love teaching, I love writing, and I love playing games. It’s been an interesting career path that’s an amalgamation of everything I want to do,” she says.

As of 2021, Murdock’s primary source of income is working as general manager for Dungeon Master Direct, a Utah-based company specializing in online and in-person tabletop role-playing gaming sessions ranging from $375 to $750.

She earns $24,000 as a dungeon master for the company, plus another $13,000 teaching writing at nearby Westminster University in Salt Lake City, where she lives with her husband, Scott. He makes $96,000 as a communications director at a state agency.

Here’s a look at how Murdock was able to turn his hobby into a career.

The oldest of two siblings in a Latter-day Saint family, Murdock says she was “strong-willed” and “loved being my own boss” when she was growing up.

Most of her childhood was spent in Michigan and Utah, where she spent her days “climbing trees, catching frogs, playing pretend.” At night, she stayed up reading books, pretty much “any kind of storytelling.”

In 2007, Murdock’s family moved to Hawaii after his father got a teaching job at Brigham Young University in Hawaii. She studied literature at school, and during this time she played her first tabletop role-playing game at a friend’s house and “loved it”.

In 2010, she took a leave of absence from school to become a full-time missionary. She was posted to Japan, the country where her mother was born.

In Japan, Murdock met her current husband, Scott, who was also doing missionary work in another part of the country.

Mari returned to Hawaii in 2012 and earned a bachelor’s degree in literature from BYU-H. She got a job in campus communications and was soon joined by Scott, who moved to Hawaii to be with her and finish his degree.

They helped start a gaming club on campus, with Murdock serving as the club’s academic advisor since she worked for the university.

The club has enjoyed great success, becoming the second largest student group on campus. Murdock became more involved in the club, organizing tabletop role-playing games for new players. In 2013, she entered and won an open audition to write fiction for The Legend of the Five Rings, a popular trading card game set in feudal Japan.

“It really opened the networking doors for other types of work, because when people were looking for a writer who could do fiction at a professional level, my name would start popping up,” Murdock says.

Even if she didn’t do it for a living, Murdock says she would still be planning D&D campaigns for her friends, reading gamebooks, or writing fiction.

Since hobbies can become side hustles, “it’s important to remember that creative work is work,” she says.

As a friend once told her, “You’re going to do it anyway, you might as well find someone to pay you.”

In 2016, Murdock moved to Salt Lake City with Scott, where she studied a master’s degree in transatlantic literature. She also continued to write freelance, primarily for The Legend of the Five Rings.

“I was forced to write down everything they needed,” Murdock says. This included novelizations of the game, as well as text explaining the game’s mechanics, character backstories, or text appearing on game cards. At first, she was mostly paid in free products, but later got paid in species.

In 2020, Dax Levine – an old friend from Murdock’s college gaming club – founded Dungeon Master Direct, a professional dungeon master service. The timing was fortuitous, as tabletop gaming has become more popular during the pandemic.

The business was successful enough that in May 2021, Levine was able to hire Murdock as a game master, commonly referred to as a dungeon master when playing Dungeons & Dragons.

“I run about three games a week on a busy week,” Murdock says. Each running game, including preparation, takes him about four to five hours a week.

She also helps organize corporate events, such as the largest game of Dungeons & Dragons ever played, according to Guinness World Records. The game took place in a shopping mall in Provo, Utah, and culminated when the 1,227 participants defeated an evil wizard named Vecna ​​in the final attack.

Despite Dungeons & Dragons’ fantasy elements, Murdock says his interest in the game was not discouraged by his church. In fact, “many members of the LDS church are drawn to fantasy games,” she says.

Attitudes have changed since the “Satanic Panic” of the 1980s, when people had “this stereotype that kids in their basements were summoning these demons and things like that,” she says.

For Murdock, the game allows you to immerse yourself in “a simulated situation in which you imagine that you are someone else. I think it really develops creativity. It creates problem solving and a lot of empathy.”

Here’s how Mari and Scott spent their money in February 2024:

• Debt repayment: $2,450 for student loans, credit card debt, PayPal credit, personal loan
• Mortgage: $2,147
• Food: $1,390 on groceries and restaurant meals
• Discretionary: $832 for home goods, a Kickstarter contribution and a hair salon
• Utilities: $452 for Wi-Fi, heat, water and electricity
• Savings: $400
• Subscriptions and memberships: $235 on Hulu, Spotify, Amazon Prime, Midjourney, Patreon, Nebula, Max
• Insurance: $161 for health, dental, vision, car and home
• Phone(s: $140
• Gas: 71$

In June 2023, Mari and Scott purchased a two-bedroom single-family home in downtown Salt Lake City for $535,000, with a down payment of $40,000. To afford the house, they took out a personal loan from their family, which is equivalent to $777 in monthly payments on top of their mortgage.

As part of that move, they did what Murdock calls a “financial reset,” with the goal of paying off the roughly $15,000 in credit card debt they accumulated during the pandemic. For this reason, paying off debt is the couple’s largest monthly expense, with nearly $1,400 spent on credit card payments alone.

They also have student debt of about $25,000 each. Scott hopes to receive public service loan forgiveness in a few years, since he works for a government agency.

Before moving, the couple had systematically paid a tithe to their church, representing one-tenth of their income. However, they suspended their monthly contributions until they could pay off their credit card debt.

Murdock typically spends up to 10 hours a week volunteering for the Relief Society, a philanthropic organization of LDS women. She believes that her current contribution to the Church is “my commitment of time rather than money.”

They own a fully paid-off 2018 Jeep Compass, which allows them to save money on transportation costs, paying only about $200 for gas and car insurance each month.

When it comes to investments, the couple has about $20,000 saved thanks to Scott’s 401(k) and pension. “Once we no longer have debt besides the mortgage, we’ll probably put more into our retirement accounts,” Murdock says.

Once their debt is paid off, “we hope to maybe foster children or adopt children, because that’s something we’ve always been interested in,” Murdock said.

As for his career, juggling freelance writing, being an executive director and teaching “can be overwhelming at times,” Murdock says. But it’s also “fulfilling for all the parts of my brain that love doing all sorts of different things.”

Murdock wishes to continue these activities, but would also like to branch out and write his own novels.

“I went to school specifically to learn how to be a creative writer, so I love that GMing is a creative outlet that allows me to hone my skills in storytelling, plotting, and characterization,” she says . “I feel very lucky to be able to do this. I feel happy and blessed.”

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