Four campaigns a week is four continuities to hold in one head
A hobbyist GM runs one campaign and forgets things occasionally. A professional runs four to eight, for players who paid, and is expected to remember what each of them said three weeks ago. That is a different problem, and it is the one this page is about.
The problem
Paid play turns forgetting into a product defect. A player who paid for a seat notices when the NPC they bribed last month does not remember it, and prep time you spend reconstructing last session is time you are not paid for. The continuity load scales with your booking rate, which means it gets worse exactly as the business gets better.
The market is real and it is not small
StartPlaying lists over 5,000 Dungeon Masters and Game Masters, and says more than 100,000 players have found a game through it. Whatever fraction of those GMs run games as a real income stream, it is a working profession with working problems, and continuity across concurrent tables is near the top of the list.
What a transcript is worth when you are being paid
Every session leaves a searchable record of what was actually said, not what you remember of it. When a player says "you told us the baron was dead", you can check rather than concede or bluff. When a table returns after a month, the recap is written before you sit down to prep.
Across several tables the wiki matters more than the transcript. Each campaign gets its own — its own NPCs, its own places, its own relationship graph — so the Tuesday game and the Thursday game never bleed into each other, which is the specific failure mode of keeping four campaigns in one notebook or one head.
Prep time is billable time you are not billing
The hours between sessions are the unpaid part of the job. Anything that turns "re-listen to forty minutes of last week" into "read a recap and check the wiki" converts directly into either more sessions run or an evening back. That is a straightforwardly commercial argument and it is the honest reason a professional would pay for this where a hobbyist might not.
For a weekly-plus schedule the arithmetic is on the pricing page: 30 hours a month covers roughly seven four-hour sessions, and 5-hour top-up bundles cover a heavy week without changing plan.
Your players can see the world without an account
A shared wiki link gives a table a read-only view of what you have revealed to them, with your private GM notes stripped out. For a paid game that doubles as a deliverable: the players get something between sessions that shows the campaign existing while they are not at the table, and it costs you nothing to produce because it is generated from play.
The numbers, with sources
| What | Value | Source |
|---|---|---|
| StartPlaying — Game Masters listed | Browse over 5000+ Dungeon Masters and Game Masters | sourceas of 2026-08-15 |
| StartPlaying — players served | Over 100,000 players have found their online D&D group with us | sourceas of 2026-08-15 |
| DM Scribe — plans | Free: 2.5 hours/month + one-time 3 bonus hours; $7.99/month for 10 hours; $14.99/month for 30 hours; $4.95 per 5-hour bundle | sourceas of 2026-08-15 |
How we sourced this: The two StartPlaying figures are read from StartPlaying’s own homepage and are the numbers they publish about their platform, not an independent count of professional GMs. We have seen a widely repeated figure of roughly 20,000 people having earned money GMing there; we could not verify it against StartPlaying or any primary source, so it is not on this page.
This is not for you if…
You run in person and will not record. Everything here starts from audio or an existing transcript. A professional running at a physical table who is not willing to put a phone in the middle of it gets nothing from this, and no feature list changes that.
Your players have not agreed to being recorded. For paid games this is a consent question with a commercial edge — strangers who booked a seat did not necessarily sign up to be recorded. Ask before the first session, not after.
- You will not record your sessions
- Your players have not consented to recording
- You run one-shots for strangers where continuity does not carry
- You want scheduling, invoicing or booking tools — this is none of those
Other ways people use this
- Actual play and podcast crews
Actual play crews already have clean multitrack audio. Turn it into show notes, a searchable archive and accessibility transcripts.
- West Marches and open-table campaigns
Twenty players, rotating parties, one shared world — and nobody who was at every session. A shared record is the format’s missing piece.
- Daggerheart tables
Nothing in the pipeline is rules-aware, so Daggerheart transcribes and extracts like any other game. The prompts say D&D. Here is what to do about it.