Company Seeks Skilled, Motivated Dungeon Master

Unemployed nerds, rejoice! The online roleplaying game community Roll20 just posted a job opening for a game master (also known as a dungeon master) with a "comprehensive understanding of tabletop gaming rulesets." The site caters to fans of pen-and-paper roleplaying games like Dungeons & Dragons and Call of Cthulhu by offering them interactive digital interfaces they can use to play these games online.

For those of you not in the know, nerds have been happily doing this "work" for free since the 1970s—ignoring our social lives so that we could create the best gaming scenarios and perfect our hobby. Paying a nerd like myself to be a dungeon master is like paying a Deadhead to go to shitty music festivals or paying Kanye West to interrupt award shows.

So how has the response been so far? Richard Zayas, one of the co-founders of Roll20, simply called it "overwhelming."

"Since it was me pushing to get this position made and filled, I made myself the search committee. I've personally gone through over a hundred applications for the position just this past weekend," Zayas said. "And the scariest and most overwhelming part is the number of quality applicants with great ideas."

The reason Roll20 is hiring a Game Master has to do with Twitch, the streaming service a lot of Roll20 users have been using. "Now there's a huge population of folks who watch roleplaying games that use our interface," said Zayas. These live-streaming roleplaying games, though popular, often don't showcase everything the company's products can do, however, "and we want to keep an example of how Roll20 can be fully utilized, plus create entertaining content."

Zayas told me that originally the staff of Roll20 had been running these showcase games, but with everyone being so busy, they decided to reach out and see if they could hire someone to do it. The resulting opportunity kind of reminds me of Tourism Queensland's call for " The Best Job in the World," where someone got paid $100,000 to hang out in paradise… Except, you know, for nerds.

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