Professional GM'ing, so far...

 The biggest take-away for me has been how bad 5e DnD is. For me, as a GM. I guess players love it. The character builds are more bloated and involved then a superhero game. But without being a cool superhero game. The discord channel for the startplaying.games service is filled with informative first hand experience of successful GMs running games of 5e. It seems they have to live on their laptop. Everything meaningful about 5e is linked to a digital platform of some sort, it appears. There just seems like such a heavy load between the GM, players, and the actual game. 

This has everything to do with how I learned to play ttrpg's, I get that. I just don't see how the GM/DM can have any fun. I don't see much player-agency in this gaming sphere for one. Or it is really an illusion. Everyone is running a campaign off of Hasbro product, so a determined storyline. Besides, a GM is not going to go off script when they have put a gajillion hours into the VTT set-up and balancing encounters. Not that this isn't what the players want. Everyone is getting what they want. It just feels so prefabricated. My eighties punk aesthetic just goes condition red on contact with this stuff. 

Therefore, I am only offering games I know I can run which offers true player agency. And that means old-school systems. Game systems designed as true tools for your imagination. For me this comes down to DC Heroes 2e, B/X DnD, Chaosium's BRP, Classic Traveller/Space Opera, and Gamma World 2e. Chaosium covers much ground for me. Any genre not covered by the others I've listed can be run with BRP. Just customize the skill list to make it genre specific.

This does mean the campaign world is built by me. But being a student of emergent play, this isn't much, really. Being enthused about the genre, reading original source material of the genre (reading Treasure Island for a game of pirates, for example), and coming up with an interesting and exciting start. After that the game kind of writes itself. 

I also have no problem poaching adventures written for other systems and using them in my campaigns. Ideas, I just need ideas. Nightmare fuel so I can get out of my head and expand my scope of view. 

All of these intentional actions serve one purpose; make the game fun to play for me. I like being a GM because it is a hard thing to do. It pushes my ability to interact with others to the maximum and demands my brain make quick connections which fit some type of relative pattern, contextualized into a fictional story, after the fact. Like a battlefield. I'm in a mental struggle which, at the end of the session I can survey the carnage and decide "did we win, did we lose?"

This truly puts me at odds with 5e's gaming products. They are designed to make the players feel special and their tastes catered to. To give participants the insular feel of a video game. The ability to disconnect as soon as they feel "uncomfortable". Heavy roleplay in 5e is a "look at me" proposal and "optimal" builds. Old school play is the guarantee if players and GMs do their part something amazing will occur. An unscripted performance done in one take by pros. 

So I guess that is what a "professional" GM is to me. The person who does the heavy lifting to make this experience a quantum potential when the game is on. And yeah, I think it is enough of a work load (mentally) that paying the GM makes sense. Game products and comic books are expensive.