Sorry for the late reply!

There are two main ways that people use Patreon, at least payment-wise.
1) The first and foremost is as a glorified tip jar. This is the sort you're going to see most often, especially among this community. There may be some patron-only art done, and there are usually rewards for people pledging extra high.
2) It's also possible to set up Patreon to make people pay per update you push out. Used more for goal-oriented people, or just people who are infrequent. When patrons sign up, they set both an amount they'll pay out every update, as well as set a monthly spending limit -- in case you put out 100 updates, they won't be charged 100x their patronage level.

As for if you set it up, that's really hard to answer. This is going to sound silly, but I might recommend listening to http://chipandironicus.com/videos/podcast/1.html -- their first topic (skip to 2:00) is about Patreon, and how it gets used. They're talking about it in the context of Let's Play, but they go into detail about why a creator might want to set it up.

THank you for the tips! I really appreciate it! I really don't have enough of a following to set one up yet, but was curious to know how it worked.