Breakdaddy said:I cant argue with your time value statement, but I can say that I have made entire campaigns with the NWN toolkit and it doesnt take hours to do maps, ever.
Well, a quck glance at nwn.bioware.com didn't turn up the toolkit for free. That means more money. And I expect one cannot come up with lovely maps in 2 minutes the first time you take it out of the box. Mastery of the tool takes time and effort. I wouldn't be surprised if many of us would never get that kind of speed with the thing, since not everybody is lightning with a computer graphics tool.
Boredflak said:Don't forget that for a "standard" party of four, you have five people sitting at the table. That's $50/hour (at $10/each). Now we're talking 16 hours of game-time savings to "come up a win". That's about three game sessions for us.
Watch your accounting. You should only count time that the system saves. Unless you waste five hours each session seting up your maps, it'll take more sessions to make it worthwhile.
I don't spend even spend an hour each session setting up battlemaps. At the frequency we play, it could easily take a year for it to pay for itself. Even more, because generally the time I spend setting up maps isn't fully wasted by my players - I often have the maps drawn beforehand, so I only waste my own time. So now we're talkign multiple years before we hit break-even...
Time saved is nice, sure, but I'm thinking comparisons... This setup costs about as much as 15+ really solid gaming books. That's a lot of content I could be using. Or, with that money, I could provide really good food for each session for an entire year. Or buy CDs for background music, or... You get the point.
So, I return - to those who know they really like minis in the first place, this is probably really nice. Quite possibly worth it, then. If I were independantly wealthy, I'd go for it, sure. But for a normal pocket, it is a heck of an expenditure for a maybe. The "go for it even if you don't use minis" line just doesn't strike me as wise.