fusangite said:
However, even leaving aside spending on alcohol and food for games (approximately $250 in the past 6 months), there is all my spending on library fines, printing and photocopying reference materials I use for my campaign ($40 in the past 3 months) and printing and photocopying materials I create for my campaing ($40 in the past 3 months).
I'm in the same boat - Amazon and used book stores account for a lot of my "gaming" purchases.
Since the beginning of the year I've purchased exactly one gaming book (
Sandstorm) - I have plans to buy two (d20
Critical Locations and
Stormwrack) or three (...plus
Lords of Madness, if it's kewl) more this year. In the past three months I've also purchased about $50.00 in .pdfs. That works out to about US$85.00 so far this year. Our tabletop group has met five times since the start of the year, and I'm in two PbP games, so call that an additional session each per month, or eleven gaming sessions in since January. That works out to not quite $8.00 per gaming session - less expensive than a night at the movies. So far, so good.
However, there are a couple of wrinkles to add to this. First, the game book I bought has limited usefulness for the games I'm running right now - only two or three pages are applicable to one of my Modern games at present. That would suggest that I paid about US$12.00 per useful page for
Sandstorm - that's a bit steep! :\ The situation is similar for the .pdfs, but the price per page is much lower - about US$2.00 or 3.00 per page of useful content.
Second, I've spent close to US$300.00 on history books and maps for my current Modern campaign and a future Modern/Past campaign that I'm working on. Now things are starting to look a little expensive - since these books are applicable only to one PbP game I'm running now, that's $100.00 per gaming get-together! That's a pair of good seats at a baseball game, or an evening out with my wife.
Still, for a hobby that's a lot of fun and (compared to a number of other options out there) pretty wholesome, it's really not too bad, all things considered.