20 Minutes of Fun ... and for How Much Money?

[WayneLigon]

At the bequest of my players, a couple of months ago I invested over $185 in a set of GURPS books. They wanted to try a new genre and a new system. Now, after three 4 hour sessions, we're going back to D&D 3.5.

Do you find that spending more money actually increases the quality of your game?

I'm at a loss as to what to say :/ Why on Earth would you buy more than just the core rule book before even running a game with it?

I'll spend money on something I can use later. I recently bought all the Eberron books except for Secrets of Sarlona, when I knew I was going to start a campaign with it. Normally I might not do that, but we'd all talked about it and I shared around the main rule book (which I already had) and a great deal of interest was expressed. So I splurged, but in a way the campaign was already 'pre sold'.

 

[VirgilCaine]

At the bequest of my players, a couple of months ago I invested over $185 in a set of GURPS books.

Good god man, what all did you buy? What genre did you use that could possibly need that many books?

Oh, wait. Space. Ultra-tech, Bio-tech, Powers, a campaign book...I can see that. Maybe Banestorm.

But still...$185? Ow.

 

[jdrakeh]

Good god man, what all did you buy? What genre did you use that could possibly need that many books?

That price pretty much covers the GURPS 4e Basic Set, Powers, Fantasy, Magic, and Banestorm.

 

[CharlesRyan]

Feh, I buy game books like candy, and read them like novels. Price ratio for my stuff sucks.

Sounds to me like your price ratio is great! If you're reading and enjoying them, then it's money well spent.

I've never bought into the "20 minutes of fun" theory. When I sit down for a 4-hour RPG session, I have 4 hours of fun. Sure, the "I get to trash a monster" moments might only be 20 minutes of that, but the rest of the time--imagining a fantastic setting, arguing over tactics, watching another player making a critical roll, enjoying the tension while the wizard's player looks up the finer points of a spell to see if it can save our bacon, even just shooting the --it's all FUN. Add to that a couple hours of fun outside the game session--talking and laughing about the last session, planning for the next one, leveling a character, posting on ENworld--and the RPG funness just goes on.

Why define the value of the activity so narrowly? Even just reading the books (and I have a lot of RPG books that have never been played, only read) is part of the experience and part of the fun, and shouldn't be counted out of their value.

 

[w_earle_wheeler]

Minus holidays, illness and diversions, we play once a week about nine months out of the year (December is a particular dead zone for us). Each session is around four hours, so that's 144 game hours a year.

Each of my players has a 3.5 PHB ($20.00) and their own set of dice ($6.00). So, for them, that works out to about 18 cents an hour for the first year.

As the DM, I use the 3.5 PHB, DMG and MM ($60.00). In a year we will run through around 5 adventure modules (4 Dungeon Crawl Classics and 1 free conversion from WotC: $60.00). I also have a GM screen ($24.99 -- it's the DCC one), over 100 discount purchased miniatures (around $150 not including paint), four sets of Dungeon Tiles ($40.00), a normal set of dice and a specialized set of dice ($13.00), a large pad of 1" square marked paper ($30.00) and various markers, notebooks and assorted supplies ($20.00 max). Oh yeah, and I use the DMG II ($22.00) at the table sometimes. That's around $420.00 spent on a year's campaign, so it works out to about $2.91 per hour. Of course, this doesn't include the additional $200 or more a year I spend on adventures, magazines and books I don't use in the campaign, and it also doesn't include the "value" of the time I spend preparing for a game.

So, between the five of us, we've spent $3.63 per hour, or $14.52 per session: or, almost twice what it would cost us to rent two new movies on DVD and spend four hours watching them together 36 weekends out of the year.

 

[Jhaelen]

In a different spin on the question, I'd like to ask, how much money do you usually have to spend before you find something that's a hit with your gaming group?

Hmm, actually I'm not typically buying rpg books in the hope they will be 'a hit with my gaming group'. I buy them mainly because I hope to enjoy reading them. I am also a bit of a collector of interesting rpg systems. After over 20 years of collecting stuff, I think, I am actually better stocked than my local rpg store.

Do you find that spending more money actually increases the quality of your game?

In a way, yes. Not so much because I actually use it in the game, but because it gives me ideas. I also find it easier to rewrite existing material than to write something from scratch. After adapting an adventure module to my campaign, it's often hardly recognizable but a lot better than something I could have created on my own.

 

[SWBaxter]

That price pretty much covers the GURPS 4e Basic Set, Powers, Fantasy, Magic, and Banestorm.

That still seems like kind of a stretch to get a game started. I could maybe see something like Basic Set + Banestorm, the other three could surely wait until a GM was certain the group was happy with the game. Heck, I personally would start with GURPS Lite (at an approximate cost of $0) and see if the group liked that before dropping any cash.

I guess I just can't reconcile the idea of rating games in terms of value for money with running out and spending like a drunken sailor before finding out whether the game works for a particular group.

 

[Retreater]

It actually came up to $241.05 with purchasing The Basic Set: Characters and The Basic Set: Campaigns ($84.70); with the group's wanting to play sci-fi, I had to pick up the genre books Space and Ultra Tech ($74.10) as well as Traveller: Interstellar Wars (for starships) ($42.35); I printed copies of the GURPS Lite rules for each player ($10); and to help make things easier on me as a GM I purchased the Character Assistant program ($14.95) and the GM Screen (14.95).

I don't consider that I went out shopping like a "drunken sailor." The bare minimum that I could have spent to run the game was $124.60 (for the GURPS Lite Rules, the Basic Set, the Character Assistant, and the GM Screen).

This was all discussed with my group prior to my purchasing it. It was almost a sure thing that we were going to play it. I mean, you can't exactly buy the books you need to design and play the game AFTER you've been playing the game for several months.

I guess I'm going to try to sell the GURPS stuff. The financial sting of it is just too great if it's not being used.

 

[JDJblatherings]

BFRPG = free
TOEE = $5.00
Hommlet & B2 = $4.00 (got them over 25 years ago)
Rappan-Athuak-reloaded- $40.00
Yggsburgh- $10.00
CityState of the invincible overlord- $30.00


so about $89.00 for my current campaign and we've already played over 32= hours so it's down to under $2.78 and hour to entertain 6 or 7 people. Since we plan on playing as is for at least a year (an we easily could) we'll be coming in under 6 cents each per hour.

 

[Calico_Jack73]

I never buy books for my players... I buy them for myself. My group is currently playing an Eberron campaign but I'm buying books for nWOD and haven't purchased a WOTC book in months. If I am running something then I tell my players NOT to purchase any books for the game until we've played it a few times and decided that we are into the game for the long haul. With the price of books being what they are these days I'd feel guilty if everyone in my group shelled out $50 for Arcana Evolved or Midnight 2e and we ended up playing only one or two sessions before switching to someone else.