Have Your RPG Purchased Dropped Off?

[JoeGKushner]

There have been two things that have caused my purchases to drop.

1. Money. As I get older, I realize that I really need to pay off some of my CC debt. It's just not going away. This needs some concentrated power aimed at it. Worse, I'm moving and I'll be paying for that for a while. (One of the reasons I've been E-baying stuff again)

2. Time. As I get older, I simply have less time to play. I used to play Rolemaster, Warhammer FRPG, Hero (Champions), GURPS Traveler, Cyberpunk and of course D&D (which became d20). Now I'm lucky to play in one game a week, which is luckier than some of my friends who struggle to do one game every two weeks or 1/month.

The worst part is, as a reviewer, I have a lot of stuff that I try to incorporate into my game to see how it works. Sometimes this works out well, other times not so well. Loved Unearthed Arcana for brining a lot of d20 modern and other rules to the table, but I'd already been using a lot of those rules.

 

[Pseudonym]

When 3.0 first hit, I bought every WotC release and a good chunk of the third party stuff that I could get my paws on. Part was the newness of it, part my being single, and part having a better paying job.

Now I find I give in to impulse buys a lot less, perfering to do more research on new material. That and the fact I met a girl and eventually got engaged, which altered my spending priorities greatly.

 

[Thornir Alekeg]

With my wife having gone back to school full time, I can't afford to be spending a lot on gaming materials. On top of that, I think that when 3e first came out, there was so much material that seemed "original" that you just had to have it. Now, the majority of the stuff coming out looks to me to be just more of the same old stuff. I look very closely at any possible new purchase before I buy it. Its been rare lately that I've found materials that I just have to buy.

 

[Treebore]

Joe K,

If you just updated eBay today why does only Hellboy show up?

 

[PCD]

I spend less. Mostly because I don't D&D anymore.

 

[Samothdm]

I definitely spend less than when 3E first came out, but it's still a nice chunk of change.

Basically, I found that I'd flip through a book at the game shop, like one or two ideas so I'd buy it, bring it home, and go through it only to discover that those were the only one or two ideas in the book that I liked.

After getting married, I felt a little guilty about buying books that basically sat unread on my shelves. I also noticed a tendency to go back and re-read certain books over and over while other books sat neglected.

Lastly, as I got more into the campaign I'm running, it's been easier to know what kinds of books will be more useful. My campaign world doesn't have halflings or gnomes, nor does it have a "pantheon", planar travel, the standard D&D cosmology, flying cities, or lots of people running around in full plate armor trying to bash things with their greatswords. So, it's easier now to weed things out that I know ahead of time I can't incorporate into my world.

That said, I still do pick up things to read just for the fun of it. The Conan RPG and Arcana Unearthed are two recent examples. It's good to know what people are coming up with from a design standpoint just so I can stay current with the ideas that are out there, even if I don't plan on using it right away.

PS: For pure "shelf space" reasons, I've recently been more into buying PDFs versus hard copies.

 

[MrFilthyIke]

I spend less now, but ONLY because I'm WAY more picky about what I buy.

:\

 

[Andrew D. Gable]

Well, at the outset of 3e I got practically everything that came out, even things I'll never use, like the Kalamar setting book, many things I should really sell on Ebay. Then we hit what I call the "3.5 wall". I picked up all three of the 3.5 corebooks and honestly saw not much of a change. I'm kinda sorry I even picked them up, I shoulda stuck with the SRD. Anyway, most of my purchasing was done anyway - since I do homebrew pretty hardcore, I was picking up a lot of regional-type sourcebooks, like Nyambe and Rokugan and stuff. And most of the major regions of my homebrew were covered by the books I had. This, combined with my general dislike of 3.5, caused my buying habits to drop off considerably. Now, I'm down to one publisher who I'll buy everything from sight unseen (Green Ronin), one that's done some stuff I like and which have product lines I try to buy most of (Mongoose, with Conan and Lone Wolf next month), and one (WOTC) who I'll buy stuff from if it appeals to me.

So, yeah, my habits have dropped off a lot. And my wallet thanks me.

 

[JoeGKushner]

Joe K,

If you just updated eBay today why does only Hellboy show up?

Hellboy was the update, the others just dropped off. Ah, time to throw more moving stuff onto the pile.

Which is another reason why my purchases have dipped off. Not this move directly, but the space necessary to house the material. If I owned a house with a basement, it might not be too bad as I could throw the stuff down there and not worry about it but as it is...

 

[palatineknight]

I have become more selective in my d20 purchases. There are so many options available, the gaming consumer has multiple options. For instance, you want to add psionic to your campaign. Well there is the Psionic Handbook and now the Expanded Psionic Handbook by WotC, Green Ronin has a psionic rulebook and the Mindshadows setting, etc. Gamers have had to learn to rely on reviews in order to find the products that best suits there own particular style of play.