Is TTRPGing an "Expensive Hobby"

[overgeeked]

Yeah, 100%.

It's why I think it would be one of the first things cut in a cash crunch for most people. You already have stuff. You can just...keep playing forever.

Ish.

You need other people to play with and the vast majority move on to the latest edition. So sure, you can easily keep playing with what you have while the edition is current, the more “outdated” the edition gets the harder it becomes to find other people to play with. And this assumes a certain level of popularity of the game to begin with. This “forever play” might work with D&D, for example, but any other game has several orders of magnitude fewer players as the base, and if those lines are still in print, the vast majority of those fans will have moved to the latest edition.

 

[eyeheartawk]

Ish.

You need other people to play with and the vast majority move on to the latest edition. So sure, you can easily keep playing with what you have while the edition is current, the more “outdated” the edition gets the harder it becomes to find other people to play with. And this assumes a certain level of popularity of the game to begin with. This “forever play” might work with D&D, for example, but any other game has several orders of magnitude fewer players as the base, and if those lines are still in print, the vast majority of those fans will have moved to the latest edition.

That's a valid point. I think it varies group by group. If, for example, your gaming group is primarily composed of friends then that's less of a concern. You'll hang out and game with a wider variety of stuff, probably. As long as your get to hang most people are cool.

If your primary group is mostly just there for gaming only then, yeah, that's probably super true.

 

[MGibster]

We're approaching 200 posts. What's the concensus? Are TTRPGS an expensive hobby? I need to know what to tell my wife about my next purchase.

 

[Lanefan]

They're getting more expensive in absolute numbers but not in actual cost.

Again, $13 for the DMG in Nov 1979 is the equivalent of $52.83 today. The DMG today has an MSRP of $49.95. And discounted options are easier to access today than they ever have been. Amazon and Books-a-Million and online retailers with blanket discounts certainly weren't a thing when I was a kid. TSR never made the Basic version of their rules free, either as a PDF download or as an SRD.

If a person is paying more for D&D today than they were in the 70s it is purely because they choose to pay more. (or theoretically because they care so little about the cost that they never bothered to look into saving money).

What does a 1e DMG cost in the wild these days? <checks acaeum.com> OK, that's not so bad - $30-50 US depending on condition*, unless you happen to stumble across a rare one from an early print run. A standard-run PH is $23-38 US going by acaeum numbers, which certainly doesn't agree with the last one I saw in a US store (a few years ago) which packed a $100 US price tag, with other 1e books and adventures similarly inflated.

The standard Monster Manual (I) ranges from $25-40 US, notable in that by acaeum's graphs the price has come down over the last few years.

So, not as costly as I thought, it seems. Good.

* - ignoring trashed and mint/near-mint for these purposes.

 

[FrogReaver]

We're approaching 200 posts. What's the concensus? Are TTRPGS an expensive hobby? I need to know what to tell my wife about my next purchase.

I think the question is - How much does she care if you spend 50 dollars? Which is to say the kind of expensive that matters on an individual basis is not something we can accurately say much about.

That said as others are pointing out, RPGs aren’t too expensive of a hobby to get into.

As an example - I just spent 60 dollars on a chess mat, pieces, clock and carrying case. I probably could have went a little cheaper but not too much unless I started looking used.

 

[Mannahnin]

What does a 1e DMG cost in the wild these days? <checks acaeum.com>

Or you can buy a fresh new one POD for $24.99.

 

[Malmuria]

TTRPG, if you want to save money, is a dirt cheap hobby compared to most. And we're positively swimming in ways to do it even cheaper nowadays.

I agree it is a dirt cheap hobby if you want it to be. And because of that, I increasingly don't see the value in buying a bunch of new systems. For example, the "gold" edition of the newly released Crown and Skull is $80. That strikes me as a quite expensive book. Is it a good value? Perhaps if C&S becomes your main system and you end up playing it a lot. But as a book, and compared to other books (say, the complete works of Shakespeare), it does strike me as pretty expensive.

There's a lot of this sort of gratuitous stuff in the hobby. One of the ironies for me of the OSR, for example, is that on the one hand there is this emphasis on embracing the DIY, dirt cheap aspect of the hobby--"folk dnd" if you will. And on the other hand, a kind of preciousness around book quality--the paper, the binding, the ribbon bookmarks etc, which sometimes seemed geared more toward collecting than playing.

 

[MichaelSomething]

What do people want, some type of regulatory body to limit what people charge for TTRPG products??

 

[Krachek]

8 DnD books over 10 years is a friendly budget.
So no it’s not expansive.

 

[Malmuria]

What do people want, some type of regulatory body to limit what people charge for TTRPG products??

People can charge whatever they want; my question is whether $80 should be considered expensive for a book.