[OT] What is the most "wasted" money spent on a gaming item.

[pogre]

It's great how many of these things classified as worthless I like. Variety is the spice of life and all that.

 

[Aeris Winterood]

For me, it would be Star Wars d20. I bought because a friend wanted me to run some "Living Force" games with it. Nice idea, since I don't play LF and could 'eat' the modules. So, I spend $35 for the core book and $15 for the LF guidebook, but then I never end up running any mods at all.

There again... I have bought everything for Star Wars d20.... and have yet to play it once...... Made characters a few times... but geeez...


I... cannot... stop... buying... products...

I think I am a publishers dream! I spend an average of 100 bucks a week at my FLGS... and the owner always has a smile on his face when I get there!

 

[Sanackranib]

AD&D 2e Arabian Adventures. I never really cared for AD&D.
It just turned me off. But I was interested in playing an Arabian
game, so I bought this book. What a waste of money. It had
nothing but rules in it. I was expecting setting material and GMing
advice on how a Arabian campaign would be different. Maybe I
expected all the wrong things, I still wonder if there was a companion
book to this, kinda Core Setting book, which I believed this to be.
I still ran that Arabian campaign but it crashed and burned pretty
quickly. Not that I blame the book for that, mind you.
B]

I managed to aquire almost all of the Arabian Adventures stuff and was really quite pleased with it. we ran 2 successfull campaigns in that setting that were among the most fun I have ever had in my 23 years of gameing. the material is scattered among several books/ box sets so you just might not have had everything you were looking for with your 1st purchase. I had some of those issues as well when I first bought it. but with a lot of reading and other sources ie:aladan and ali babba + the 40 thieves I found it readily adaptable. Sorry you had a bad experience with it. the setting is so unbelieveable and magical that IMO it lends itself at least as much as the eruopean midevil setting to gameing. and I may yet try to convert it to 3e!

 

[arwink]

The 2e Diablo conversion, although I'm still known to convert monsters out of it and use the magic item tables to generate ideas.

On the whole, though, yeuch.

 

[Bran Blackbyrd]

GURPS Basic Set, Third Edition Revised and GURPS Supers, Second Edition. I've never used either one.

D&D Rules Cyclopedia. I had only played a couple of times, I had no idea which books I needed and the person that picked the books up at the store for me got the Rules Cyclopedia and the AD&D 2E PHB. I figured out pretty quick that something was wrong with that situation and only used the PHB from there on out.

Blood Wars cards that I used once. What the hell was I thinking? Oh sure, Blood Wars hit my town as soon as it came out but Magic: The Gathering didn't get here until Fallen Empires? Son of a $%~!

Encyclopedia Magica Volume 2. By the time I went to buy them the store only had volume 2 and right after that TSR started circling the bowl. In short, I never got the other books and I never used the one I got.

Hmm. Dragon Quest was sort of neat, but I never got to play it much. I don't regret getting the board game, but it was a waste.
The rest of the stuff...

 

[Viking Bastard]

I managed to aquire almost all of the Arabian Adventures stuff and was really quite pleased with it...

I did realise that there was other AA stuff out there, I had the
whole in front of me. This was just shown to be the Core Book for
the setting, so I of course assumed that this would have all the
core setting stuff in it, but then expanded upon in further product
(which was the traditional way of doing things). The setting stuff
in the book can pretty much be summed up as: "This is, like... an
Arabian campaign and stuff and there's, like, a lot of sand and stuff
and like, only one gawd, that's, like, a chick and stuff, y'know...
and now here is the list of tules of how you can do pretty much
everything with sand."

Now, I later bought two other AA books, which I liked, but I did
just not have the money to buy every single book of the line.

 

[trancejeremy]

A few years back I learned that American Science and Surplus was selling lots of TSR products in lots - $5 for a random assortment of books, a 'grab bag". So I buy 5 boxes.

What do I get?

6 copies of Birthright - Tribes of the Heartless Wastes (being a Birthright fan, I actually paid full price for this when it came out).

4 copies of Buck Rogers War Against the Han. Ick, is all I can say. Though I guess I have a lifetime supply of standup cardboard mongols.

4 copies of Country Sites. (I too, bought this book for full price, and absolutely hated it, and I managed to trade most of them.)

I did get one okay Al Qadim boxed set, and a couple Ravenloft books. But I was pretty disappointed.


D20 related, I would have to say a certain city book which is to not be named. Gah, I really hate that book. Everytime I look at it, steam comes out of my ears. I love most of the supplements/adventures for it, but the city book itself is just so aggravating to me. Don King. Don King? Don King!!! Grrrrrrrrrrr. Don King should not be an NPC in a serious RPG book. But I can't get rid of the book, because I find the big foldout map of the city to be useful.


I also managed to buy a couple supplements twice. The most expensive was Nocturnum for Call of Cthulhu d20, though I managed to trade one for a couple of books I wanted.

I also just bought Experts from Skirmisher press. However, my two puppies just torn it to shreds and ate bits of it. It's a cool book, but kinda expensive, so I'm not sure if I should buy another copy or just try to piece it together best I can.

 

[fba827]

For 3e related stuff, for me personally it has been the Hero Builder's Guide.

The resource does have a very specific purpose and handles that role well. However, I simply did not need it for it's purpose and thus I got nothing out of it.

Every other 3e thing I have purchased I have been able to get some sort of inspiration of of, at minimum. But for this one item, nothing...

Again, not that it is necessarily a bad item. It just is for a specific role that I do not need filled.

 

[bloodymage]

MoP. I've left 3e, though I still play and run online. I will never use this book, though. Can't remember why I bought it. There's stuff on my shelf I haven't used yet and other stuff I'll never use again, but nothing like MoP.

 

[Anime Kidd]

How about an entire collection of gaming material?! It's not that I regret it or anything, but I don't even know anyone nearby who is even remotely interested in it.

As for products, spent way too much money on useless stuff. But the ones that I can remember at the moment are:

Ruins to Myth Drannor (green box)
Forgotten Realms (grey box w/ Elminster on it)
Star Wars D20 (can't believe WotC made a revision of it. Damn waste of money!

)
Creature Collection I