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Enchanted Trinkets Complete--a hardcover book containing over 500 magic items for your D&D games!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="JohnNephew" data-source="post: 427661" data-attributes="member: 2171">I am so there!I think this may be a trait common to a lot of GMs.  We really enjoy tinkering; what a lot of people consider work, we consider recreation.  This is a strange and inescapable dynamic in the RPG market, too -- a lot of projects that relieve the GM's or player's work have a narrow appeal, because for a lot of gamers that "work" is a large part of the hobby.Still, as prepainted minis have demonstrated, there ARE people who are interested in the hobby without going all the way, or who are willing to shift the focus of their interest to another aspect of the hobby.  (If you have only X hours for your hobby, how would you prefer those hours be spent?  What part of the whole process gives you the most pleasure or fulfillment?)In the computer hardware scene, an analogy would be my decision recently to buy a network attached storage server.  We really needed something for the company, and something that would easily function cross-platform (we have Macs and PCs both), and after Michelle's iMac hard drive fried this summer I was even more paranoid than usual about the backups thing.  I had long been thinking of running some kind of Linux set-up with Netatalk and Samba, probably hacking it out of various old hardware.  Ultimately, I threw in the towel; I know I could have put it together (having spent some evening and weekend time playing with the Linux partition I'd craftily installed on Michelle's P4 at home, when I was giving it a bigger hard drive), but I decided I was better off devoting my efforts elsewhere.  So I got a pre-built NAS machine, a Gateway device, rack-mount chassis, running a stripped-down Linux system with four IDE drives and RAID 5.  Still, I did buy it on eBay, which meant it was $600 instead of $2000.  If I hadn't been able to get a used/refurb one, I probably would have bit the bullet and brought a brand new one, smaller capacity, in the $800-$1200 range.  I just have too much to do -- as much as I enjoy the nuts and bolts of figuring things out and making them work, sometimes I have to decide I am going to focus on a different level of figuring things out and making them work, and spend the money on something with a lot of the work already done for me.A healthy market should have a wide range of options.  All gamers are "do it yourselfers" to some degree.  Some just want a core rulebook -- in fact, they don't need to buy anything, as they can download the SRD for free under the OGL, and make up their own experience point table.  On the other hand, some people prioritize their recreational time in such a way that, for example, buying pre-made adventures and worlds gives them a lot of value.  Spending $40 on a cool campaign book, or $15 on an adventure, and then spending the time available for gaming playing with friends rather than preparing for play, may be a great value for their money and time.  To others, it might seem a silly waste of money.Just like with computers; some people want a brand new hard drive with a warranty and a tech support number (if not a technician to install it) -- some of us are happy to pick up cast-off hardware, track down the jumper settings to configure SCSI ID and other options, and risk zapping our hardware with static electricity when we aren't careful.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></blockquote>

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