What are your "dumbest" TTRPG costs

[MNblockhead]

I should think of a better word than "dumbest", but I just got off work and am tired. Also, I'm going through all my recurring expenses and recent purchase history as I currently have to rent in another city from my family, had to buy a second car, and drive 678 mile round trip to visit my family a couple weekends a month. I'm basically married but have the expenses of a divorcee and it will be this way for about a year. So finances have taken a big hit and that makes a lot of my discretionary spend seem dumb. The following are some bad habits I've gotten into with my gaming spend due to being in a much more comfortable financial situation where I could be lazy and eat the wasteful spending.

• D&D Beyond. I am paying for a Master Tier subscription and I've not run a D&D game since January. I kept it for my son to use but he almost exclusively is a player and he and his friends play pen & paper, so he's not even using it. Worse, I'm paying for a hosted Foundry instance and have already imported all my D&D Beyond content into Foundry. So this will be the first thing that will go. What makes this even more dumb is that if I cancel my sub, I still have access to all the content I purchased. I can't create new homebrew or share my content with others, but I'm not doing any of that now anyway. Anyway, I've cancelled my subscription. It is paid up through August, so I still have full access until then, but I'm not looking to run D&D again until the end of the year at the earliest, so I cancelled so I don't start paying more for something I'm not using.
  
  
• Buying stuff that I have not plan to use in the near future. Doesn't matter if there is a great deal. Even an incredible Humble Bumble deal. Spending money on anything I'm not going to use in the near future feels stupid when I'm need to cut costs. I have everything I need to run my current Warhammer campaign until it is complete, which will probably run well into next year and could run much longer if my players and I want to. So, I'm noping out of backing any Kickstarters, impulse buying great Humble Bundle deals, and buying new Warhammer Fantasy books that come up, no matter how cool they look.
  
  
• Buying in multiple formats. I'm not that bad with this recently. Most of my spend since December has been on Warhammer Fantasy. Cubicle 7 / Games Workshop are not great about giving discounts or bundles when you buy the same content in multiple formats. I've avoided buying any of the physical books. I received the Core book as a Christmas gift, but I personally have not bought a single WFRP 4e physical book. I have, however, bought most of the Cubicle 7 modules for Foundry. I also bought the PDFs for much of the same content. Sometimes, it is just more convenient to prep or reference rule content with a PDF. But I don't have to have the PDFs. If I just take some time to put together more my own reference journals in Foundry, it would be as if not more convenient than the PDFs. If I do buy any more Foundry modules from Cubicle 7, I'm going to resist the urge to also buy the PDF.
  
  
• Minis and other physical items. Since I've been running games exclusively online now for over four years, I've basically stopped buying physical miniatures, terrain, and game aids. But occasionally, I'll see something cool that I could see using if and when I run an in-person game again. No more.
  
  
• I need to look at my Foundry hosting useage with the Forge. I'm paying at the highest tier, but that was mostly because I was running a years-long Rappan Athuk campain, until the end of last year. That was a huge amount of content that I added to my instance that did not come from the Forge's marketplace (if you buy from Forge's Bazaar, the assets don't count towards you storage). I am sure I can (which means I should) downgrade my sub with the Forge. I could save even more by self hosting, but the Forge sub give a lot of quality-of-life improvements for managing things. While I'm technical enough to host myself and have the equipment and bandwidth to support it, I don't feel strapped enough for cash that I want to deal with extra hassle.

Of course all of the above is dwarfed by what I'll end up spending for Gamehole Con in October. But that's been planned and saved for. Part of me feels like I should cancel the hotel reservation and not go forward with it, but I haven't been to a proper con in years, so I'm probably not going to cut it. On the other hand, I'm tempted to nope out of Gamehole con and save up for Gary Con next year instead. It is not in my budget to go to both.

Anyway, how have/would you order cost-cutting in your TTRPG spend? Have you ever looked at your TTRPG spend and had a "well, this is stupid waste of money" realization? I'm guess for most it will fall into the category of "buying stuff you never play or even read."

Lastly, how do you balance other categories of discretionary spending against your TTRPG spend? For myself, I cancelled most of my streaming services (just kept Amazon Prime, because I also use the free shipping a lot and have a prime visa with a good points program). But I would cut my TTRPG spend to the bone before cancelling guitar lessons.

 

[Reynard]

I keep forgetting to cancel a Roll20 subscription that was gifted to me 3 years ago that I now pay for, despite the fact that I run games exclusively using Fantasy Grounds. That's pretty dumb.

 

[Emberashh]

I have a $300 GM Screen and I just bought, today in fact, an even fancier one for around 700 all in.

I'm also an absolute dice Goblin whilst simultaneously being a sucker for Gemstones and Metal. I don't want to admit how much I've spent on that though.

 

[Blue]

My dumbest TTRPG cost? Hmm, that was Gary Gygax's Cyborg Commando RPG after he was ousted from TSR. Hmm, it was a bit after my paper route, but still working just a few hours a week after school making minimum wage for 1987 ($6/hr).

I offer that somewhat humorously - even the games I haven't had a chance to play or run have be at the least decent reads and supporting an industry where creatives need every bit they can.

On a more serious take, I've bought the various Bones Minis kickstarters, time and time again, even though I barely painted any from the first kickstarter and now haven't been playing in person much at all.

 

[MNblockhead]

My dumbest TTRPG cost? Hmm, that was Gary Gygax's Cyborg Commando RPG after he was ousted from TSR. Hmm, it was a bit after my paper route, but still working just a few hours a week after school making minimum wage for 1987 ($6/hr).

I offer that somewhat humorously - even the games I haven't had a chance to play or run have be at the least decent reads and supporting an industry where creatives need every bit they can.

On a more serious take, I've bought the various Bones Minis kickstarters, time and time again, even though I barely painted any from the first kickstarter and now haven't been playing in person much at all.

I playtested Cyborg Commando at Gen Con. It was great meeting and playing (for a very short demo) with Gary, but I ended up not buying the game. Now I regret it. While I still wouldn't want to play it, it would have been cool having a signed copy and something tied to a good memory. Instead I have a signed Polyhedron #1 signed by Gary. A signed Cyborg Commando would be a lot cooler. Of course, high school me was not thinking about what 50+ me would appreciate.

 

[MNblockhead]

My dumbest TTRPG cost? Hmm, that was Gary Gygax's Cyborg Commando RPG after he was ousted from TSR. Hmm, it was a bit after my paper route, but still working just a few hours a week after school making minimum wage for 1987 ($6/hr).

I offer that somewhat humorously - even the games I haven't had a chance to play or run have be at the least decent reads and supporting an industry where creatives need every bit they can.

On a more serious take, I've bought the various Bones Minis kickstarters, time and time again, even though I barely painted any from the first kickstarter and now haven't been playing in person much at all.

Yeah, my retirement plan consists mostly of "paint all those damn Kickstarter Bones minis collecting dust on my top shelves."

 

[Wofano Wotanto]

Very little in the way of current TTRPG expenses, wasteful or not. The most recent thing I regret was the ~$120 spent on that dreadful Absolute Power game, which was a pity purchase from the FLGS because they'd made the mistake of ordering an extra copy for me. I note the (single) other copy they got in is still collecting dust, as it should. On the plus side, having read it has cured me of all my nostalgia for Silver Age Sentinels and BESM/Tri-Stat in general.

Don't suppose anyone would like to trade for a copy of the fool thing?

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

I never really got into painting minis, but I have several hundred pounds of them- lead, pewter, resin, cardboard & plastic- mostly of fantasy, sci-fi characters. Included in that are not just heroes & foes, but things like Dwarven Forge (and other) terrain.

They come from a variety of companies, and some are connected directly to games- some of which I never had any intention of playing.

And most of them are probably still in blister packs.

 

[Alzrius]

Years ago, I bought a shrinkwrapped copy of TSR's old Quest for the Dungeonmaster board game (the one from 1984) for...let's just say "a lot."

Looking back, I'm pretty sure I got taken, simply because most listings for it today are less than what I paid for it then. Heck, I'm not even sure that the shrinkwrap it's in is the original shrinkwrap; there's a reason why, at the Gen Con auction every year, the guy who runs it always points out that "shrinkwrapped" isn't a legit condition for when you describe how pristine an item is (or is not), since anyone can buy a shrinkwrapper and repackage something.

 

[Arilyn]

I have a $300 GM Screen and I just bought, today in fact, an even fancier one for around 700 all in.

I'm also an absolute dice Goblin whilst simultaneously being a sucker for Gemstones and Metal. I don't want to admit how much I've spent on that though.

Dice for me too! I have (so far) resisted a beautiful etched glass set that's over $100 Canadian. So far...