The Hobby Thread

[Carborendum]

58 minutes ago, zil2 said:

Go to Turkey!  Everything's yummy there.

I hear it's pretty humid in the darker areas and pretty dry near the white sands.

[mikbone]

4 hours ago, mirkwood said:

My other big hobby is Dungeons and Dragons.

Nice.  

I got the following game for Christmas off e-bay that I remember fondly playing in my youth. 

The 4 youngest kids 9-15 now want to play D&D badly.

What do you recommend for a starting set?

[mirkwood]

5 minutes ago, mikbone said:

Nice.  

I got the following game for Christmas off e-bay that I remember fondly playing in my youth. 

 

I remember that game.

 

 

Quote

The 4 youngest kids 9-15 now want to play D&D badly.

What do you recommend for a starting set?

 

That depends on several things.  We have three DM's in our group.  My son and I both run 1E games.  My son also has a 5E that we sometimes play.  Our third DM runs a 5E game.

 

Have you played?  What edition?  Do you still have the books?

 

I'll tell you if you have played, 5E while it carries the name D&D, it is not Dungeons and Dragons of old.

 

If you think your kids will play with others their age 5E is probably the route to go.

 

I prefer 1E/2E, but I do have fun playing 5E too.

 

 

[mikbone]

43 minutes ago, mirkwood said:

Have you played?  What edition?  Do you still have the books?

Played long ago with a crappy DM.

Perused Players Handbook, Monster Manual, Dieties and Demigods.

Dont have them any more

Bought a couple copies of Tomb of Horrors after reading the Book Ready Player One 

And I got a set of dice.

What are the required basics to run a single campaign just to give the kids a taste.

They will probably just play with family.

 

Dude they just made a revamped version!

Edited January 18, 2024 by mikbone

[Ironhold]

1 hour ago, mirkwood said:

I prefer 1E/2E, but I do have fun playing 5E too.

 

 

5E never impressed me, and the scandals out of WOTC over the last few years have been such that I've basically noped out of D&D for right now unless it's an older edition.  

That being said, I recently acquired the Anime 5E manual, and find that to be a far better balance of all-ages & compelling to play. I just need to carve time out to get a group together.

Edited January 18, 2024 by Ironhold

[zil2]

2 hours ago, Carborendum said:

I hear it's pretty humid in the darker areas and pretty dry near the white sands.

[NeuroTypical]

I did an awful lot of this in high school and into college:

 

I'm still playing Mechwarrior 5 on the PC, when my wife lets me hook it up to the living room TV.

 

[mirkwood]

1 hour ago, mikbone said:

 

What are the required basics to run a single campaign just to give the kids a taste.

They will probably just play with family.

 

 

 

Dice, the rulebooks for the edition you want to play and either premade adventures, or a DM willing to write adventures.

 

Rulebooks needed would be the DMG, PHB and MM.

 

 

[mirkwood]

6 minutes ago, NeuroTypical said:

I did an awful lot of this in high school and into college:

 

I'm still playing Mechwarrior 5 on the PC, when my wife lets me hook it up to the living room TV.

 

Great games.  Still have my copies, though I didn't play the tabletop Mech Warrior until I was in my 40's.

[rcthompson88]

I love board gaming.

I play this one with my Bishop and a few others whenever we have a day (or a whole night) that we can devote to it:

[mikbone]

10 minutes ago, mirkwood said:

premade adventures

Can you recommend 1 or 2 good ones for beginners?

[Maytoday]

I memorize Pi. I'm not really sure why.

I also rollerblade, even in the winter.

That's it, and writing that I feel like I spend entirely too much time on youtube.

 

[rcthompson88]

18 hours ago, zil2 said:

You all know that fountain pens constitute a hobby for me, as well as simply being my normal writing instrument.  I also review fountain pen inks for how they look and perform in a Japanese EF nib (this is the finest "extra fine" nib available for stock fountain pens - as opposed to custom) - it's a very under-represented nib size in most ink reviews, making said reviews not very helpful for EF nib users, so I'm trying to fill the gap.  This is my main / biggest hobby.

So, what are yours?  Do you collect Legos?  Do you spend every spare minute out in the garden?  Maybe you play in a band on the weekends.  Whatever - tell us your hobbies.   (Those who have absolutely no hobbies can lurk here for ideas...   )

A lot of my hobbies are games based, particularly playing chess, Baseball Strat-O-Matic, and reconstructing ancient board games. When I was a teacher I taught ancient history of the eastern hemisphere and western hemisphere, and learning about the games played by these civilizations was a favorite unit activity of mine.

[zil2]

5 minutes ago, rcthompson88 said:

learning about the games played by these civilizations was a favorite unit activity of mine.

Yes.   The Royal Game of Ur or Nine Men's Morris.  Alas, I live in the midst of a bunch of people who don't like such games.  The best I get is dominoes every now and then with the neighbors across the way - chicken foot is our favorite variation.

[rcthompson88]

10 minutes ago, zil2 said:

Yes.   The Royal Game of Ur or Nine Men's Morris.  Alas, I live in the midst of a bunch of people who don't like such games.  The best I get is dominoes every now and then with the neighbors across the way - chicken foot is our favorite variation.

Royal Game of Ur was one of my kid's favorites. The base rules are fairly easy and there is enough interaction between the two players to keep them interested.

[Ironhold]

1 hour ago, NeuroTypical said:

I did an awful lot of this in high school and into college:

 

I'm still playing Mechwarrior 5 on the PC, when my wife lets me hook it up to the living room TV.

 

Battletech has continuously been a thing, although the IP has changed hands a few times and this has caused a variety of complications for both the game itself and the fiction of the game. Your local Target might actually still have a few of the most recent starter box, which is premised on Solaris VII. Note that while Iron Winds Metal does still make a small amount of metal gaming miniatures, the game has largely gone over to plastic since it's a lot cheaper. 

Car Wars is being revived, with brand new miniatures and other materials to go with them. 

Ogre, though, doesn't seem to be very popular, at least not locally. 

[NeuroTypical]

24 minutes ago, Ironhold said:

Battletech has continuously been a thing, although the IP has changed hands a few times and this has caused a variety of complications for both the game itself and the fiction of the game. Your local Target might actually still have a few of the most recent starter box, which is premised on Solaris VII. Note that while Iron Winds Metal does still make a small amount of metal gaming miniatures, the game has largely gone over to plastic since it's a lot cheaper. 

Indeed.  I might go download the Mechwarrior 4 abandonware some day and see what the latest modders have done.  A quick google says random people have added clan stuff and a bunch of DLC.

[mikbone]

I might have gone a little overboard after reading Ready Player One.  The arcade simulator plays like 500 games (from X-arcade). I had my twin bro help me customize it.  It’s been in the garage for the last 6 mo due to the current home remodel.  

Robotron is my favorite.

[NeuroTypical]

Speaking of School House Rock, it's had an interesting run in cultural reaction.

70's - 90's: Yay this thing helped me get good grades in school!
2000's - 2018: Totally forgotten as we all focused on our careers.  Some of us bought the CDs and made our kids watch them.
2018-early 2022: 1st wave millennial ascendancy says SHR is white colonizer genocidal capitalist propaganda and must be destroyed.
Late 2022-present: Angry woke millennials are off to other things, and 2nd wave millennial ascendancy are saying things like "Wow this is cool - the only thing I was ever taught about America is that George Washington owned slaves.  Those old people seriously did math?  Crazy!"

Although I was reminded of this SHR, that was almost banned in my house by my dad, a self-identified "male-chauvinist-pig" who came back from WWII to discover women had entered the workplace, and stayed mad his whole life about it.

 

[LDSGator]

19 hours ago, mikbone said:

I might have gone a little overboard after reading Ready Player One.  The arcade simulator plays like 500 games (from X-arcade). I had my twin bro help me customize it.  It’s been in the garage for the last 6 mo due to the current home remodel.  

Robotron is my favorite.

Dude this is awesome. 

[mikbone]

17 minutes ago, LDSGator said:

Dude this is awesome

Other side

[NeuroTypical]

You're missing the Depeche Mode sticker.

[Jamie123]

I am very interested in philosophy, though I'm not as involved with it anything like enough to call it a "hobby". When my daughter was little I used to talk about it with her. Sometimes I would read to her from Plato's Republic to see what she made of it. As she got older though, she started studying philosophy as a subject at school, and our conversations became something like this:

Me: So you've been learning about Kant? Didn't he believe in dualism?

Daughter: No, that was Descartes.

Me: Kant believed in dualism too. The noumenal world and the phenomenal world?

Wife: If you're going to disagree with her, why ask her in the first place?

Me: I'm sorry, I may not know much about Kant, but I do know for a fact that Kantian dualism is a thing. I have read about it.

Wife: Why do you have to argue all the time?

Me: We're not arguing, we're having a conversation.

[mikbone]

On 1/19/2024 at 11:21 AM, NeuroTypical said:

You're missing the Depeche Mode sticker.

Album covers.

 

Depeche Mode 

Mute Records

1990

 

The album covers on the arcade machine all came out during my sojourn in Jr High and High School.  I was in already back from my mission and in Undergrad when Violator came out.  Great album though.  And the cover art was great.

This came out after I graduated from HS

September 1987

Edited January 20, 2024 by mikbone

[NeuroTypical]

Great, now Imma have "words like violence, break the silence" in my head for the next few days. 

We'd sit in my basement with my commodore 128 playing Wasteland with those songs on loop.  Sometimes I dream doing that stuff.