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Railing Kill posted:In casual play, sure. That would be like using proxies in a game of MTG. I did it from time to time when I was testing things out in Mordheim (a small-scale, platoon, street-fighting version of Warhammer). But if you show up to a sanctioned event or a tourney with that stuff, you'll get DQ'd wicked hard. Yeah I figured that actual sanctioned tournament play would be strict, but it should be possible for people who aren't interested in serious competition to play without dropping a grand or two. Then again, I think those people probably wouldn't be the kind to fall into the sunk cost fallacy for Warhammer anyway because they'd just move on or house rule things if the game started sucking. Is there a market for cheaper counterfeit products as well? Do tournaments check everyone's minis to make sure they're the official brand name products?
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Jan 16, 2017 18:34
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chitoryu12 posted:Being someone who's literally never played 40K or any other miniatures-based game before, is there any way to play without spending a ton of money on official products for gaming outside of competitions? Like do places let you just use quarters or paper tokens or something so you can play without dropping the price of a motorcycle first? Maptools is great for this. It's how I play all of my wargames (stupid not living near any good wargaming places), you can create tokens that look like anything, with any dimensions you need. Just play on a map with the grid turned off and tweak the Units scale however you like. I've used it to play Warhammer, 40k, Necromunda, Flames of War, Black Powder, Warmaster, Kings of War, Bolt Action and probably a few more I've forgotten. I can post screenshots of how it works if you're curious.
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Jan 16, 2017 18:35
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chitoryu12 posted:Yeah I figured that actual sanctioned tournament play would be strict, but it should be possible for people who aren't interested in serious competition to play without dropping a grand or two. Then again, I think those people probably wouldn't be the kind to fall into the sunk cost fallacy for Warhammer anyway because they'd just move on or house rule things if the game started sucking. There is, and the higher end ones do. WH40K runs on "WYSIWYG" rules, mainly if your squadron has 4 rocket launchers in it then you need to have exactly four models holding rocket launchers. If the army box only came with 2 rocket launchers, the expectation is that you would buy a whole second army just for those two extra models. Certain online retailers used to sell "Bits" meaning they'd pop open product and sell the extra models and add-ons individually but Games Workshop found out and got pissed and started pulling the licenses of anyone who did that rather than charge the full amount.
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Jan 16, 2017 18:39
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chitoryu12 posted:Is there a market for cheaper counterfeit products as well? Do tournaments check everyone's minis to make sure they're the official brand name products? Yes and No. Most tournaments for GW games don't care about the minis so long as you're clear about what's what and aren't being an outrageous rear end in a top hat about modelling for advantage and whatnot. It's mainly the ones put on by GW themselves that insist on you using their figures. Even at GW you can normally get away with recasts so long as you aren't dumb and speak openly about it.
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Jan 16, 2017 18:41
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chitoryu12 posted:Yeah I figured that actual sanctioned tournament play would be strict, but it should be possible for people who aren't interested in serious competition to play without dropping a grand or two. Then again, I think those people probably wouldn't be the kind to fall into the sunk cost fallacy for Warhammer anyway because they'd just move on or house rule things if the game started sucking. I once had the following dialogue in a casual game of Mordheim: Them: "What is that troll doll deployed up on that ridge?" Me: "That's a Rat Ogre." Them: "Oh. Ok." I was looking to start up a Skaven (rat people) warband, but I hadn't yet invested the money to do it. so I subbed a warband with dumb poo poo. I liked Mordheim because the warbands were smaller, and therefore cheaper. you could field a competitive band for $50-100 instead of $1,000+. There's also only 6-12 minis to paint instead of ten billion. (Paint is another big cost to a lot of players. Lots of players can't paint worth poo poo, or don't want to. The going rate to have someone else paint them is the price of the figure, so that straight-up doubles the cost by itself). There is a market for off-brand minis. There's generic ones that could be used for D&D and stuff, and a lot of them seem to be designed with GW stuff in mind. Like, this "Space Soldier" has insanely huge shoulder pauldrons I WONDER WHY??!?!?!" hose tend to be cheaper, but not enough to be worth the hassle of people giving you poo poo about them. Edit: What those goons said. WYSIWYG is the golden rule. If it's representative of what's in your stats, then that's more important than the brand of figure. Some people even go out of their way to use different figs, just to make an interesting looking army. Railing Kill fucked around with this message at 18:45 on Jan 16, 2017 |
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Jan 16, 2017 18:42
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Kaza42 posted:Maptools is great for this. It's how I play all of my wargames (stupid not living near any good wargaming places), you can create tokens that look like anything, with any dimensions you need. Just play on a map with the grid turned off and tweak the Units scale however you like. I've used it to play Warhammer, 40k, Necromunda, Flames of War, Black Powder, Warmaster, Kings of War, Bolt Action and probably a few more I've forgotten. I can post screenshots of how it works if you're curious. I've always been completely clueless when it came to figuring out Maptools. I'd love to use it for GURPS games because of the difficulty in finding locals for play.
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Jan 16, 2017 18:44
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Kurieg posted:Certain online retailers used to sell "Bits" meaning they'd pop open product and sell the extra models and add-ons individually but Games Workshop found out and got pissed and started pulling the licenses of anyone who did that rather than charge the full amount. IIRC GW themselves had giant bits catalogs that you could order single specific models and bits from, but they discontinued that in favor of making you buy whole boxes of stuff for that one extra plasma pistol arm or whatever you're searching for. While we're on the topic of making GBS threads on games workshop, I'd feel something was amiss if we didn't mention the huge ripoff that is Forgeworld: the entity that sells slightly more interesting looking plastic army men for about twice the already ridiculously inflated cost of standard GW plastic army men.
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Jan 16, 2017 18:50
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yeah, GW is very strict about people buying things and using their figs in the way they prescribed. I have a friend who doesn't even play that would just buy a fig to paint and have as a knick-knack, does make me wonder how many mini buyers are just hobbyist painters too.
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Jan 16, 2017 18:58
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Robindaybird posted:yeah, GW is very strict about people buying things and using their figs in the way they prescribed. Your friend is GW's ideal customer, or he would be if he spent 2000 dollars on models and never actually played the game. What they want are display hobbyists, not actual gamers.
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Jan 16, 2017 19:03
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Kurieg posted:Your friend is GW's ideal customer, or he would be if he spent 2000 dollars on models and never actually played the game. What they want are display hobbyists, not actual gamers. haha yea, he only buys one every six months or so and not any of the huge sets or transports/etc, though I should mention about gamers wanting to pay people to paint as he could use a source of income that's less physically straining.
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Jan 16, 2017 19:22
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At the same friend's store that I mentioned earlier, there was a dude who's job was to paint minis. He wasn't employed by the store, but he was a vet who was horribly injured and on permanent disability. He had to do something sedentary to make a living, so he painted minis for people (and I think he made dollhouse furniture, like Det. Freamon in The Wire). The store managed his work queue and brought him a steady stream of customers. He had a waiting list no shorter than six months at any given time. He charged just under the price of the fig to paint it, and his work was good. Like, professional-level work. It was a great arrangement, and it the only time I've been happy to see wargamers spend as much as they do on GW poo poo. He also made a scale replica of a section of Stalingrad for a big Battleground WWII event that the store ran. It's still the best model anything that I've ever seen.
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Jan 16, 2017 19:57
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chitoryu12 posted:I've always been completely clueless when it came to figuring out Maptools. I'd love to use it for GURPS games because of the difficulty in finding locals for play. Well if you want to give it a try, here's the campaign file I use for 40k http://www.filedropper.com/warhammer40kframework It's got a bunch of maps and games in progress/after completion on it if you want examples or stuff you can just use.
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Jan 16, 2017 20:03
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chitoryu12 posted:I've always been completely clueless when it came to figuring out Maptools. I'd love to use it for GURPS games because of the difficulty in finding locals for play.
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Jan 16, 2017 21:28
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Railing Kill posted:At the same friend's store that I mentioned earlier, there was a dude who's job was to paint minis. He wasn't employed by the store, but he was a vet who was horribly injured and on permanent disability. He had to do something sedentary to make a living, so he painted minis for people (and I think he made dollhouse furniture, like Det. Freamon in The Wire). The store managed his work queue and brought him a steady stream of customers. He had a waiting list no shorter than six months at any given time. He charged just under the price of the fig to paint it, and his work was good. Like, professional-level work. It was a great arrangement, and it the only time I've been happy to see wargamers spend as much as they do on GW poo poo. I really like seeing well-made model environments. Since it was a big event, I don't suppose there are any pictures of it hanging around?
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Jan 16, 2017 21:35
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Prism posted:I really like seeing well-made model environments. Since it was a big event, I don't suppose there are any pictures of it hanging around? A quick Google search didn't turn anything up, and the store's page doesn't have anything about it. The big event was a while back, so it wouldn't be in anything current. But the store owner probably still has photos somewhere. I'll get a hold of the owner and see what I can do to scare some up. I've been wanting to take a look at the Stalingrad model myself to get some ideas for making model terrain anyway. (I live a couple hours from the store now, so I don't get in there as often as I used to.)
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Jan 16, 2017 21:43
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My friends and I played many games of Warhammer Fantasy with pieces of paper cut into grids, twigs stuck into bases, and Lego figures mixed in with fully-, half- and unpainted minis.
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Jan 16, 2017 22:00
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I seem to recall GW getting especially up in arms over the relative ease in which people can now share and 3D print lookalike models from their vast catalog.
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Jan 16, 2017 22:17
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Maybe they should put some efforts into their sculpts then, as your average consumer grade 3D printer can't replicate decent models. 
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Jan 16, 2017 23:03
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Railing Kill posted:It's a bit of both, but mostly the latter. A friend of mine runs a game store, and I know a bunch of his regular GW players. When they're being totally honest, there's a pang of regret when they're griping about their games because they've sunk over a grand into just a single army, and most of them have at least three armies. When the investment to be competitive is over $1,000, I can see why they hang on as long as they do. I have seen a lot of them sell their GW stuff off and jump to Warmachines and the like. I knew that that game was ludicrously expensive, but I had no idea how much. I once put a few hundred dollars into collecting A&A miniatures but I ended up selling my collection for 80% of what I paid for it months later because I couldn't find anyone to play with. Despite making back most of my investment I was ashamed of the huge money sink into much smaller, plastic tanks and the like that were already in colour out of the box.
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Jan 16, 2017 23:54
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I have a buddy who owns a used videogame store, though he also dabbles in some boardgames and MtG. Back when he was getting started, the co-owner at the time convinced him to stock some WH40K merch, swearing that there would be interest for it if they had it in stock. To make a long story short (since I don't know all the relevant details), GW more or less stole 3 grand from them and never delivered all of the promised product. For the longest time, they had a GW display rack with like 1 paint kit and 2 small army boxes just gathering dust in the store.
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Jan 17, 2017 00:31
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Every FLGS owner has GW horror stories. Ever been to one with that big rack of blister packs? Yeah, GW doesn't let you just order the ones you keep selling out of either, you gotta buy them in bulk meaning eventually you just stop ordering all together because people that play warhammer usually only want a handful of those and the rest just sit on the rack for years.
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Jan 17, 2017 00:34
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That really does explain why (prior to their move) Merlyn's WH/WH40K stock is shoved way in the back corner.
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Jan 17, 2017 00:58
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Mondian posted:Every FLGS owner has GW horror stories. Ever been to one with that big rack of blister packs? Yeah, GW doesn't let you just order the ones you keep selling out of either, you gotta buy them in bulk meaning eventually you just stop ordering all together because people that play warhammer usually only want a handful of those and the rest just sit on the rack for years.
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Jan 17, 2017 01:09
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JustJeff88 posted:I knew that that game was ludicrously expensive, but I had no idea how much. I once put a few hundred dollars into collecting A&A miniatures but I ended up selling my collection for 80% of what I paid for it months later because I couldn't find anyone to play with. Despite making back most of my investment I was ashamed of the huge money sink into much smaller, plastic tanks and the like that were already in colour out of the box. Yeah. $1,000, give or take a couple hundred, is about what you might expect for a competitive army in 40K or Fantasy. You can field a decent army for about $500, but that's not going to do a whole lot and won't be all that fun or special. You can save some money by painting everything yourself, but most people are already doing that. If not, you're probably up in the $1,500+ range. People, myself included, talk about Magic like it's an expensive hobby, and it definitely can be... but it doesn't need to be. You can make a decent commander deck on the cheap, for anywhere between $50 and $200 (if you buy all the cards at retail price, which no one does). But $500 is the bare minimum to field a single loving army in Warhammer. That would be like saying, "You need to buy six booster boxes worth of cards to make one complete Magic deck." And WH figures don't appreciate in value like CCG cards do. And most WH players have a few armies. It boggles the mind.
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Jan 17, 2017 01:17
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Railing Kill posted:People, myself included, talk about Magic like it's an expensive hobby, and it definitely can be... but it doesn't need to be. You can make a decent commander deck on the cheap, for anywhere between $50 and $200 (if you buy all the cards at retail price, which no one does).
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Jan 17, 2017 04:24
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Hell, my spouse and I go infinite just drafting on friday night magic. Sell the value cards back to the store for credit and use that credit to pay for the next week, and take the prizing as credit. I think we're up like 80 bucks right now in credit..
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Jan 17, 2017 04:42
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Kumo posted:A Bard named "Fresh," with a weird symbol for a name. Did he at any point use the phrase "smell you later" or refer to growing up in the western part of whatever hometown he claimed?
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Jan 17, 2017 04:49
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Yay for having a group willing to buck the murderhobos stereotype. We ended up coming across a large group of brigands, played along with the first stage of their extortion, and then basically explained that yeah, we know what's up, and maybe we can provide an alternative payment that doesn't involve fighting. So far we've healed one that looked like he got into a fight with a bear and lost, and in general are having a fairly peaceable lunch while discussing the situation we find ourselves in with the brigands, who are larger than us in numbers but probably could be smoked in the span of 8-10 rounds, tops. For the record, one of my party is lawful good, 2 more are neutral good, one is lawful evil (more as a defense mechanism after being a slave for a long time than anything, he doesn't actually like what he's become too much), one is neutral and I have no idea what the last one is, but the neutral one has straight up shanked a guy for information (I don't know IC, and he thinks I don't know OOC), so we're not exactly playing a group of Dudley Do-Rights here.
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Jan 17, 2017 08:45
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Lesson learned from today's session: just because the GM gives you a nice fancy sword loaded to the gills with magical enchantments, and just because there's an armor-boosting helm to go with it, doesn't mean you should go off charging into the teeth of battle when you really just broke-in to the facility to recover a vial of McGuffin liquid. That's the second time in three sessions that I've escaped by the skin of my teeth. We did escape with the thing we needed (and was maybe one round away from dying horribly), but I can already feel the weight of repeated "marginal victories" piling on complication after complication.
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Jan 17, 2017 10:29
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gradenko_2000 posted:Lesson learned from today's session: just because the GM gives you a nice fancy sword loaded to the gills with magical enchantments, and just because there's an armor-boosting helm to go with it, doesn't mean you should go off charging into the teeth of battle when you really just broke-in to the facility to recover a vial of McGuffin liquid. I think "complicated" is a very diplomatic way of describing your imminent situation.
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Jan 17, 2017 16:40
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gradenko_2000 posted:broke-in to the facility to recover a vial of McGuffin liquid. Are you by chance playing an XCOM 2 themed campaign? Because that's eerily familiar.
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Jan 17, 2017 17:50
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Joe Slowboat posted:Are you by chance playing an XCOM 2 themed campaign? Because that's eerily familiar. 
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Jan 17, 2017 18:09
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Dareon posted:Did he at any point use the phrase "smell you later" or refer to growing up in the western part of whatever hometown he claimed? I think it was just a Prince reference, not a Simpsons reference. Part of the campaign featured jobs the PCs were required to perform as members of the Guild. The idea was that these tasks would let the PCs obtain experience, gear, and lead to pieces of a larger puzzle as to what was really going on in the city. At least at the beginning, jobs were undertaken with the supervision of senior Guild members. Two PCs were tasked to accompany Golden Ox, the Guildmaster, and a group of orphans to the zoo. One child (brat) ran afoul of a swarm of monkeys and the PCs had to intercede. After dropping the kids off, the group next went corpse collecting, and finally (curiously) were in the precisely right place to sweep up coins from a knocked over bank wagon. The Dustman's Guild being in charge of keeping the streets clean, of course. The other PCs went hunting for sea ducks with Marigold - both for meat and feathers for beds. They were successful, but encountered some wreckage from a ship & local frog-like creatures (Grippli), who were freaked out about something that had happened recently, but they had difficulty explaining what precisely. Because the Golem had tetanus, he was dispatched to an alchemist in a nearby district for treatment. He was received and treated for it, but the alchemist was fascinated by the Golem's physiology and made him a deal to come back for further testing and samples. The golem noted some curiosities in the alchemist's laboratory, but was told to pay it no mind.
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Jan 17, 2017 18:20
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Kumo posted:I think it was just a Prince reference, not a Simpsons reference.
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Jan 17, 2017 19:06
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Talking about the game store that my buddy runs reminded me of how horrible the LGS is where I currently live, and how much I miss living near my buddy's store. There's a bunch of cat piss stories that come out of the bad store. Here's one: There was a little while when I was playing in a Pathfinder game and none of the players could offer a decent time and place to host the game. So we checked with our local game store to see about using their side room. It's what the room was for, and most game stores I've seen have something like that. My old store, the one my buddy runs, has a side room that people can just use, free of charge, for RPGs. This store, though, charged a fee. That's fine, I guess. I asked how much it was, and the owner told me:  Five bucks. Five bucks per game is no problem. We'll take it. No, it's 5 bucks per hour.So I conferred with the group via text (I was the only one at the store at the time). We needed a table for about three hours, from 7 to 10. The store was open until 10 on that night (Friday), so we decided to bite the bullet and pay the $15 for the table. Pooled together, it was three bucks per person, so that wasn't bad. Not good, but not bad either. I paid, telling the group that they can owe me. I was still by myself at the store at about 6:00, but around 6:45, the rest of the group shows up. When everyone was there, we went into the room. The table was covered in wargame poo poo: minis, terrain, stacks of books. I went back out and ask the owner to move the stuff so that we can use the table. I told him there's no rush because we have ten minutes or so, but we do need the stuff moved. I tried to be diplomatic. Can't you just move it to the side and work around it? You're just playing D&D, right? No, not really. We're playing D&D, but there's too much stuff all over the table. And I wouldn't want to move someone else's stuff without them knowing where I was putting it.The owner sighed and asked (read: told) his girlfriend to move the stuff. A side note on her: she worked at the store unpaid at least a few days every week. She was another local college student, and was basically the store owner's Bang Maid. I would have had sympathy for her if she didn't choose this for herself. But I digress. The owner's girlfriend dallies on getting to the room. (Who could blame her? It's not like she was getting paid to do it.) It's 7:30 by the time the room is clear enough for us to use. Normally, I wouldn't mind waiting a half hour to play, but when we only had three hours in the first place. That's 1/6th of our time. The first game went well otherwise. We killed a gang of troll highway robbers. The next week, we went to pay as a group. We were told: Fifteen bucks is not enough. That's how much it was last week. No it wasn't. It's five bucks per person.With that obvious line of bullshit, the room is now $25. To me, coming from a good game store, having to pay to rent a table is bad business. So even the $15 was a bit steep for my taste. $25 was really bad, especially since we were only going to be able to use it for three hours at best. The group conferred again away from the store owner. Two of the players were pinching pennies pretty bad, being poor undergrads. "I haven't eaten since noon. I brought a fiver for food, so I can either eat or I can play," one of them said. I offered to pay his way, being a comparatively rich grad student (ha....) at the time. But we all agreed that $25 was too much, and this would be the last time if the price stayed that high. We were all caught in that awkward trap of feeling socially obligated to pay because we were already there. That was a big mistake. So we did. We paid $25 loving dollars for three hours worth of table time. We got started at 7:00 that time, which is good. What wasn't good was what started happening around 8:45. At about that time, the store's overhead music got louder. It went from ambient noise that you could easily tune out from conversation, to the kind of volume you'd hear at a restaurant that sucks and plays music at a volume just high enough to trip up every conversation. Like Texas Roadhouse. But we soldiered on. After about five minutes of that, the volume increased again. Now it was the kind of volume you'd expect from a bar on open mic night. Like, the music dominated all of the other sound in the room. We couldn't hear or see anything going on in the rest of the store, so one of the players suggested that maybe the sound system in this room is independent from the rest of the store, and that maybe it got turned up by accident. Just as a couple of us had gotten up to go talk to the owner about it, the song changes to "Closing Time", at the same volume. Now we all get it. But it's still 9 PM and the store is supposed to be open until 10 PM for Friday night Magic. We went out to talk to the owner. The place was empty, and he was sitting as his desk looking pissed. He said not enough people showed up for FNM (?), so he cancelled the event and was closing the store early. But we paid for a table to use it until 10. Well, I'm closing the store now, so you guys needs to leave. We wouldn't have paid for the table if we knew it was going to be two hours. Can we have our money back? No.I could have dug me heels in and gotten our money back, but I didn't want to bother with that for the sake of $25. I wish I could say that I gave him poo poo for being a baby that passive-aggressively drove us out of the room instead of talking to us like an adult. We never used the place again, and we just put the game on hiatus for two weeks until one of us could arrange for a space to play. I have a few more stories of this guy and his store. Horribly, my wife worked for him for a while. Not as his Bang Maid, but as a mural painter. That got ugly.
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Jan 17, 2017 19:14
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Tell us about the mural painting also tell us why you would ever have anything to do with that dude especially in a business sense.
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Jan 17, 2017 19:50
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I would have walked at per hour. Anybody who charges for play space in a game store on an hourly basis is either overcrowded or an rear end in a top hat.
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Jan 17, 2017 20:49
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Ominous Jazz posted:Tell us about the mural painting also tell us why you would ever have anything to do with that dude especially in a business sense. Sure! I didn't have anything to do with the guy directly, and my wife (now, then girlfriend) was a college student at the time and needed a second job. But let me back up a bit so we can really smash this story against a wall at full speed. My wife is a professional painter now, but she was just getting started with doing it professionally back then. She did a mural back in high school at a LGS near her, elsewhere in this state. That one is literally a joke: it is three life-sized depictions of known female fantasy characters (I don't remember who off the top of my head). They are pointing downward mockingly and whispering to each other. They were painted on three walls of the bathroom. It's at Spellbound in downtown Waterville, Maine, if you're ever in the area. They're nice folks in there and deserve your business. The mural is also still there, so you can have three pretty ladies laugh at your baby dick while you take a piss, if you are so inclined. The LGS in my town now is not worth your business. My wife wanted to both make some extra money and get some experience for her painting portfolio. At about the same time, one of the guys from Spellbound talked to the owner of the bad shop and recommended my wife's work out of the blue. That put the idea in the grognard's head, so he drew up a contract for her. It specified paying her hourly, rather than a set amount as one normally would for a mural. But it also didn't fix a time frame. My wife was very clear about this right up front: this was going to take a while. He wanted three of his game room walls painted, each of which was 15-20 feet long, and about eight feet high. He wanted art covering those walls, not just in little spots. He wanted a straight-up mural. My wife told him it would likely take her 9-12 months to complete the work, given the amount of time per week she could dedicate to it. She told him she was a full time student with one other job already, so she could give him up to 15 hours per week, tops. The contract both of them signed specified her hourly wage, the dimensions of the space in question, and a rough description of what was to be depicted. It required no specific time frame or weekly hours on her part. He was fine with everything she specified, and he was fine with the contract. So let's talk about this guy. Imagine the Comic Book Store Guy from The Simpsons, but replace most of the fat with Randian philosophy. There is nothing else meaningful I can say about him that wasn't already said in the previous story. He's a womanizer, a cheapskate, and socially unpleasant to say the least. He's also the reason this town can't have a good game store (well, that and no one else has stepped up in a concerted effort to put him out of business, although the local book and music store has supplanted his shop as the place to go for Magic cards). This Randian Superman was now my wife's boss. At first it wasn't so bad. My wife was happy just to be painting instead of working her other, generic retail job. She sketched out each wall, first on paper, and then in pencil on the walls themselves: one wall was three MtG characters (Liliana, Jace, and Chandra), one wall was Warhammer 40k, and one was Warhammer Fantasy. This was what was agreed in the contract. So far so good. I don't know if anyone paints, or has seen someone paint. Suffice it to say, painters use either in-person models, or reference images. They never paint detailed images from memory. And since Chandra wasn't loving standing there to pose, my wife looked up reference images. This the grognard took as "slacking off." I guess he assumed that everyone else was as lazy as him, like when he would be farting around on the internet all day whenever he was in front of a computer. Every new reference image was an opportunity for him to get after her. Didn't you already have a reference for that wall? What are you doing now? Well, I'm painting a Tyranid now, so I need a reference for that.He also did that thing movie and TV producers often do: he didn't let the artist do their loving job. He would constantly demand different things of the compositions, often contradicting something he had said a week or so earlier. Part of painting is designing the composition. My wife made it clear that his best bet for the work to get done right, and on time, was to give her a rough idea (as in the contract) and let her compose the details. That worked for a couple of weeks, but then he started jerking everything around. I guess he can be forgiven for this insofar as he's definitely not the first person who has done this, but it's still douchy as hell. It just isn't exceptionally douchy like everything else he does. He also did that classic TV producer thing where what he was asking for was increasingly bad, because he has no eye for design. my wife kept telling him, "you need to trust me on this one. That idea isn't going to look good." That would work for a day or two at a time, then he'd be at it again soon after. Remember when I mentioned that my wife was a full time student with two jobs? And that they agreed upon that from the start? Yeah, well, he kept ignoring that too (shocker). If she went in for any less than 20 hours in a week, he'd give her hell over it. Reminder: she agreed to 15 hours per week in the contract. He made her cry a couple of times. She managed to hold it together and cry in the bathroom. Small victories. He seemed to have no sympathy for, or even understanding of, college student workload. He would give his girlfriend poo poo about this, too. Again, his girlfriend basically volunteered her time to come and hang out with him at the shop, where he would let her do all the work while he hosed around on the internet. But she was also a college student, with a real job of her own, and yet he would get mad at her for not showing up all the time to do his job without pay. He started getting mad at my wife when the work wasn't done after six months, and all but demanded that my wife come in 30 hours per week. My wife tried to explain to him that she literally did not have enough hours in the week to do that without quitting her other job and/or dropping classes. He did not seem to care. (This is all besides the point that his anxiety about the timeline did not matter a bit. There was no big event he needed the mural done for. There was no ticking clock. And he paid her hourly, not salary, so it's not like he was getting less work for his money. He was just being an impatient dumbass.) The last straw luckily came near the completion of the mural. My wife had about two weeks worth of work left to do on it. Liliana, Jace, and Chandra were done. Space Marines fighting Tyranids were done. The Warhammer Fantasy wall just needed a bit more work. It had been about ten months (of the agreed upon 9-12 months). Then my wife's grandmother, whom she lived with in middle school and high school, died. When my wife told the grognard that she wouldn't be coming in on some previously agreed upon day so she could attend the funeral, he gave her hell about it. I wasn't there, but here's a paraphrae from how I understand it: I need to go out of town for her funeral tomorrow, so I won't be coming in. That's not what we agreed on. I know, but there was a death in the family. Who died? My grandmother. Sure she did.I'm a college professor now. I totally understand this impulse to disbelieve a college student who says their grandparent died. I once had one student have three grandparents "die" in one semester. But there are right ways to deal with this, and wrong ways. The wrong ways (see above) are wrong because sometimes a college student actually has a grandparent loving die. My wife choked out a brief response, he said, "sure, whatever," and she went outside to pace around and call me for a ride home. He apparently never even looked up from his computer screen in that whole exchange, too. A real Randian Superman. I lived right down the road. I pulled up to find my wife in tears, being consoled by one of the regulars who was out for a smoke. She got in the car and told me all about it. I already knew about the other crap because I was in there often enough, and from her telling me. But this was beyond the pale. We went to the funeral, and when we got back into town, she went back to work finishing the mural. She worked for four more days finishing that mural, probably 20 more hours, and didn't say a word to him the whole time. He didn't notice at first, but apparently he tried to talk to her in passing on the second day and got no reply. On the third day he went out of his way to talk to her, and still got no reply. On the last day, my wife signed that loving mural, packed up her poo poo, and left without saying anything. My wife says he was saying something to her on her way out, but, "it didn't sound like an apology so I didn't stay for it."
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Jan 17, 2017 21:15
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Bro, seriously, name and shame. There's points where the Geek Social Fallacies come into play, and then there's this poo poo. Call the bastard out for being an insufferable prick, so that way others don't have to go through the same deal.
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Jan 17, 2017 21:30
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Yawgmoth posted:That wasn't a Simpsons reference, it was a Fresh Prince reference. Which is what that name clearly is as well. Player drew a weird symbol next to his name on his character sheet and insisted we refer to him as such. The players maintained the poor bard was touched in the head (perhaps due to the early onset of syphilis) and paid him no mind. But yeah, perhaps it was a Fresh Prince reference, definitely Prince, no Simpsons. Since I'm here and to speed along HAY GUYS OUR GAME. Their second day on the job as Dustmen, they get partnered up with Quinn, a journeyman, and he explained Harper's crabs to them. Harper's crabs were a local species that annually hatched and swarmed the city, clogging drain-pipes & cisterns and generally being a nuisance. The Dustmen went down into the sewers periodically to destroy the egg clutches to keep the population down. It's a living. The PCs descend into the sewer and set about eradicating egg clutches, but chance upon a hidden ladder. Being PCs, they go up it into a small study with very old books and a undead creature called a Crypt Fiend. A fight ensues and the Monk gets crited, being held against the ceiling, armor sundered as he is disemboweled. They finish off the Crypt Fiend and tend to the Monk while the Bard finds a curious magical passage into another, smaller space with some thing lying on a bier. A fight ensues and he manages to kill the thing handily with his dagger of spell-storing unleashing a sonic burst. They carry back the monk to the Guild hall, where he convalesces with Sinclair, an older Guild member missing one arm and with horrible burns and scars on her body. The monk heals, and the party sets out again to visit the alchemist for the Golem's check-up on his tetanus, but they find no alchemist once there. They do find a Hungry Flesh in his stead. They manage to kill it, without becoming infested with tumors themselves, (hooray) and manage to recover a potion of regenerate in the alchemist's stores as well. The monk decides to offer it to Sinclair, and when he does she slaps him and storms off. The monk is taken aside and it is explained to him that Sinclair was matron at the city orphanage overseen by the Dustmen, which burned down in the fires at the beginning of the campaign and had to be restrained from going back inside to rescue more of the children. A few days later in game, Sinclair emerged from her convalescence with two whole arms. Thereafter she treated the party and the monk in particular with, if not kindness, something approaching respect.
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Jan 17, 2017 22:32
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