I may have done the nerdiest thing in my life

Everything else
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In light of @Scotch_Lufkin’s spreadsheet categorizing his feelings about wizard spells by school in a game that hasn’t even come out yet, I feel like we all have confessions to make.

As is tradition, I’ll start.

Back in the dark ages before we all had Google and QT3 in our pockets to distract us from encroachment of the grim darkness of the increasingly near future, I worked overnight security at a graveyard. Now, the worst thing I ever had to deal with was a nesting pair of geese near one of the mausoleums (geese, btw, are assholes), but the boredom…the boredom was a thing. I bought a PS1 with an attached 5" LCD screen and a car charger because the golden age of JRPGs wasn’t going to enjoy itself, and Art Bell only gets you so far.

Well, it turns out you can only replay Final Fantasy Tactics and Lunar so many times – for God’s sake, I completed the entire Arc the Lad trilogy that Working Designs (RIP) brought over near the end there – and besides, I had recently bought my first-ever gaming PC and Baldur’s Gate II had captured my heart.

Oh, Baldur’s Gate II. Let me count the ways.

Anyway, long story longer, I got way too caught in start-over churn as I waffled on PC classes and party mixes. Amn is great, but I was getting tired of walking across those districts over and over as I skittered across that tangled web of quests, sidequests, companions, merchants, and guilds. I was going to be efficient.

So I mapped out a damn-near comprehensive diagram of Chapter 2, from Waukeen’s Promenade to Firkraag Keep, and all the questlines therein. I made itineraries based on various parties - when I could get which companions, which quests were likely doable at what point, how long I had after recruitment before Korgan got pissy about chasing down Valygar or Nalia whined my ear the rest of the way off about restoring the Flail of Ages d’Arnise Hold.

I had matrices of party members. Who despised whom, where to get the necessary thieving skills (Nalia, Jan, ugh. No wonder my favorite parties all had a thief-y Bhaalspawn). Could I get away with just Anomen as a healer in this setup? (Yes.) Can Keldorn tank sufficiently with his shitty DEX so I can abuse his utterly broken Dispel ability in the fights where it matters? (Mostly.) Is being evil worth having Korgan, Viconia, and Edwin in the party at the expense of Keldorn and thereby not only the uber-dispel but the awesomeness of Carsomyr? (Oh, hell yes.)

Sadly it was all in a physical notebook that has long since perished in some move or another, but damn. I have spent a lot of time playing Baldur’s Gate II, but on balance it’s only about 0.5x the time I’ve spent thinking about Baldur’s Gate II.

How about you? What fabulous skeletons do you have proudly dolled up in wizard robes, propped up in the corner of your office to get maximum eyerolls from family members?

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I hate to think what could have been too nerdy for this thread. :)

I guess I’ve already contributed to this thread in way, but I wanted to stop in an say I love the idea and can’t wait to hear other’s tales.

The only other one that comes to mind (I have a lot, have no fear) is when I used to sit around at work and using notepad, create Dungeon Keeper 2 maps. In that DK2 map editor, you used symbols (like numbers and letters) to denote things like lava tiles and gold tiles, and so you had to create them on text files and load them into the editor (somehow, it’s been ages since I did this so I don’t recall the details) and it took a long time, but I made 3 or 4 maps and they were very well received by the community. I was super into DK2!

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I still have the pizza box board game i invented as a 9 year old somewhere in the garage. Complete with grease stains. Each space called a random event table with randomized enemies, leading to the Big Bad Guy in the center.

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Sorry, anonymous trolls from another forum have tried to harass/doxx me.

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I was too shy to actually post on my favorite USENET groups (especially rec.arts.sf.tv.babylon5.moderated), but once I made an exception. I wrote a screenplay that mashed up Babylon 5 and Pulp Fiction. That is, it followed the plot outline of Pulp Fiction, but substituted the characters and plenty of dialogue from B5 for humorous effect. I suppose you could call it “fan fiction”. Then I posted it to rastb5m, which was the most concentrated gathering of B5 geeks in meatspace or cyberspace. It was moderately well-received. One stranger actually reposted it for his personal website, which was nice.

Fortunately or unfortunately, you’d have to be pretty good with the Wayback Machine to find it now.

If I could have convinced my now-wife to incorporate John M. Ford’s Klingon wedding vows in our wedding, I think that would have been the nerdiest thing I’d ever done, but no dice.

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I invented several role playing games complete with heros, villians, systems, stats, etc. when I was a kid. We even played them. My favorite was a superhero RPG, because no one else had made one yet. Then the Marvel RPG came out and we dropped mine for that one whvh had all the real characters.

I wish I had kept that, I drew pictures for the character sheets and everything.

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I convinced my wife to have almost exclusively songs and music from the LotR movies during our church wedding, performed by a life singer and organist. We had “Into the West” and left the church to “Hobbiton" and had a few more I can’t remember.

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Too many choices make it hard for me to decide which is the nerdiest, but I think I’ll settle on printing out what was supposed to be a medieval scroll for a D&D campaign I was running back in the late 80s on really thick, colored paper using my university’s laser printer in its library. I had written it using, I think, the black chancery font, because I thought it looked sufficiently monkish. And then burning portions of it, dripping colored wax across parts of its text, and spilling too much black paint across it that I used for my miniatures, and ending up making it near-undecipherable for the players.

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I don’t know how nerdy it is, but I think it’s reasonably common knowledge around these parts that I’m a collectible hound. Feathers in AC2, orbs in Crackdown, achievements, whatever. As you might imagine, this tendency rears it’s head in real life as well.

I took a business trip to England maybe a decade ago, and I was told that all the coin currency had parts of a shape that when put together showed an image, a shield I think. So I spent that week making sure I collected all the coins that would get me that.

The Mariners were releasing five player bobble heads over the 2008 season, and I decided I had to have all of them. Not that hard really, just had to be one of the first 20,000 or so in the gate at the five specific games. Except one was on my wedding day. So I called anyone I could think of who would go to the game and let me buy the bobble head. I did get all five, incidentally.

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Thanks for that link, Djscman; I hadn’t heard a whiff of Elise in years and am glad to find that she’s still out there being Elise.

The Klingon wedding vows will not happen ay my wedding later this year, alas, but we are including, from Starship Troopers, “You’re it, until you die or I find someone better.”

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My own effort is puny compared to @inactive_user’s. Maybe because the game itself is just tons of times smaller in scope. That is what saved me.
I remember when I was around… 16 I guess?
I grew an obsession for Shining and the Darkness, a dungeon RPG with JRPG elements released on the Megadrive. It was not very elaborate, although a bit edgy in parts.
Anyway, I decided to do what I never had ever done: make a walkthrough of it. I made maps of every levels, with legends, coloured (anybody who knows me know that I am not one for graphical displays). No idea what took me.
I then figured that thing didn’t do me much good, and sent it to the official Megadrive magazine of my country. They didn’t publish it, but the following month, another publication from the same editing house published it… while saying all those amateurish annoted maps had been done by their own staff. I guess somebody in-house got a nice little check for my benevolent enterprise.
Taught be to be a nerd. I am cured, obviously!

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During the darkest of years when a copy of Space Hulk (IMHO one of the greatest heads-up combat games of all time) was not in print, and could only be had via insane eBay auctions or equally insane… making your own copy from scratch. 160 hand cut fully interlocking tiles, a hundred odd counters and chits, new art, a Dark Angel’s Deathwing reskin, and of course about 50 multi-part plastic miniatures. I worked on and off for about 5 years, long enough for SH to come back into print lol, and eventually restarted from nearly scratch to take advantage of new cardstock and printer resolutions that had become available over that time. Hundreds of hours later, it’s done.

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I’ve been writing a tabletop RPG system since college. Not quite on the level of most of the things here, but I’ve certainly plowed a similar amount of time into it.

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So, I’m going to break this into two parts, because nerdy is definitely in the eyes of the beholder.

Nerdy, to me:
In high school a friend and I bonded over both playing Ultima 4. Now, both of us were Commodore 64 nuts and had many games under our belt, but for both of us, Ultima 4 seemed huge in size with so much to do and so many places to find. This was in the age prior to strategy guides and internet wikis. It was also an age where you might not even find another person who owned a copy of the same game you were playing, so you drew upon your own experience much more than we all do today. As things happen, we both pursued the easiest path to win. It was my friend who let me know he would not loot chests from random encounter fights because he could then use them to run around to keep an enemy at bay. And so with that small tidbit, I set out to create an entire method of travel from city to city protected on each side with an unclaimed loot chest. It started as a simple first run from Britain to Skara Brae if I remember correctly, But I couldn’t just leave it at that. Then came other paths, with small circular areas around each town so I could use them as points to link to other spots. I covered as much as possible outside of severely blocked paths or things through the water. I think water encounters didn’t leave the same bug of a permanent loot chest.

The time involved to do all that was in the realm of something only a teenager with no job could even begin to fathom. In fact I think my friend went ahead of me and finished the game and kept asking me why I had not, but he just didn’t understand the importance of fun from overcoming the programming of the game by exploitation of its rules. I consider that an example of me being excessively nerdy.

In contrast, nerdy, to my fiance:
So my fiance has a young coworker who is a PC gamer. I’ve chatted with him multiple times about games but one particular night they were done working and so we sat back with some beer and he and I went through our gaming history with each other while my girlfriend listened on. She’s a mobile gamer, at best and understands very little about gaming, genres, etc.

So we went back and forth for nearly two hours talking and laughing about things as we skipped around game genres, big titles, small titles, ones we hated, ones we loved, etc. And then on the ride home, my fiance turned to me and said, “Holy shit. You are a nerd. I had no clue what the two of you were talking about for that entire time. I understood maybe 10% of what you were talking about at all. It’s like you’re from a different planet.”

I took that as a badge of honor. Strangely, I think just about everyone here on this site would also amaze her for that same background knowledge. It is thus we can understand the HUGE knowledge divide between those who play games, and those who do not.

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That’s how I played Ultima IV also - I mean with a partner, not the whole blocking enemies with chests thing. One of the most fun gaming experiences I’ve had. Then my friend moved to Florida and I had to play Ultima V on my own. Great game but it wasn’t the same.

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I felt the same way. Hell I actually feel the same way about gaming NOW, which is probably why I’m on this forum. Games are meant to be enjoyed with others.

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Man, there are just so MANY possible stories. I could probably write 20K words in this thread without even cracking the 21st century, and it’s not like I’ve gotten LESS nerdy with age or anything…

Here’s my first story: BattleTech (the board game) was released by FASA in the mid 1980s, and I think we got into it after the second edition because I don’t think I owned the original with the “BattleDroids” title. I assume everyone reading is familiar with the game, though many might not remember that it originally featured the RoboTech/Macross models through a now-defunct licensing deal with Harmony Gold.

Well, about that same time, the Revell model company was also taking advantage of the interest in RoboTech/Macross/whatever giant robot shows from Japan and they had a line of fairly large (maybe 8" to 12" high) models that were branded as “RoboTech” but only sorta-kinda fit into the show’s lore. However, they did largely correspond to the 'mechs in the BattleTech game.

The models were fairly cheap, so over a few years my buddies and I accumulated a couple dozen of these things. Being super-nerdy, we adapted the board game rules to kind of an open-movement, measuring tape thing where we’d play these large battles across an entire basement using the big models as the playing pieces. This didn’t work especially well since the FASA rules included firing arcs and facing that were tied to the hexagonal game board, but we made do with cardboard arc signifiers, etc.

OK, that’s only moderately nerdy so far, but it kicks up a notch. One of my buddies had fairly wealthy parents and their house was large and had a really excellent pool that we were infrequently allowed to use. The pool had a couple little levels to the surrounding patio and a built-in hot-tub that joined the larger pool with the little waterfall thing. Not an unusual setup, but pretty extensive for the time.

But here’s the key: the patio was made with hexagonal tiles about 8" across. Oh yes. So you see where this is going, but it’s worse than that.

See, we didn’t get to use my pal’s pool all that often. I don’t remember the details, but it was his parents, our overall schedules, his distance from civilization, and probably some other stuff; we couldn’t just pop over and use the pool any time we wanted.

So we arrange for a Saturday where we “reserve” the pool. We plan out all the details of the game; the sides; who will control which 'mech; etc. We come up with some special rules to fit the circumstances, like if your 'mech is a flyer and it ends its turn flying over water (the pool proper in this case), then you can do that, but you have to tread water and keep it roughly where it’s supposed to be so we can work out whether anyone has line-of-sight and range to it. We set everything up and start playing pretty early on a Saturday summer morning.

Did I mention we were 17 years old? I should have mentioned that. It’s important to the punchline. And that’s because - contrary to anyone’s expectations - a few of us have girlfriends at that time. Actual, breathing young women who voluntarily want to spend time with us and be seen in public with most of us as long as we don’t speak without permission.

The girls got wind of our having my buddy’s pool available, and they want in. OK, says we, show up in the afternoon and we’ll all swim. Surely, we reasoned, we’ll be done with our game after six or so hours.

Yeah, not so much. The girls show up at 2 or so and we’re on like turn six. There are boot-sized models scattered all around the pool. We’re all sunburned to hell and back. One of the shorter guys is desperately treading water in the middle of the pool with a futuristic F-14 held over his head.

Here’s the kicker: we wouldn’t let the girls swim. The game was too close and we wanted to finish. We told them it would just be another half hour or so… and after another three hours they all left in disgust.

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I am not at all nerdy based on what most of you guys have done. But I did run a Earl Weaver Baseball league and I have this thing for Dark Souls youtube play thrus.

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I used to do something similar, but I used regular white printer paper, which was then soaked in coffee and then baked in the oven to reach that parchment look and feel.