I may have done the nerdiest thing in my life

Lots of the stuff in this thread is crazy impressive and nuts, but man, @DeForrestation, the pics on yours really jst take it to another level. That is incredible!!

However, your pool story has me snickering in my office, @Tin_Wisdom :-D


Like @Fishbreath above, I’m working on a tabletop RPG system. It’s a hack of the Fate Core ruleset set in a near-future scifi/comedy setting with some loving homages to Star Control, Mass Effect, and Star Trek thrown in for good measure.

After running a home game campaign for 3.5 years, I turned it into a larger public campaign, modeled off the D&D Adventurer’s League style of interconnected public gaming, something that our local RPG collective, RTR does routinely (we have other “Semi Organized Play” campaigns in Call of Cthulhu, Chronicles of Darkness, Exalted, and Mutants & Masterminds 3E, all running for three-month long seasons once a year).

So I blew about $650 commissioning art and logos from people for the races and game itself. I still need to commission some spacescapes, ship art, space station art, and NPCs, but that comes later. For now, we’re just focused on finishing Season 1 (Session 3 of 6 is this coming Sunday; so far, 16 players are RSVPed for our three tables!).

https://seekthestars.obsidianportal.com/wikis/main-page

It’s a long and involved endeavor, and I have no idea if I’ll ever monetize it or not, but sharing the crazy, wacky stories this universe/game makes possible with a bunch of good friends and more-or-less strangers here in Raleigh is insanely awesome. . . nevermind the hundreds of hours I’ve dumped into the process ;-)

I have a spreadsheet of every game I’ve purchased / owned since '92. Including (usually) price I paid for it, whether I finished it, and what I thought about the game. With different tabs for different platforms.

It was originally in excel, but I converted it to Google Sheets (well, actually, it was originally in Lotus Symphony…). The conversion was a bitch, because the dates refused to translate properly.

I’ve considered sharing it with all of you, but I sometimes name my female characters with rather … crude names. Parts of my brain are still 13, after all.

Here’s a bit from 2002 -

Operation Flash Point Feb-02 40 X Dave insisted. /shrug
Jedi Knight 2 Apr-02 40 Finished Four Times
SoF2 May-02 50 Finished
Warcraft III Jul-02 50 Finished
IWD2 Sep-02 50 Solved 2/16/03
Medal of Honor: AA Sep-02 Gift Finished
Hitman2 Oct-02 50 Finished
EQ: Planes of Power Nov-02 30
Starfleet Command III Dec-02 Gift Got halfway through the Federation (final) campaign
Galactic Battlegrounds Dec-02 Gift Played a bit, wasn’t that great
CivIII Dec-02 Gift Played a bit, wasn’t that great

https://i.imgur.com/IcbfsUl.png

In Ultima II, I had bridges of pirate ships crossing all the oceans.

image

Seriously, having to find a random encounter, kite it down the length of the loot chest roadway to the spot I needed to fill, fight the encounter and leave the loot untouched, it was insanity. I loved doing it.

Yeah, I agree with this. I grew up with a brother two years younger than me and parents that would on occasion join in so gaming’s always been a social thing to me. Friends and school only reaffirmed this too (FFVII and Thief: The Dark Project were the subjects of playground chatter in my circle).

Blimey, your poor fiance! ;-) I’ve been known to do the same and my girlfriend has become quite knowledgeable over time thanks to it, but I try to keep it to a minimum these days or pull the conversation around to include her gaming endeavours more because… yeah, being lost while two people talk in another language can’t be much fun! That said, get her on to certain subjects and she won’t stop either so… Nerds gonna nerd! :-)

Oh my god, that’s amazing. What happened with your relationships afterwards?

I don’t know if I’d say your actions were nerdy, @ArmandoPenblade and @DeForrestation. I just think they show an awesome dedication. As someone who just spends his whole life zapping around (so much so I don’t own a TV — haven’t got the time to dedicate to zap with that), it fills me with awe.

I probably should add an episode that is sticking with me.
I learned English playing Phantasy Star II (I was studying German as my language at school). The following year, I started an English class, and I asked my teacher something that had been burning me: what the final sentence of the ending of the game meant.
She wasn’t able to answer me, which worried me then, and worries even more in retrospect, as that sentence wasn’t that difficult (I wonder what the people will see in the final days, for reference)

I certainly don’t still have it, but when I was 11 or 12 a friend and I designed and built a boardgame/wargame based on the Iliad, complete with papier mache landscape and “miniatures” made of fimo.

I had a friend in college who ran an earl weaver baseball league in Austin. It wouldn’t be you, would it?

Oh, and I obsessed over an Earl Weaver baseball league in college. But that’s definitely not the nerdiest thing I’ve done.

I’m not at all nerdy compared to you guys.

In the late 70’s my brother and I got some copies of the AH magazine The General an a few AH wargames. Not having access to any more wargames we reverse engineered Kingmaker and a railroad game whose name I have forgotten from feature articles. I went on to design a wargame about the battle of El Alamin as part of an enrichment class in high school but I never did finish the map.

Now most of the nerdy stuff I do is different. For a while I had the disassembled battery pack from a Chevy Volt in my basement while I used it in my project of building a Power Wheels sized F1 car. Due to my upcoming move I have shelved this project and sold off the battery pack.

I just want you all to know that you are fabulous people.

When I was maybe 10 or so I liked the show Space 1999. That’s already pretty nerdy but it gets worse. I built a cockpit from cardboard based on the spacecraft in the show (they were called Eagles).

It was not that elaborate, mostly just an enclosure with windows cut out in the shape of the Eagle’s windows which were distinctive quarter circles. The cool part is that my father was an electrical engineer and he helped me rig up battery powered lights and switches so the cockpit was a little more fun.

Holy shit, is it me or did it turn out better than what you would have gotten from ebay?

I love Space Hulk, I actually had the (somewhat) recent anniversary edition, but we weren’t playing it any longer and I got $150 on ebay for it some years back (which is a little over what I paid) after playing it for a few weekends. It didn’t look as good as what you put together, I know.

Thanks! I’m pretty happy with it, even if I only get to break it out to play twice a year at most ;) I was actually offered a brand new in box 3rd edition for only $100 and decided to pass, the weirdo kitbashed one (which the building of incidentally sent me down an irrecoverable wargame spiral) just feels special to get on the table.

@ArmandoPenblade , Holy crap! Talk about a level of dedication, I just cut paper and paint by the numbers, there’s a whole universe crafted there. I did the click on a random wiki entry from your site (Plodnar) and was not disappointed :)

And @Tin_Wisdom story of the epic battle to retake Lake Suburbia, through hours of (historically accurate) mecha combat nearly brought tears to my eyes. Good show on that one.

That’s some impressive stuff. I skimmed a bit of it and I’m really liking what you are doing here so far, like the milestone system.

Holy flashback … I had one of these toys as a kid:
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It became a carry all for my piddly star wars figurine collection from the first movie. Later another show toy was added, which I think more people would recognize, now.
image

God, my uncle had that Eagle 1 ship and I’d totally forgotten about it until you posted that picture. Edit: actually, I think it was a smaller version.

They had several versions. One was a “cargo” like ship if I recall. I honestly don’t know which one I had but it easily held about 7 or so star wars figures.

I’m nerding out again, aren’t I?

I used to play Strat-o-matic Hockey.

I’m glad y’all like it! As noted, some of the mechanics borrow heavily from Fate Core (an “open source,” generic rpg meant to act as a skeletal frame for systems to be built on), but there’s lots of modifications and stuff going on and getting playtested now.

Having characters roll to electrostimulate a 96-year-old Guy Fieri’s heart into pumping long enough for him to survive a massive heart attack and finish judging a cooking competition in an interstellar dive bar in order to settle a massive galactic diplomatic incident peacefully was…everything I’ve ever hoped for out of an RPG.