TOPIC: What's your price point?

Like many others in this hobby, I have a certain amount of disposable income. But not every dollar is equal.
$1000 Legendary token? That's a great deal.
$45 bottle of whiskey that I waited hours for? It's a #666 single barrel release!
$20 Magic Card? I don't know if this is worth it.

What is your price comparison?

$100 UR, not much more then a ticket. $300 relic I can work up to it. But seriously you can be quite competitive with reds for less then the price of a ticket on most classes.Plus unlike magic they stay legal season over season and have good resale value.

Grizwald wrote: Like many others in this hobby, I have a certain amount of disposable income. But not every dollar is equal.
$1000 Legendary token? That's a great deal.
$45 bottle of whiskey that I waited hours for? It's a #666 single barrel release!
$20 Magic Card? I don't know if this is worth it.

What is your price comparison?

Well, I've spent a LOT more on individual Magic cards (like the last three I needed for my Beta set) and Comic Books than I have on individual True Dungeon tokens. I think certain Magic cards and comics are not only fun to collect but are great long-term investments. I consider tokens short term investments and fun to play with, but I don't really see any of them as long-term investments, considering within a few years (sometimes the very next year) almost any token might be either obsoleted by a newer token or reprinted.

Grizwald wrote: Like many others in this hobby, I have a certain amount of disposable income. But not every dollar is equal.
$1000 Legendary token? That's a great deal.
$45 bottle of whiskey that I waited hours for? It's a #666 single barrel release!
$20 Magic Card? I don't know if this is worth it.

What is your price comparison?

Though I own a few legendaries, I would never spend $1000 on one. I would rather buy tickets to runs, mostly to buy out a run and play with friends. More power to those that want to. Pretty sure the most I spent on a single token is for the 3 HoP's I bough off of ebay at various times when I first started playing. I think they were each between $200 and $300, but I could be remembering incorrectly. I have spent more on several tokens either through Jeff & Co or third parties.

In the good old days, two Jack-in-the-Box tacos for $.99 (plus tax). Convert all things into how many tacos. Obviously more applicable for food to show how overpriced most food is. Well, or maybe you are weird and don't like deep fried meat paste with a leaf, slice of unmelted cheese, and spicy sauce.

Entire CCG collections I still own <$$ one token I own. TD is hard for me to wrap my head around because it's a hobby with no connection to anything else with any similarity for me.

Tickets - super expensive compared to doing other things, like RPGs at cons. Tickets and 23 treasure and participation tokens - sure, I'll do that a bunch of times and ghost some, too.

Spending thousands on tokens compared to spending thousands on traveling the world and playing games with stuff I already own? Rational answer is the latter. However, tokens retain value to varying degrees even after being bought, so it's not the same as buying something transient. Can "rent" expensive tokens until decide to move on and hope they retain significant value when moving on.

My price point has really been to spend cavalierly, in an unsustainable way. See how things change as this year continues.

Netflix will charge me $18/mo instead of $14 if I upgrade to 4k UHD? Wow, that's getting steep, I'd better stop and think about whether I really want to pull that trigger.

Double down runs where I can get 2 hours of TD entertainment for $132 instead of $66? Sold!

(seriously, I really love double down runs now, which seems crazy given that I can still dimly remember a time when playing *both* dungeons at GenCon instead of just one of them felt like an extravagance, and I couldn't believe anybody would ever spend $100 for a token)

Also

Ian Lee wrote: My price point has really been to spend cavalierly, in an unsustainable way.

+1

David Zych wrote: Netflix will charge me $18/mo instead of $14 if I upgrade to 4k UHD? Wow, that's getting steep, I'd better stop and think about whether I really want to pull that trigger.

Double down runs where I can get 2 hours of TD entertainment for $132 instead of $66? Sold!

(seriously, I really love double down runs now, which seems crazy given that I can still dimly remember a time when playing *both* dungeons at GenCon instead of just one of them felt like an extravagance, and I couldn't believe anybody would ever spend $100 for a token)

Also

Ian Lee wrote: My price point has really been to spend cavalierly, in an unsustainable way.

+1

Good point, all told I've spent way more money than I want to think about on tokens, but I'm still on the cheapest Netflix plan and haven't been willing yet to get HBO Max. Disney+ was a no brainer, but I paid in advance for the 3 year deal at around $3 per month.

dice, I've spent a lot on dice... a lot....

but I could not justify spending 1200 US on a set cut from meteoric iron

At one of the last cons I attended, a dealer had beautiful sets of dice made from stone for about $80. I literally stood in the booth for about 20 minutes before deciding to pass on them.

David Zych wrote: Also

Ian Lee wrote: My price point has really been to spend cavalierly, in an unsustainable way.

+1

This is me also with TD especially the last year.

When I played Magic, I would occasionally drop $100ish on playsets of the top standard cards; and while I owned a few Moxes and other Power 9, I either received them as gifts or managed to trade for them. Wish I had held onto them longer.

Brad wrote: dice, I've spent a lot on dice... a lot....

but I could not justify spending 1200 US on a set cut from meteoric iron

If the dice were from an actual meteor, that would be tempting. I have $200 metal dice that feel amazing to roll and are beautiful that were definitely worth it (but you can’t roll on glass - yes, heavy metal dice can break glass in case you were wondering.)

Financially, I’m in a strange position that I suspect not many are. Having grown up relatively poor, being in a position that is quite the opposite is a bit twilight zone-ish. I made sure that enough in investments is set aside for a comfortable retirement, college for the kids, and a trust to support our farm and our non-profit work. Because I am still working and earning quite a bit, once I reached that point I decided it was ok to move from spending $250/year on TD and similar amounts on other hobbies to spending more. It still feels odd to do it (or spend on nice vacations, etc..)

Is $1K a good value for a legendary? Mostly yes (you can get armor, etc on ebay for less than $1K pretty regularly.) Does it feel bizarre putting in $8K orders for metal disks covered in plastic for a game when that is more than the first 5 cars you owned (combined) cost? Yep. I doubt I’ll ever get to the point where spending more than $50 on any gaming item doesn’t feel like a luxury.

I would never consider TD tokens a real investment. An investment implies you are intending to profit from it and have a reasonable expectation of that happening. Jeff could decide to retire and shut the game down tomorrow and the tokens would go to a near zero value. At some point (hopefully not soon), that will happen (I would hope he would sell the operation if he decided to go that route.) I’m not sure anything in gaming is a good long term investment. I have old games and gaming books that likely have some value but are mainly kept for sentimental reasons.

Spend on TD some percentage of disposable income. If it makes rent tight, don’t do it. You can have fun on runs with just rares or less.

Fred

I'd say that not all tokens are created equally. I went a bit mad with my token spend in 2020 because I didn't have anything else to spend my disposable income on and it made me happy, but I am going to be cutting back now that I can indulge in hobbies and activities away from my computer desk.

Spending some cash on something that will majorly impact the game is a lot easier for me than an incremental boost. Getting a level up item unlocks new abilities and spells is a lot easier to justify than something like the Lucky Cloak, which gives me +1 to my saves over the +2 I had from the rare. It's something that I'd be happy to pull or trade for, but absolutely wouldn't spend the money for that PYP. Treasure enhancers are similar, in that they give me a better chance of pulling good loot every time I run, so they're worth more to me than something like a +3 staff which gives a small boost to my spell damage over a rare.

I generally break things down into how many hours of work I need to do to afford it. If the spend makes me happier than that many hours of work make me sad then it's a worthwhile purchase. It all comes from the slice of my budget that's set aside as disposable income, things that I actually need to spend money on like groceries and rent get paid first.