The $8,500 Gaming Table You Want 260
Recently I stumbled upon The Sultan Gaming Table. With a price tag of over $8K, it would have to be awesome: but it has little compartments for the players and DM as well as a drop-down playing surface. If you find the pricetag daunting then you are a sane person, and might instead want to look at the Emissary which starts at a "mere" $1,500 and has many of the same features. Honestly I just love the idea of having my minis on a playing surface underneath the dinner table. I ought to be allowed to expense one of these. I also wish they had more pictures and fewer renderings on the site.
Re:Make it cooler (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:It's Just A Table (Score:3, Interesting)
A buddy of mine plays with a set of polyhedral dice that cost him $3800.00 for the set. They are cut from meteorites. his D20 cost $450.00 on it's own.
Re:It's Just A Table (Score:3, Interesting)
In college I successfully performed oral surgery on my own mouth (gory story ahead):
I had a horrible wisdom tooth, growing in 'sideways'. It would surge 'up' occasionally, making my whole jaw swell and causing horrible pain. I got the notion that if the thing could hit air, it might just stop trying to come in...
I sterilized the tip of my Kansas City Board of Trade pen knife with my lighter, and went to work on it in the men's room. Five minutes later, I had successfully removed a flap of skin over that tooth.
It has never hurt since.
I tell this story and people are shocked, but I grew up on the farm. Sometimes the common sense solutions work, sometimes they don't. But my next stop would have been at a dentist (without either funds nor insurance), so I did my best to take care of it. In my case, it worked.
Re:Okay, have had one of these in action. (Score:5, Interesting)
I've seen people ragging on the price. Look at the cost of nice hardwood furniture. And I said NICE. My mother's a friggin' oak fanatic. So I know how pricey this stuff gets.
Their prices are only outrageous when viewed in a vacuum. People are talking about being able to buy the materials and tools for less. Sure. If your labor is worthless and you have already figured out all the joinery and other neat tricks that they've incorporated into one of these tables.
Very likely though, you have not. As such, you're paying a skilled craftsman for labor.
I'm a computer programmer and play a lot of RPGs. I'm also a woodworking fanatic. I've spent the last 10 years collecting power tools, and I don't mean hand drills and jigsaws. I have a complete woodworking shop in my 3-car garage. I had to put in a separate 100amp subpanel just for the shop. I have probably $30,000 in tools. I've made maybe half a dozen pieces of furniture so far. I would have made more, but my time is limited.
I could probably make a decent attempt at this table and do fairly well. I'm sure mine wouldn't be as good. It takes skill to do this stuff, even with good tools. And the tools can be expensive. The dovetails for example take years of practice to be able to make them look perfect when doing them by hand. I can make perfect dovetails, but I use a $500 jig and two $200 routers. Even the router bits can be $5 to $40 a piece. And the hardwoods their using aren't cheap either. Things like oak, walnut, cherry, and maple can go from $2 to $8 a board-foot (144 cubic inches of wood), more (possibly 10x more) for figured wood. Then there's the finish. Getting it right is hard and takes hours of surface preparation. I still suck at this.
I'm amused by people's attitudes toward good furniture. People walk through furniture stores and ooh and ahh over the furniture. We have antique furniture now because it was made right in the past. The stuff you see today, most of it will fall apart in a few years. When I walk through furniture stores now, all I see are the shortcuts, finishing mistakes, and how that piece will fail.
People think that because you can buy a piece of crap particle board or MDF table at walmart for $50, that this table is outrageously priced. What's really happened is that your incomes have dropped so low that the real quality that we used to be able to afford is now beyond reach. I can't afford $8000 for a table. But I can certainly make nice ones now that my grandchildren will have in their houses.
Re:Okay, have had one of these in action. (Score:2, Interesting)
The hilarious part is that you can buy incredibly awesome stuff at auctions and junk shops for a fraction of what you pay for newly made lead-encrusted melamine and chipboard assembled by slaves.
Seriously, I paid $300 for my tiger oak dining room table with six book-matched leaves that store under the top. It was worth more than that 78 years ago when it was made, and it's only gotten prettier with time. All five legs were turned from single pieces of highly figured oak that were probably 6" squares to start with - just the wood would run you at least $300 today (and you can't even get an all-wooden sliding and storage mechanism like that today).
Re:It's Just A Table (Score:2, Interesting)