Of dreams on display like butterflies

[pyat]

A long time ago (well, 10 years or so) I became a member of that curious society of hobbyists who buy tabletop RPG books simply as a collector, or to read. It really is a collection, in the same way other people have a collection of rocks, or stamps, or ships in bottles. Before age 25, I was buying games I intended to play, or supplements I intended to use. Not anymore. Now I buy things to read them, if that.

There is simply no way I could do justice to every single one of the RPGs I own and actually play the things, nevermind the various supplement books, etc. It's taken me seven and a half years to get through most of the Adventure Path series of modules for D&D 3.0.

That's nearly as long as the entirety of the personal "golden age" of gaming that most gamers experience and remember fondly. Which is to say, that period of our lives between junior high/high school and the end of college, when we had time to play, time to prepare and a limitless supply of government-provided pencils and notebooks.

If I were to return to the sort of gaming schedule I had in those days - 2 sessions a week in the school year, 5 sessions a week in summer - I could chip my way through some of the odd or strange games I have. Even on that schedule, it would take literally years to even run a short campaign for each of my games.

And there are some I simply have no interest in playing, even though I own them! Stuff like Cooperation or Dragon Raid or Fifth Cycle - gaming oddities with quirky systems and settings that interest me without appealing to me. Space Opera may be the king of these games.

I suppose one day I may box them all up and put them on eBay or bring them to a game swap.

Comments

[kores-rabbit.livejournal.com]

I've got a bunch of Palladium games books that I suspect I may never use again. Tonnes of world books for Rifts. I just hauled a boatload of D&D 3.0/3.5 books home from a friend's house. I will likely never use them except as inspiration.
I love gaming books. Oh such nerds are we.

[pyat.livejournal.com]

Inspiration is still good! And one can always use maps. Maps are gamer porn.

Cooperation

[thebitterguy]

Wait, which one was that again? I think I have a copy of that around here somewhere.

Re: Cooperation

[pyat.livejournal.com]

It's an SF game with a lot of calculus and bad cover art, printed in the late 90s. It's deperately important that you know the volume of your spaceship before you can travel anywhere.

[paka.livejournal.com]

How to say it... hm.

Okay, I figure that old games and magazines have sort of the same feel as reading National Geographic; you're never going to get to Kenya or Hungary, and you're never going to get to play Pendragon or Elfquest or whatever, but you can read this stuff and imagine. In this case, you also have the advantages of the platonic ideal game - you can imagine how cool it would be to discover or unveil all this coooooool stuff, all without the limitation of suddenly having your fellows decide they need to go to White Castle or get derailed by a 2 hour+ long firefight. Sort of like reading fiction.

And if you're actually running a game sometime you can tap this stuff for inspiration.

I dunno.

[pyat.livejournal.com]

I can see all that, and it definitely is true in the case of some games. And, with the right gamers, any game is good. Even Space Opera.

[zenten.livejournal.com]

I'm saving my books for retirement.

[pyat.livejournal.com]

When you can eat them? :)

[zenten.livejournal.com]

No, that's my stocks in cat food.

[athelind.livejournal.com]

Maybe I should box up some of the stranger outliers in MY collection and send them your way. You'll find some of the baroque mechanics amusing, I'm sure.

[pyat.livejournal.com]

What were you thinking? :)

I am the next phase.

[epi-lj.livejournal.com]

I own a collection of RPG books that I own just to read and I have never played an RPG.

Re: I am the next phase.

[pyat.livejournal.com]

I'm curious as to how that happened!

Re: I am the next phase.

[epi-lj.livejournal.com]

Way, way back in the day I got the D&D Expert System. I can't remember how I got it, but the date (Wikipedia suggests that Expert System came out in 1981 and I remember it was just newly released when I got it) suggests that it was probably a gift, since I would have been 9 at the time and not doing a lot of shopping on my own. Anyway, that was just after my family moved to the U.S. for a year and then back, and then I changed schools partway through the school year. A lot of my social ties were severed when we moved away, then the new ones again when we came back, and then again when I changed schools, so it was a pretty introverted time for me when I didn't really have a ton of friends that I hung around with. I remember reading the rules and looking at the pieces with a couple of friends, but we never played it. Probably in part I was too young really (my family was well-known for getting me gifts that I was too young for, determined that I was some sort of wonderkid well beyond my years), and probably having only one or two friends who weren't that interested in the game, I just didn't have the social resources.

In sixth grade, I had a teacher who sparked my interest yet again by holding a D&D game at lunch hours. Or rather, lunch hour. We played a single session, which was just rolling characters and preparing backstories, and then a kid went home and told their parent, and the parent complained to the school that the teacher was teaching us demon worship, and the school made her shut the club down. So we never did play. Around that time I was really getting into Infocom text adventures as well.

My elder sister, later in highschool, dated a guy who was into role playing games (she eventually married him but much later got divorced). He knew I was into science fiction, so he loaned me his Traveller rule set (the original little black book ones), which he wasn't using anymore and which I read and really enjoyed. However, he was like six years older than me and dating my sister -- we didn't hang out socially, and so I never gamed with him.

In highschool, I attended a gaming convention thing with a couple of friends who played RPGs extensively in elementary school. I bought a few books -- mostly Traveller universe products, but I bought Paranoia also because my friend liked it and I thought we might play, but it turned out that that convention and its relentless nerdery pretty much ended his interest in the 'scene', so we never played. He did try to start up a game on his BBS as a way to get some fun stuff happening there, but it was disorganized and never took off. Oh, I also got an early (photocopies in a folio) release of Macho Women With Guns.

After I borrowed the Traveller books, I made some software to do character generation and world generation and stuff, which I thought was a lot of fun. It was around then that I realized that I mostly just enjoyed reading about the systems and didn't really need to play. Also, the idea of playing was starting to trigger my burgeoning social anxiety. It seemed so... performative.

I sort of lapsed for a long time, but in University I got really into the On The Edge CCG, to the point where I picked up the Over the Edge RPG manuals just as background for the game (the CCG was based on the RPG). After that, I started picking up books here and there.

[...continued...]

Re: I am the next phase.

[epi-lj.livejournal.com]

A few years ago (okay, maybe eight years ago now), we did try to sit down and play. We had a friend offer to lead a bunch of us who had either never played or hadn't played in a long time, and one friend who used to play a lot. The guy showed up late. We made characters while we waited, but the who who used to play a lot turned out to be a really annoying player and basically forced us all to cheat on our rules and make these superhuman characters. When the DM showed up, he was hung over and hadn't prepared anything. He said he could wing it. There was a strong division of playing style between the three of us who were new, and were trying to give it an honest go and get into our characters, and the one guy I mentioned before, who kept wanting us to buy improbable weapons and wanted to just know where the monsters were, etc. The DM turned out to not have the brain power available to wing it very well or come up with interesting descriptions or seem to give two shakes at all. The session ran less than ten minutes before we were all, "You know, this just isn't working." and gave up.

To say that I now have a library is kind of misleading, though, because what happens is that I usually read them and then give them away to people I know who will actually play them. So I only retain a few of the books. I kind of want to buy another Over the Edge set, since I liked those and gave mine away. I have some of the new Traveller books just released. I have another sci-fi RPG book based on some illustrated spaceship books I had as a kid. I have a set of the old Traveller books. I'm not sure what else I actually retain.

[leonard-arlotte.livejournal.com]

When it first came out at GenCon, I played Fifth Cycle a few times, and bought it, in addition to 'Into the Dark' the special supplement that was never sold by itself.

I've since picked up all the supplements to the game, having enjoyed it back in the day. If I could find players, I would probably dust it off.

[girlydoll.livejournal.com]

With the style of gaming diminishing in interest due to online games it may be better to do it sooner than later.