Of dreams on display like butterflies
Jun. 5th, 2009 09:09 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pyatA 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.
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.
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Date: 2009-06-05 04:33 pm (UTC)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.
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Date: 2009-06-06 01:37 am (UTC)