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

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.