I got my dead tree version of Green Ronin’s Dragon Age RPG today and it looks pretty damned good. But on my chilly walk to the mail box, I got thinking. How many RPG’s do I really need?
I started doing a mental inventory of my primary gaming book case. Let’s see D20 including 3.0, 3.5, Pathfinder, d20 Modern and a few other licensed and original game. I have three versions of Star Wars. There’s a whole stack of old and new World of Darkness plus Trinity and Exalted. I’ve still got some Cyberpunk, Shadowrun and Mutant Chronicles books setting there too. I’ve got two editions worth of Gurps books plus plethora of miscellaneous books and supplements. The list pretty much kept on going and I hadn’t even started thinking about the gaming closet of doom and all of its ancient secrets and forgotten lore. I know I will never run or even play most of these games.
When it comes down to it, there’s very few games that I really plan on running any more. Pathfinder is great fun and I love playing it but there’s still just too many little nit-picky crunchy bits. Of course, there’s Savage Worlds. The little game that can do just about anything. To be honest, I doubt that another game system is going to match it’s ease of play and just the right amount of crunch. Cortex comes in very close but there just a few little bits that still don’t set that well with me but for some things I just might give it chance. World of Darkness has evolved into this unique love/hate relationship. There’s so much fluff and a few crunchy bits that are just cool but there’s always seems to be a little hiccup here and there. And today, I just picked up another game.
As gamers, we’re hoarders, collectors and kit bashing artists. It’s part of the hobby as a whole. Just because a game is never played, it still can be useful. The crunchy bits can be the inspiration for an endless array of house rules. Fluff can folded gently into whatever game system you want or just be an entertaining read. And a last resort, a bad old game is great bartering fodder to some who might just have a copy of that out print game that you’re suddenly needing. So, I guess you never can have too many games.
Feb 012010
Chuck on 
Banesfinger on 
You’re right, you never can have too many of them. Hunger for new RPGs cannot be satisfied.. and that is just a honest opinion.
You stated my feelings about collecting RPGs. I will go out and buy all sorts of RPGs, but my group of players are of the mindset, “I am D&D your God, thou shalt have no other RPGs before me”. So I know that trying to get them to play anything else just invites derision (“You actually buy other rpgs? HAHA!!”).
Anyways, I use material from other rpgs to supplement my current game. For example, I’m using Tome of Corruption from Warhammer 2e to deal with mutations from handling really evil stuff in my campaign called Taint.
Every game finds a purpose in my campaign.
I’ve been thinking about this more and more just now, particularly with the way Climate Change is affecting Africa and recent disaster in Haiti. I spend quite a lot of money on gaming and other hobbies for products which I enjoy owning but seldom (if ever) really use.
It makes me feel embarrassed because it is complete Western excess – we can afford these luxuries so squander our money on them.
I’m trying to bare thing in mind for future so I don’t just make impulse purchases of books I don’t need, or at least sell on books after I’ve decided that I don’t need them.
My wife and I have had conversations about this in the past, and she doesn’t realize the value of Kitbashing. She is a big video game player, but not a table top player, so the Idea of homebrewing, and converting cross system just doesn’t make sense to her. The only salvation that I had for my bookshelf was bringing shoes into it. But I did get to thinking: A lot of my games are fairly redundant.
My last D20 game was Jury-rigged spycraft, d20 modern(with the Future supplement), and Starwars SE. I could have used just one of any of them, but as a glutton for punishment I decided not to. My players all started with non-jedi starwars classes, but I opened up a large quantity of the other material in a handout of character option that were just copy/paste from the other sources.
Why do we feel the need to do this?
I personally hate generic systems like Heroes and GURPS, but at the same time my settings tend to be unique enough that specific RPGs tend to fail cover what I want(except L5R).
Hey, Andy. Don’t see generic systems too short. Each comes along with its own good and bad points. GURPS and Hero do have their place but I do think that both have become too cumbersome over the years.
I’ve always thought of them more like setting-less systems rather than generic.
I decided a while back to get rid of any physical books that I wasn’t really using – which pretty much means Savage Worlds stuff. I still have PDFs of other things that like to look through occasionally but don’t really use – 1st ed AD&D, TSR Marvel Superheroes, Rolemaster / HARP, etc. It’s a good compromise.