December 19th, 2008 by Chris Eng

Should you conduct your own purge, you’ll hit the point (or perhaps points) where you can’t wrap your head around getting rid of some beloved and useless collection. It becomes an immense blindspot, rendering you unable to even consider getting rid of it, even if on some basic level you know it does you no good. I just dealt with one of those. It took a lot of thinking and reasoning to acknowledge the problem and move past it. And it hurt. A lot. I made the decision to part with a huge portion of my roleplaying books.

Gaming is a life-long passion of mine. I got my first set of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons (Why start with Basic? Doesn’t that imply it’s dumbed-down? Gimme the good stuff!) for either Christmas or my birthday when I was nine—I can’t recall which. And though I didn’t have enough similarly-minded friends to get a game going at the time, it was D&D’s singular emphasis on imagination which kept me hooked. I made character after character, designed dungeon after dungeon, created world after world. By my teens I usually had at least one group together at any given time, culled from a variety of social groups.

And bought game books. I wasn’t particularly picky—if a system had a cool premise or neat set of gaming mechanics, I’d pick up the core rules. If it showed promise beyond that, I’d buy the supplements, too. It probably hasn’t helped that I’ve worked in gaming shops off and on pretty much since I got out of high school, but it’s helped me accumulate some pretty amazing RPGs: Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, the game they came out with before Games Workshop decided to switch completely to miniature-based tabletop gaming; Amber Diceless, a system based on one of my favourite series of novels, and the only one I own which proudly eschews any use of polyhedral dice; In Nomine, concerning the machiavellian interplay between the various castes of angels and devils; and Exalted, the greatest single game I’ve never gotten to play.

It’s a little difficult to describe Exalted in a nutshell—you might as well try to distill the essence of our world down to a short paragraph. The incredibly wide scope of the game is part of its inherent appeal. Still, a not too unfair description of it would probably be to take high fantasy on an epic level and add an equal portion of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon-style wuxia with a small dollop of the Holy Roman Empire. I’m forgetting some important influences, but that gives you a very basic idea. I fell in love with Exalted the first time I had it shown to me… and I started buying the books.

I don’t know how many I’ve ended up with over the past five years or so, but I have a stack of them standing over two feet high. Well sure, there are some doubles in there—if I ever got a game going, each of the players would need a copy of at least one or two of them—but most of them are singles, each of them covering an aspect of the game world at large. Sadly I never got that game going, so the books have just sat there.

On the other hand, I’ve somehow recently managed to convince (or trick, I’m not sure which) Carla to play in a Dungeons & Dragons campaign I’m running. It’s 4th Edition, which I was sure I’d hate (based on the fact that I’d been there since 1st Edition and a couple of them seemed like blatant cash grabs), but turns out I am a complete convert for. The changes made to the new edition are sensible and logical and it’s the perfect game to get new roleplayers involved with—hence, Carla. I’ve been buying the new supplements and have enough material and ideas to last for years. In fact, it’s one of the only games I can envision myself getting a campaign running for during the rest of my life. Sure, I may feel the need to branch out and break out the Paranoia for one or two sessions, or dust off the Warhammer FRP books again, but those would be the exceptions to the rule. I don’t see teaching Carla to play Exalted at any point in the future and she’ll likely be in most of the games I run from this point on (since she seems to be quite taken by gaming in general).

So, what to do with the mountain of gaming books that have accumulated over the course of my life? Get rid of them. It’s the only sane answer. I love gaming, but what I love about it is the interaction—the roleplayng. The imaginative part of the process (i.e. adventure creation and world building) is still fun and captivating, but I left the part of me that was content to sit there and world-build by myself back in my childhood. If I really want to build a fantasy world, I don’t need a set of rules to do it; I can just sit down with a pen ad some paper and make some notes. If I’m going to incur the expense of buying gaming books these days, it’s because I’m going to play them, and that means any games I won’t likely use will have to be gotten rid of.

It took way more effort to come to that realization than with any of my other collections, and I think it’s probably because of the extra investment of self which comes with gaming books. Whether or not you ever use them to run a game, when you read through them you can’t help but imagine yourself (or your group of characters) in the setting to some degree or another. There’s a piece of you in every gaming book you read. Still, they’re small parts of me, and they’re parts I can get back by participating in other games. Any ideas inspired by leafing through piles of rule books can be salvaged and used again somewhere else. Nothing is lost. So, it is with just a small amount of regret that I say good bye to most of my Exalted collection.

I say most because I’m keeping a few of the core books. Not many—five or six. A fraction of what I started with and only a few inches of the two foot pile, but enough to keep the ideas flowing. And I’m also getting rid of In Nomine and most of my 1st, 2nd and 3rd Edition D&D books. I’m never going back to play with the 2nd Edition rules again (I’m not a masochist; I hold no nostalgia for THAC0), so why keep them?

When all is said and done, the books I’m getting rid of will probably fill about four or five medium-sized boxes. But it’s not the amount of space I’m freeing up that is the payoff—it’s the fact that I know that over the course of years I may just end up with a streamlined and optimised gaming book collection I can use to give my wife a fraction of the joy and fun tabletop RPGs have given me over the years. Well, that and getting the rest of my friends eaten by dragons.

Save vs. Awesome.