You have a shelf full of rulebooks and you have spent hundreds of pounds/dollars over the years keeping it that way but just how much of what fills your shelf would you honestly buy if you were given the chance to read through it all those years ago? Sure you’ll have the systems and the settings that you’ll have played before as a player or picked up for a quick look while at a friends house but how many have you bought either off your own back or after barely reading a review online or in a magazine?

I’m looking at my shelf at the moment and a lot of it is obscured by the detritus beside my bed but at least 50% of what I can see is settings that I’ve barely used.

• Dragon Mountain – To this day I still have no idea why I bought it. The books have been flicked through maybe twice and then discarded to the bookshelf never to be opened again. In fact I think it was bought at the urging of a few of my players who quickly changed their minds after I’d handed over my hard earned cash and they’d got their grubby mitts of the books for themselves.
• Karameikos – I know why I bought this and I know why it still sits on my shelf and not in a landfill somewhere. For many years I played D&D using the Rules Cyclopedia and was sitting on the edge of my seat when I found out they were releasing the setting for AD&D. Again this setting has never been touched except for the occasional flick through to remind me of what mistakes TSR could make. I think it was still TSR at the time. It’s a lesson in how something right can become so wrong when no thought goes into the process.
• Birthright – This looked very promising when I first got a hold of it. And do you know just how much of the setting and rules I’ve used over the years? I’ve used the map. That’s it. I spent £20 and used a map that I could have made for pennies. This one I have no idea why I keep it on the shelf though. It must be the logo on the side of th ebox as it looks quite impressive.

In fact now I think about it I’m convinced that I keep them just to beef up my collection and make it look more impressive. Does anyone else do this or am I the only one thats so insecure about the size of his collection that I have to buy guff just to make myself feel better?

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Why do I have such a downer on updates to game systems?

1. It’s expensive.
I’ve spent thousands of pounds over the years on roleplay books. At least 90% of that was on supplements and campaign settings rather than rulebooks so you can understand when I get a little miffed when the publishers bring out a new version that makes all those supplements and settings worthless in the eyes the new system.

2. Same old story just different rules.
So when WOD went through a reboot very little changed. The mechanics where mixed up and ‘refined’ and that’s about it as the same basic story kept going. To be fair to White Wolf they basically shot themselves in the foot when they first published that Gehenna was on it’s way. Or were they just very shrewd people that knew exactly how many people would buy the new rules?

With Dungeons and Dragons 4ed  they’ve basically turned it into D&D lite. It’s not a refinement of the previous games or an expansion on the system. They’ve took the popular parts from online computer games and melded it together with the previous rules to create something that doesn’t feel, to me at least, like any D&D game I’ve seen before. Why not keep the old D&D line going or at least fix the bits that didn’t work and release 4ed as a new game line but one that uses the same world? Have it as an extension of the mini battles game and market it to the crowd of young gamers moving up from Pokemon and the other card games that seem to be morphing into spinnig top battles.

3. Did I say it was expensive?
Forget the cost of the books I’ve bought in the past that are now worthless. Lets look at how much it costs to get a Forgotten Realms game going now that 4ed is out. The DM/players guides come in at $60 for both of them and the setting books add another $60-70 onto that as well. Your talking over $120 just to play the basic setting and never mind any of the expansions they bring out in the future. What if you go to all that trouble and you find you really don’t like the new setting or you really don’t like the new 4ed rules?

4. Physical space
I live in a normal sized house in the UK. We have plenty of shelf space and yet I am forced to keep a sizable amount of my books in boxes in the attic. I cannot find anywhere to keep my almost complete collection of oWOD books never mind space for the new system should I ever give in and buy it.

5. Mental space
I’ve already memorised the rules and mechanics of 13 separate gaming systems over the years. Do I really need to squeeze another one in? At what point will my mind begin to fail and the AD&D equipment charts start to meld together and be mistaken for the Small Creatures Crit Table from Rolemaster?

The old games worked. Sure they had their flaws but so do the new versions. Pick one and stick with it but I just wish the old system I loved still had official work being published for them.

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Do you know the last time I had to learn a completely new gaming system? I’m not talking about jumping between editions of games here but proper separate systems. The last time was fourteen years ago when I had to learn the WOD system after a ten hour shift and several cans of lager. Thankfully WOD is basically a very simple system but it would have been a totally different ball game if the system was any more complex.

As those that follow this blog may know I’m coming out of retirement as a gamesmaster very soon to run a Shadowrun game. Now those systems we play I know off by heart but I’ve only ever played SR once and it was as a player 18 years ago.

I’ve read through the rules several times now and its a fairly simple system but I cannot for the life of me retain any of it in my head. Have I reached my limit? Have I got to the same stage as Homer Simpson and for every new bit of information that goes in two bits fall out?

How do you go about learning a new system? Do you just go with a brute force attack and sit through your evening reading and rereading the rules and playing games regardless with the books in front of you or do you have a way of remembering the differences between systems and using those as hooks for learning the new rules?

At the moment I’m going with the brute force idea but it’s failing badly. I usually go through the character creation on my own to pick up the basics and repeatedly build the same generic character over and over again. Normally this will highlight those few areas I have trouble with or can’t quite get correct in my head but I’ve drawn up three characters so far and you’d think one was from WOD, one from D&D and the other from a completely homebrew game that is based on playing germs and living with the bleach under your kitchen sink.

I wonder if you can get any nanotech that make learning gaming rules easier?

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