This week, I sold 50 books (well...two of them were bundles of scratch-off character sheets for DCC) to Noble Knight Games, who offered me $350 cash/$450 store credit, which was a fair deal. I took the cash, and here is why: I have to stop buying so much stuff. A lot of it--not all of it, but enough--just sits on my bookshelves. I have enough games that I already like--Castles&Crusades, OSE, BRP--and I don't need any more. I have found that, because I like this stuff so much, I am trying to 'keep up' with what it being produced, even in just one silo of the hobby--say OSR--and I am wasting money and attention on things simply because I get game FOMO. It is a waste of money at a time when my wife and I have just purchased a very expensive second property. It is also an enormous distraction from my own imagination, something I recognize can be stunted by those books because I am allowing people to imagine things for me. That's not bad per se: there is something important to be said about inspiration and evocation (especially through fantasy art), but generally speaking, I want to make up as much of this stuff as I can. I have gotten much better about this as I've moved through the current era of gaming (2019-present), and I know what my sweet-spot is: give me the world, the place names, the gods, some NPCs, some factions, and a map. The rest of it is all me.
Also, I have about 500 PDFs that I can have bound and printed very cheaply should I choose to do so. I have a small binder-making tool myself if I really want the paper version of something small. I can do a lot of this on my own, in other words. So I jettisoned a lot of stuff: some DCC stuff, some C&C stuff, my Shadowdark/Hyperboria/Dragonbane stuff. Some CoC stuff that I'll never use (I may get rid of more of that), and a bunch of random things. I will not miss them. Less is more.
None of this stopped me from backing Hellcrawl, or planning on buying the Demonic Grimoire for OSE.
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