I still read Conan darnit, get off my lawn. But seriously me and most of my players don’t and didn’t have fantasy as a favourite lit/media genre, although we love it as a gaming genre. As a GM I get most of my inspiration from other genres - although my main inspiration these days are right wing...
Me, I love Savage Pathfinder for my D&Dish fix. Very Deeandeeish feeling, but doing away with the need for meaningless and boring attrition battles, and the system is great for sandboxy, low prep and high improv longer campaigns with good tools for non-combat.
Today I learned from in situ observation that while keeping ducks in the garden make it free of snails and slugs, the ducks won’t touch or taste the redlisted panther slug. I gave my duck pals an extra bowl of yummy peas for being so environmentally concious.
I don’t do oneshots or shorter stuff, only one long campaign at a time with one session per week, and I’m happy with that. That I don’t want more is partly because I can put as much or little effort in prep for my one weekly session as I like, depending on other commitments - it keeps GMing fun...
I’ve moved to PDFs since a handfull of years, besides some core books for systems I really like. Part of the reason is shelf space, but price is a factor too - I would never pay current paper book prices just to check out a system like I did a decade ago.
I guess the thousands and thousands of ”books” in the Harlequin romance series are right up your alley then, and the AI-written future of literature looks bright!
Re: 5, if I was as good as manager as I am as GM when it comes to making the players do both the heavy and light lifting, I would be the CEO of Earth 😂
But yes, I agree with you.
Not having the stamina to read the 1761 pages in this thread, I just want to remind everyone that old Traveller grogs are way, way, WAY more conservative than D&D folks. It’s a scientifically proved and fully objektive fact.
Currently reading Roberto Bolaños 2666. A bit late on the train, but darn it’s good! The first episode reads like Umberto Eco od:ing on postmodernism. If the book keeps this up it might enter my (unseriously long) favourite list.
Don’t worry, capitalism and the benevolence of the free market will sort that out for the best as usual. Heavy regularion and restriction of gambling is for unpatriotic commie whimps, right?