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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Samothdm" data-source="post: 1763538" data-attributes="member: 5473">Obviously Mike Mearls is a super reliable source for this so I'm sure what he says is true.For my own self, I've only ever written and published one d20 book (see my sig) but it took FOREVER to get published.  For two years I deducted lots of my d20 purchases as well as a science-fiction writing class I took and a lot of reference books I purchased as well as portions of my monthly internet fees for doing online research and such.  However, I don't write off every single D&D/d20 purchase.  Maybe I'm too conserative.  Basically, I'm working on 3 projects right now.  Each has a particular "theme" to it, so I only write off the books that relate to that particular theme.  Example, if I were writing Quintessential Aristocrat today, I would feel justified in writing off purchases of Green Ronin's Noble's Handbook, Mongoose's Power Classes: Noble, the Unlikely Heroes: Noble PDF, and any other product that had a noble-type class in it (Star Wars comes to find, as well as AEG's [/i]Swashbuckling Adventures[/i], etc.).  I would probably also feel justified in writing off Mongoose's entire line of Quintessential books to make sure that I didn't do anything in my book that had already been done before in their books.  As it was, when I got around to writing Quintessential Aristocrat, I'd already bought a lot of the Quintessential series for my own reading and game play and it was a different tax year, so I didn't get to write those off.  A lot of those other products weren't out yet, so obviously I didn't have them. Most of my write-offs that year were actual nonfiction history books that I used as research.  So, this year, while I did buy the Eberron Campaign Setting, I don't feel like I can write that off because I'm not sure it's 100% related to my game writing.  It's something I would have bought anyway, even if I weren't a writer.  That's kind of my acid test: Would I have bought the book anyway?  Using that test, sometimes I write off a portion of a book for "research".  Never thought about writing off movies and DVDs, though... that's a good point.  Don't forget things like your computer (amoritized over time), modem, ISP fees, etc.  I imagine you could justify writing off your Dragon and Dungeon subscription prices as "trade publications".  As an ad guy, I get to write off pretty much every magazine and my cable bill as "ad research" so I don't see why you couldn't do the same as a game writer.</blockquote>

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