Making the cut for your TTRPG library

[Dannyalcatraz]

How long do you hold onto a game book you don't like before unloading it somehow?

I started in 77-78, but my collection didn’t expand much beyond D&D, Traveller, and Champions until the early 1990s. At that point, it exploded! By the turn of the century, I owned books from 200 different RPGs.

And there it stood for a good decade or so, when I finally divested myself of about 40 systems worth of books. I donated a lot of them to the USO, along with some polyhedral dice sets.

Since then, I’ve added a couple new systems.

But the real answer is, “it depends”, because I absolutely still have my earliest acquisitions. The stuff I donated was all bought post-1990.

 

[jdrakeh]

I used to be very big into collecting physical books and boxed sets. At one time, I had an actual library of them (i.e. a dedicated room in my house that was nothing but RPG stuff). I currently own exactly three physical books (the Anniversary Edition of BFRPG, a NOS copy of Freeport: City of Adventure, and a ratty, beat up, copy of Codex of Erde).

I used to have a "one year rule" stating that if I hadn't played or read an RPG product in over a year, it went on the chopping block. Now, realizing that I'll probably never again play anything other than current edition D&D locally, I've pretty much switched to PDFs exclusively, as the only players I can find for anything other than current edition D&D (or WoD) are not local to me.