No gaming today. I forgot we had someone coming over in the afternoon that would've made it impossible. But we've still got tomorrow afternoon/evening and Sunday for me to get my revenge. Instead, I spent the better part of the day reorganizing my gaming shelves. Being an old gamer and a packrat, I've accumulated a lot of stuff over the years. And even though I've sold off some bits and put more in storage, the shelves in my study are still filled to bursting.
And then there's the overflow. Books piled up on my side of the bedroom (fortunately hidden from view for the most part by the bed, but still a navigation hazard) as whatever is interesting this week gets hauled off the shelf for bedtime. To help combat this, a few years ago, I set up a small bookshelf in our bedroom, with the goal of keeping stuff I was most likely to want to read at hand, rather than stacking it up on the floor or nightstand. Sort of an "A-list" as it were.
Of course, that only helped so much. My tastes changed, and inertia set in, and most of the shelf space wasn't devoted to the stuff I'm most likely to need these days, so it was time for a change. Also, roughly 90% of the books I'd gotten at and since GenGon had never been shelved, but were dwelling in piles of their own on the floor of my study. I decided to fix it, which meant trying to decide what got to stay on the shelf in the bedroom and what had to go.
Ultimately, what went was my Hero System stuff. Mind you, I love the Hero System. I've played it more than anything else in the past 25 years, and it's still my most likely go-to for a sustained superhero campaign. But I really haven't broken out the Hero stuff in well over a year now, and the odds of me needing, say, Asian Bestiary II or The Ultimate Skill on a moment's notice are pretty damned slim. So, they've been moved out, in favor of an assortment of Urban Fantasy/Horror games that are more likely to see use. Aberrant also got moved into the study (I'm not sure what it was doing on the A-shelf in the first place) to make way for my Feng Shui stuff (on the off chance I get to run it in the coming year).
Do you prioritize your collection? Do you consider your gaming stuff a collection at all?
When I can't keep it all in one place, I do prioritize. In my previous home, some of the collection had to go in the closet, mostly Mage and my HERO books. Mage because there were too many to keep on the main bookcase and HERO because it just wasn't getting any use -- as if any of my RPG books get sufficient use.
ReplyDeleteI absolutely, for many of the reasons you list - but space and ease of access being primary, prioritize my gaming library...
ReplyDelete...and because I can't seem to part with any of it, and keep acquiring more things despite what I used to think was my common sense, but now looks like a shill for paypal, I guess it must be a collection. 2010 was the year of suddenly deciding to accept pdf versions and as expected, that just made things worse.
C'est la vie~ Good holiday post!