Why I Sold My Huge RPG Collection

Actually, there’s a couple of very good reasons.

First of all my wife and I were expecting our very first child. I knew that there wouldn’t be much time for gaming and that I’d need the extra space. I’d not done that much tabletop RPGing for a while so the obvious thing to do was to sell off the books in my collection that I hardly used. That would be almost all of them, then. I put it all on Ebay, book by book, and even opened a small shop to help sell them. My big boardgames went first, like Dark Future and Dragonstrike, and then the rest followed. My best sellers were my Star Wars D6 books and my MERP modules – one MERP book went for nearly fifty pounds, and that was with a starting bid of a fiver. I made a lot of money, which was then used to buy what we needed for our baby boy, whom we named Bruce. We worked out that my roleplaying collection paid for everything we needed for Bruce – cot, sterilising unit etc – and we even had money left over. Result.

Second of all, I always got lost in the number of games I had. I couldn’t focus on new material, because when I went to my RPG bookshelf there were 40 different systems and genres screaming for attention and my games were turning into a mish-mash of stuff that was influencing me. I can’t even begin to describe my pain when I decided to turn my fantasy Europe MERP game into a near-future cyberpunk game when the main PC woke up from a centuries long slumber to find the world had changed… it sucked. Big time. Stripping down my games gave me focus, and now my handful of games are enough to keep me inspired but at the same time not drown me with details.

There are a few things I regret parting with. My red-box Basic D&D, for instance, and my 5th Edition Call of Cthulhu book and adventures. I also miss my Runequest stuff.

Ah, well. Easy come, easy Ebay.