On Mechanics and Setting

One of my vices is one common to others in the RPG hobby – the obsessive-compulsive need to buy as much material as you can.  In a way, it’s really weird – for a hobby that is to me so much about using your imagination, I spend an awful lot of time collecting minutiae that in a lot of cases I’ll never get to use.  Technically, once you’re introduced to the concept of role-playing, you never really need any more external information – you can play for a million years with the first edition Dungeons & Dragons rules and have it not get stale.  Of course, there’s reasons to get a new RPG beyond just the concept of role-playing in general.  Most importantly from where I sit, is that new material has the potential to be inspirational.  They can fire the imagination of any aspect of the hobby, and that makes them pretty valuable to me.

Generally, pretty much everything you’ll pick up will be one of two categories:

• Mechanics – The basic rules on how to play this particular game.  While all RPGs are advanced versions of “Let’s pretend”, each has different ways to resolve things that happen in the game so that it doesn’t devolve into, “I shoot him!” “Nuh-uh, you don’t!” “Yes I do!” ad nauseum.  The mechanics answer the questions like, “How do I know if something my character has attempted is successful?” and “How far can my character jump?”
• Settings – The materials describe a game world to play in and they way it works.  Middle Earth of the Lord of the Rings trilogy is a different setting than say the world of Harry Potter, even though both have elves and wizards and magic.

Inspirational mechanics are usually when rules are presented in a way that I’ve not seen before, or a novel application of existing ideas.  Inspirational setting material is pretty much the same but for settings of course.

That said, I have to admit that sometimes after I’ve picked up a new game, I wonder to myself, “Why did I buy this again?”  And sometimes it’s hard to justify.  I can content myself with the fact that I get some inspiration from just about everything I’ve picked up, but on the other hand I have a feeling I’ll never actually get to play most of these and so their utility is a bit diminished.

I’ve picked up a lot of games over the years, and I’ll be going through my library in the near future, giving my thoughts on each.