The Collector

From time to time, I see people talking about collectors vs. players (especially in the old school gaming arena). Much of these discussions tend to look down on the collector and praise the player. I’m in a position right now where I guess I’d fall into the collector definition since 1) I have amassed a large amount of 1970’s/1980’s gaming material and 2) I’m not in an active gaming group (and haven’t been trying TOO hard to get one together). However, even though I have a nice sized collection, I don’t keep it hermetically sealed and under lock and key. I actively use this stuff to mine for ideas. OK, I don’t have a gaming group at the moment, but I have a son who at some point will become an experiment for some of my ideas. If it does occur (and I hope it does) that I have a regular gaming group that meets at least once a month, I’ll use the material on them. So, I’m a player (DM) forced by circumstance to become a collector. And my collection habits really are directed into purchasing game material from when I was a kid that I wanted but couldn’t get due to finances, lack of availability, etc. I’ve been pretty excited to get the white box D&D 3 little brown books and many supplements (to include some things like Fantasy Art Enterprise’s Necromecian). There was some pretty gonzo stuff put out back then. At the time I was much too young to really have much awareness of the gaming world (I didn’t effectively become aware of D&D until somewhere in the 1981 or 1982 time frame). For some reason, I really find myself drawn to the whole digest format. I think it really brings back feelings of being a kid and making my own comic books by folding 8 ½ x 11 sheets of paper to make my own digest size comics. At any rate, that really appeals to my hobbyist/DIY ethic (I was in the punk scene in the mid 80’s through mid 90’s making zines and comix). And it’s nice that the whole OSR thing really gets me back into the hobbyist/DIY seat again (even if I suffer from project ADD-not being able to see a project through to completion before I lose interest and move on to another one). At any rate, I need to get back to my current project (I hope to post an encounter site or part of one this weekend – keyed with new monsters/NPCs and art). We’ll see how that goes.

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