The Rubric
Being a series of questions I ask myself before I purchase an RPG book. I am actively in teacher school right now so I'm thinking about assessment.
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- Is it a fundraising campaign? If yes, don't buy (I cannot separate my actual desire for something from the FOMO)
- Is it a system book? If yes, don't buy (I have all the systems I will ever need)
- Is it a big, glossy hardcover? If yes, don't buy (Books are more useful when the author is thinking "What can I cut to reduce the pagecount?" rather than "What can I add to increase the pagecount?")
- Is this actively useful for a campaign I am currently running? If no, don't buy (Playing the game is so much more important to "supporting the hobby" than buying books)
Reading is great, owning books is great. But at some point you transition from playing RPGs as a hobby to collecting RPG books as a hobby and I want to do the less lonely one.
This blog post is part of what I'm responding to here. The most important thing is that I have a campaign running. That is first priority. If I don't have a game running and I add a book to my shelf, I'm going to think "Well, before I start my new campaign, I should read that book to see if it will be useful.".
This skeet annoyed me. The idea of saying "Don't buy Dungeons & Dragons! You should support the little guy." and then posting a shelfie featuring Knave, Quest, and Dagger Heart is patently absurd to me. I know that Hasbro is so much bigger than the rest of the hobby that this is like comparing an X-Wing to a Star Destroyer next to the Death Star, but if you're going to advocate for people to buy from smaller publishers, show at least one product that didn't make a million dollars on Kickstarter.
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EDIT: Jared reminded me that he did one of these. I definitely read his when he posted it, and it's good so it's worth the citation.
EDIT: Some of the gay beholder discord chatter has me wanting to clarify my meaning like a coward. The purpose of this rubric is to decide if an RPG book is immediately useful to you. The first exclusion is important for this, because if you buy a book from Ratti Incanti or Spearwitch, you will get it within the month, maybe two if there's a postal strike or something (shout out to my siblings in CUPW whose employer sucks and should be restructured as a utility). A Kickstarter is arriving in six months to two years if at all. You will be a different person by the time your Kickstarter reward arrives.
The other thing I want to be explicit about is that this is specifically about RPG books. If you aren't currently running a campaign, you should be reading normal books. And you should buy those however you like. Thrift did a good rubric for that recently.