How many game books do you buy?

I remember that the excellent site Pen & Paper once had a poll about how many game books you owned. It was interesting, since I remember it having had more than 2000 gamers answering that poll! It's not enough to be a good coverage of all of gamerhood, but it did show some trends about the gamers that hang out on the web.

There were multiple categories, and most of them in the lower range, naturally. Those of us who own stupid amounts were lumped together as "more than 1000", "500-1000", "200-500" if I remember correctly. The lower ranges were far more fine grained. What surprised me was how many that fell in the category of roughly 25 game books. For me that sounds a lot like having one favourite game line, or maybe two. A lot of people also had less than 10. I think those people who claim you only need one rule book and some imagination might be onto something. The next big bump were the collectors, and I was in the higher end of that range, 200-500.

Apart from all the pictures that gives us about the size of most game libraries, it gives me an interesting comparison. I just counted the amount of game books I have in my library now, since having moved and left most of what I counted in the former poll in storage. That way I could easy see how much I have accrued over the last 24 months, and maybe also compare that to the time the rest of the collection have grown. After some math I found that I buy roughly 6 books a month, or closer to 7 if I include magazines. Should I be lucky that I will have ten years or so to find storage space until I reach the "more than 1000" range, or should I be scared that it took only 24 months to surpass the size of most of the collections in that poll, again?

How many generic rules do you need? One?

Yesterday I was looking at the Open RPG forum over at rpg.net, and found poll about generic systems. The question of course was, which of the generic ones you use.

I found this interesting, since among the 60 or so rule systems that I own, I find a few of the ones mentioned in the poll. Here's the list of the systems in the poll.

1. BRP*
2. GURPS*
3. HERO
4. Savage Worlds*
5. Unisystem
6. FATE*
7. HeroQuest
8. PDQ
9. d6 system*
10. d20 system*

The systems I own is marked with a star.

Considering the fact that generic systems is supposed to be able to be used for any setting, why would you need more than one? Surely it would be cheapest to buy one and then use that for all your gaming needs, since it can be used for anything. Right?

Maybe I should ask myself why I own so many of these? I know I prefer some of them for different reasons, and to be frank I don't think I would enjoy using any one of all these systems for all my campaigns. I've heard of that kind of behaviour many times, but it don't seem to be my way. All those systems come with an agenda, and some kind of implied style of play. Since I don't own all of them I can't tell you what it is, but I'm certain it's true for all. Just compare GURPS and the D6 system vehicular combat rules. Two campaigns using these two will be very different, even if both are generic and universal.

So, why bother with generic systems if having style/setting/rules as a unit seem to make so much sense? I'm not sure, really. For me as an obsessive collector I don't need much to get a new system, but if forced to explain myself I'll be sheepishly out of words. I kind of hope I'm not alone at this...