Trouble Letting Go — The Heartbreak of Selling Wrath of the Immortals
As many readers know, I’ve been selling off parts of my RPG collection since my marriage. The reason is simple: lack of room — two forty-somethings each get married, each for the first time, and have to combine two houses worth of stuff into one house. However, I’ve been keeping many older items like really like, such as my Classic D&D rules and adventures.
Last week, however, I looked at my copies of the Wrath of the Immortals boxed set from TSR and The Primal Order from WOTC and realized that I have never used them and probably never will. I just do not need detailed rules on deity-level NPCs. I run my deities as deities — plot devices who can do whatever I need them to do within the limits of their areas of power. They don’t really need hit points, let alone detailed lists of powers and how many points of divine energy each power uses. And that’s what TSR’s Wrath of the Immortals and WOTC’s The Primal Order do. Sure, Wrath of the Immortals also has rules for a campaign with PCs as Immortals, but I’m never going to run anything like that.
As my wife still says my games take up too much space, I decided to go ahead and sell these. Someone who will use them (or some collector who just has to own everything) can have them. In a way it breaks my heart to sell a Classic D&D item, as OD&D and CD&D are the games I am most likely to run in my “old age,” but I have to be realistic. I’ve never going to use it. The rules aren’t anything I need and the adventure changes the Known World in ways I really don’t like — almost as bad as the changes to the Forgotten Realms for D&D4. Logically, I know this feeling is silly, but I still have it. Oddly enough, I have no such feeling about selling The Primal Order even though it is the first RPG product WOTC’s published and it is a fun read.
I’d like to know what my readers think of this. Do you have trouble letting go of gaming materials you know you will never need or use?