Reading Material

One of the many joys of this hobby is the sheer volume of imaginative material it has generated over the last five decades. Even now, I can happily spend an afternoon thumbing through a well-worn module or sourcebook and suddenly find I've lost an hour or more in its descriptions, maps, and background information. Roleplaying games, at their best, can stimulate the imagination in ways few other media can. They seem designed to invite speculation, which makes them a pleasure simply to read.

But they’re also games.

This shouldn't be a controversial statement, but sometimes I wonder. RPGs are designed to be played, yet so much of the hobby nowadays seems oriented around simply reading them instead. You can see this in how games are written, how they're marketed, and how they're consumed. I know more than a few gamers with dozens – sometimes hundreds – of books on their shelves, the majority of which have never seen use in any fashion, except as reading material. I know this because I myself am too often guilty of the same.

Now, there’s nothing inherently wrong with reading RPGs for enjoyment. I do it all the time and some games practically demand it. However, I do worry about the habits this encourages. For many gamers, especially since the appearance of PDFs and other digital media, the hobby can become more about collecting and commenting than it is about playing. “Backlog” becomes a point of pride. The latest boxed set or 300-page full-color hardback might get read, maybe even admired, but rarely, if ever, brought to the table.

There is, increasingly, a bifurcation in the hobby between those who play RPGs and those who consume them, often as passive entertainment. It’s now quite common to encounter people who own dozens of games they’ve never refereed or played, who follow RPGs the way one might follow a television show or a comic book line. They discuss scenarios, debate rules, rank publishers, and chase new releases, not unlike fans of any other media franchise. As I said, there’s nothing inherently wrong with that either, but I question whether that mode of engagement still resembles gaming in any meaningful sense.

To be fair, the sheer volume of RPG material produced each year probably makes it impossible for even a fraction of it to be meaningfully used. Nevertheless, I think this overproduction has consequences. Most importantly, I worry that it's fostering a passive approach to gaming, one where we're more accustomed to absorbing information than in making decisions, more practiced in critique than in improvisation. Worse, it creates an expectation that play requires exhaustive preparation and a towering stack of sourcebooks before anyone dares to roll dice. The result is paralysis: we read, we plan, we dream, but we don’t actually play.

The modern glut of RPG material encourages a passive engagement with the hobby, one where reading supplants playing. It fosters the illusion that the essence of the game lies within the glossy pages of a new release rather than in the messy, unpredictable energy of the table itself. Increasingly, we see products crafted less as tools for play and more as artifacts for consumption – lavishly produced, densely written, and satisfying to browse but difficult to use in actual sessions. These works often prioritize information over usability and polish over spontaneity. In doing so, they quietly undermine the fast-and-loose, make-it-up-as-you-go spirit that once defined roleplaying.

It wasn’t always like this. The earliest RPG books were lean, sometimes opaque, and unapologetically practical. They assumed the reader was already gathering friends and dice, ready to dive in. These texts weren’t written to be admired; they were written to be used, bent, scribbled in, and carried to game night. If you weren’t playing, they didn’t offer much. They threw you straight into the action with minimal handholding, trusting that you’d figure it out (or make it up) as you went. That trust in the referee’s imagination and willingness to improvise was not a flaw but a feature, a recognition that the real magic happened not on the page, but in the shared chaos of play.

There’s a lesson in that, I think. Games need to be played to come alive. The rules, the settings, the monsters, the magic, all of it is inert until you put it into action. Reading an RPG can be a fine experience, but it’s not the same as the laughter, confusion, and surprise of a good session. The books may be the door, but the game – the actual game – is what lies beyond it.

So, by all means, read. Marvel at the creativity our hobby continues to produce. Just don’t forget to play. Otherwise, all we’re doing is collecting books and calling it participation.