Extinction Events

AI Art by @nightcafestudio

Every so often, and this is a personal thing, not a "gaming industry" one, there comes the point in your gaming life when you experience an extinction event. You could lose all your books, lose a gaming partner, lose your group, and you enter a period where you know you are not going to recover quickly - or at all. In my case, I did not lose a single book, but it hit pretty hard with some significant house damage and a complete change in my gaming life, space, and interests.

In rebuilding a "happy place" where I could game and find peace from the upcoming storm of repairs and life disruption, I had to ask myself, "If I lost it all, what would I be happy with?" My new space where I can game is limited, so my game choice needed to fit that area and not require large maps, pawns, places to lay out rulebooks, and gaming materials. I had about three empty shelves for everything in this space, which I did not want to pack with books, and they needed room for folders, notes, dice, cards, and other things I would use to play, so in reality, I had a shelf and a half.

My Cypher and Numenera books fit there nicely. This was also the place I successfully played Cypher System with friends recently, so the game was a natural fit for the space. I moved the books to the spot, far away from my other gaming collection, and in a world where I had none of my other books, I asked myself, "Could I be happy with this?"

And the answer was yes.

The other books could be upstairs or a world away, and I would not miss them. Then I realized where I was in life, in the middle of a hypothetical extinction event where I was taking stock of what I needed and wanted. This is one of those moments where you split your collection into the books that make you happy and all the others you could live without.

If something does not make you happy, get rid of it. You don't really need it in your life.

With Cypher, I can GM that online or in person and never need to open a book. I have fun playing it. This replaces 5E and all my generic games. The space I need to play is very minimal. The game does anything, and I do not need to sort through lists of content. Too many games are "list games" that rely on the illusion of quantity over quality and ship with thousands of low-quality magic items, monsters, gear, powers, spells, character options, and junk.

I am done with the supersized games. Searching through six monster books for one creature or looking it up online and realizing it is a minor variation of something else makes me feel the game is wasting space and offering low-quality variants as content.

I appreciate design and universality.

An appreciation that minor differences in modifiers don't matter.

And a game that emphasizes a dynamic narrative structure with equal player input.

So my life changed, and I got through the extinction event feeling good about my choices and happier that I went through it all.