Giving up on a game line

For the second time in my gaming life now I've reached a point when I realise I'll probably never play or run a particular game line ever again - so I want to get rid of my books.

Does this happen to others?

The first time was with Rolemaster. I was introduced to it in uni, and soon converted my long-running AD&D game to it, and enjoyed it. I went off into the army and played other games, but after that returned to it for another long campaign. 

Then one day I sat down and played with K as a GM. It was awful. It was ages looking up charts, by the time we found out if we our characters lived or died we no longer cared. My character couldn't do anything, the randomness of the dice rolls was so much higher than any skill for anyone under 10th level that it was easier not to worry and just roll the dice. Half the time when I sprinted I ended up moving at slower than walking pace. 

After the session I said to another player, T - "Mate, it's not that bad when I GM, is it?"
"No," he said.
"Then why was it so fucking awful this time? This doesn't feel like the same system."
"It's different because you ignore the rules. You roll the dice and pretend to look up some chart and use that time to just make up what happens next."
"But -" I said, not wanting to admit that he'd pegged me perfectly."
"Look, you didn't realise the rules were shit because you never used them."
"Oh, alright then."

After that I realised I could never GM or play Rolemaster again. Why have this big pile of rules you never use? Get some other system where you do use the rules. I went to throw the books away, but T being a true gamer said, "no! I'll add them to my collection." So away went Character Law, Arms & Claw Law, Spell Law, Companion, Companion II through to Companion VII, and so on. Hundreds of dollars of books, gone.

Now something similar's happened with GURPS. In this case, I do enjoy the system in itself, it's just that nine-tenths of the gamers I meet never read the rules, so when GMing I have to just handwave over the details or we'll never get anything done. 

If you have a detailed system and the details come up regularly and people enjoy them, that's great - but if you have to handwave them all, why have them? That's what I thought when I got GURPS Martial Arts - my players can't even remember the difference between All-Out Attack (double) and All-Out Attack (strong), so what'd be the point in having Committed Attack or Defensive Attack? Again, why have this big pile of rules you never use? 

I just don't see any prospect of a group where even half the players really care about all that detail. Playing GURPS and ignoring the detail is like playing Ars Magica and nobody being wizards. You could do it, but what for?

I wrote to my two GURPS GM mates asking if they wanted to buy the books.

"How much?" said one.
"I dunno," I said, "I haven't sold any games since about 1985, I normally just lose them or give them away. Normal secondhand price is half new price, yeah? New they were $60 or so - nowadays in Mind Games they're as much as $80. So probably $30 each?"
"Wow thats nearly $300...did you really spend $600 on all those books?"
"Shit, I s'pose I did. But it wasn't all in one go! Bah, you have a bigger stack than me, you must have spent thousands!"

Rolemaster I gave up because I didn't want to run or play it anymore, GURPS I'm giving up because though I like it and others will play it, we'd be ignoring nine-tenths of it and so lugging around all those books to sessions is pointless.

So to me this is a big deal, having spent all that money on the books, all that time reading them and running or playing games with them. But now giving them up... 

I'm sure I can't be the only one who reaches a point where they realise they should just give away or sell a whole line of game books because they're never going to play them again. What about you guys?

Old school and the Arsehole GM

Looking at various discussions about D&D4e as against earlier editions and the "retro-clone" movement, and Ryan Dancey's famous comment that "roleplaying is twenty minutes of fun packed into four hours", we can see that many people don't understand what "old school" is about. The essence of old school is nothing to do with dungeons, but is a playstyle based on,

The GM hates you. The rules hate you. The dice hate you. Only your wits can save you.

It's a joke but in every jest a little truth, as Shakespeare said. The truth is that the GM is there to present you with interesting challenges, and you can't rely on the rules or lucky dice rolls to solve those challenges, you have to use your wits and think your way through problems. 

If you're a munchkin or attention junkie, you'll be upset at having to use your wits, because you haven't got any. You'll claim the GM is oppressing you. 

Many people don't get this about old school. Over on the GURPS forums people were discussing the GURPS Dungeon Fantasy books. The writer had the characters start off at 250 points, which is about 10th-15th level in D&D (depending on edition), and said this was because,

"I looked at the canonical GURPS stats for pits, poisons, dangerous animals, and other threats and disasters, and made the DF templates sufficiently robust that using them would yield the carefree, cinematic fun of old-school dungeon crawling instead of some sort of grim survival horror. 

"[...] the 250-point power level is needed to make a larger-than-life, carefree genre work in a grim, gritty system like GURPS, where enough kobolds will eventually get behind you, roll a critical hit, etc."

That is, he imagines that characters just fall into ten foot pits and jump out swearing a bit but largely unharmed, they regularly face down hordes of kobolds who line up to be dispatched one by one, and so on. He imagines that nobody uses their wits. 

Of course he's entirely wrong about dungeons. The pit trap, for example, is not something you fall in, climb out of and laugh at. It might kill you, so what you do is not fall in. You achieve this by looking for traps, and going around them, disarming them or setting them off harmlessly. 

The monsters are deadly and vicious. You don't survive them by sheer number of hit points you can receive or deal, but by using planning, tactics and teamwork.

Some will perish. But with wits and some luck, some will survive and prosper.

If you enjoy a challenge of your wits, you will enjoy this kind of gaming. If you're witless, you won't, and will probably complain that the GM is oppressing you. You might even come up with a new edition of your favourite game with detailed rules for everything and carefully minimaxed character classes to help protect you from the arsehole GM.