Ephemera

Over thirty years of gaming I have accumulated a considerable number of books, dice, and other items associated with the game. However, I have also accumulated a whole lot of paper - old character sheets, campaign notes, and other bits and pieces that have been written down and never discarded.

Obviously, none of these things have any value to anyone else. However, as things that I have created they have considerable value, if only sentimental value, to me. That makes discarding them tricky.

Over the past several years, I have thankfully seen the rate at which I create new items of this sort drop drastically - I've taken to creating almost everything using a PC, which means that any paper generated is just a physical representation - the master copy is the one on the PC. However, that's not yet true of everything, and it doesn't really help me with the accumulated cruft. (Most damning of all, of course, are those documents that started life as electronic copies but were then heavily edited in pen/pencil in their physical versions, such that the master copy is the paper version...)

As I've mentioned on Part Five, I'm now at a point where my accumulated stuff from past lives has started to impact on the quality of the life that I'm living now. And that means that those past lives have got to go, or at least be sharply cut down to size. I need the space a whole lot more than I need the stuff.

So...

Actually, I don't have a clear way forward here. I think that what I want to do is to gather together all the paper I've generated over that time (but specifically all that paper that I have generated - not published materials of any stripe), and then gradually deal with it. In many cases, this means scanning it, potentially front and back, and then discarding it. In some cases, it may mean tracking down and editing the electronic version (so that that returns to being the master copy), and then discarding it. And in some few cases, it just means discarding it.

(I think what I'll do is get everything transferred to electronic format and then work on sorting that into a sensible arrangement of files, rather than trying to sort as I go. Because otherwise the job is going to get bogged down in the organisation state. But I may rethink that.)

One other thing: As a corollary of this clear out comes a new policy for creating new paper. Specifically, don't. Where some sort of note or other paper is generated (and sometimes that is appropriate, when scribbling a map or similar), it should be scanned promptly, and the electronic version should be considered the master. Once the paper version has outlived its usefulness, it should probably be rescanned for archive purposes, and then discarded. (And going forward, any game that does not have a form-fillable electronic character sheet need not apply!)