Stuff Nobody Ever Uses

In my scan-and-shred exercise, I've taken a short break from dealing with old settings and have instead been working on old rules notes for the past several days. In that time I've been archiving old hand-written notes detailing new classes, kits (2nd Ed's version of sub-classes), spells, equipment, and so on.

And the really depressing thing in amongst that is that, with very few exceptions, nobody ever used this material. Most of the spells were never cast, most of the kits never saw use, and so on and so forth. They just soaked up time (which, thankfully, I had in abundance) and paper, and then soaked up space through several moves.

There's a lesson there: material that nobody ever uses has no value. Which in turn means one of two things:

If generating that material is enjoyable in its own right, or it serves to train you in some skills that you will put to good use later, then generating that material has some value in itself - carry on. (But you probably shouldn't be particularly sentimental about it - once you've generated it, it has already served its purpose and can go.)

But if generating that material doesn't have some intrinsic value, it's better not to bother. Go do something that does have value instead - be that creating something that will see use, honing some other useful skill, or doing something else entirely. Doing work just for the sake of doing that work is a waste of time.

Basically, it all comes back to value-add again - does an activity provide enough benefit (of some kind) to justify itself? Does buying a sourcebook provide enough benefit to justify the sticker-price? Or would the resources be better employed somewhere else?

(One thing amused me, though: in among my notes I found a revised spell memorisation/casting system for 2nd Ed AD&D. Almost exactly the same rules are now found in the 5e PHB.)