Not long ago this guy right here came across my feeds.  I like thinking about it.  In the end, and in all truth the only thing you really need, if you want to game, is a pencil, some paper and a friend.

Those are the foundational things.

Ascending upward from there in pyramidal style you need accessories - minis & graph paper & battlemats, dice - all the accouterments we end up amassing in the course of our lives as players.  I've got a lot of gear anymore and some of it sits neglected & mourned, rarely used or under-used.  But I still like having those things - accessories to the game itself that accumulate like totems, like badges.

Above those I'd say books.  You don't need books, but you can get a lot from them, not the least is ideas.  But I don't exactly mean rules, not rulebooks - those are a smaller thing yet, maybe the least important.  In terms of having a good experience running a game I'd say rules are helpful but probably the least necessary aspect.

But books.  Books of rules are a complex matter - do we want books that list abilities, do we want to create an endless chase of possible character options?  Really - I find this aspect of games publishing to be somewhat overblown and entirely unnecessary.  These are the rules you do not need to buy.

I'm reminded about that man up there, at the top of the page, and how the THAC0 tables were always in another book.  Codes & secrets hidden away to ensure that at least one person at your table would have to buy that book too.  But working around those systems, putting together your own hack - these are the aspects of the game that tend to really speak to the person running it.

When your hobby is creating new worlds with new physical laws & new kinds of beings, languages & gods - putting together a new system of dice mechanics becomes a somewhat trivial endeavor & really, I think that every single Ref/DM/GM/Storyteller out there is a game designer, a  creator down at their core.  I think that's part of the whole experience.

So the challenge is to come up with books that those people can use.  My challenge that is.  Because I'm not in a position to be releasing miniatures (yet).  I make books, and books aren't obviously, or innately useful - Gary himself said so.  But books can be made to have utility.

I think that the best books give ideas - new ideas to synthesize with old, new ways of thinking & imagining the systems in place, the setting & the nature of characters.  I like to have the setting be embellished, I like big splashy discussions about the ecology of monsters - with just the right amount of descriptive hooks to make them more than a stat block and less than a fully realized, atomic object.  Monsters that can fit into your setting, that have strange qualities that beg explanation but don't have a single true answer.

So these types of books-  monster guides, setting descriptions, adventure modules - these I think of not as rules - but as tools and those are the books that I want to read - and the books that I want to make.