Book Cataloging?

Our household has a lot of books: roughly ten floor-to-ceiling bookshelves worth, with even more stored in boxes, and that’s not even counting the comic books!

In addition to a New Year’s purging of unneeded volumes, one thing we’ve been looking to do for quite some time is to catalog all of these books so we can track what we’ve got and, to a degree, where it is, since it can be difficult to recall if we have something (and if we still have it, or have given it away or sold it at some point).

So I turn to the collective wisdom of my readers: do you have any recommendations for library cataloging software? Mac OS X is a requirement (we’re a Mac household), with features like ease of use and portability (accessible from different machines on our network) high on the desireability list. Bonus points if it also works for any or all of: 1) comic book collections, 2) Board games and RPG boxed-sets, 3) DVDs, and 4) cabinets of herbal ingredients.

Any suggestions?

[RPG Theory] RPG Rules - This Is Personal

It occurs to me that roleplaying game rules are tweaked, modified, and revised far more than the rules of any other type of game. Most boardgames change very little over time: they might see some modification, variants, or the like, but remain largely consistent, certainly not the degree of change you find between the first and current edition of D&D, or the very first and current editions of Hero System or even GURPS.

I wonder if the reason for that might be the intense identification RPG players have with their in-game proxies, their characters. You hear a great deal with RPGs about the “feel” of play, debates about simulationism vs. narrativism, and other discussions about what the purpose of RPG rules even is (beyond, one assume, “to play the game by”). A lot of this seems to stem from the impression that a virtual person’s “life” is governed by these rules, rather than just a faceless game piece. Nobody cares what the queen’s reason for attacking the opposing rook is in Chess, nor does anyone seem to care what the One-Eyed Jack thinks is “wild” in Poker. There are no “characters” in those games, no story or narrative, just an abstraction with a set of rules and an end-state.

By the same token, RPGs are the only real sort of game to ascribe different motives to the player and the game-piece. That is, when you’re playing Monopoly, you make decisions based on how to win the game, not on sound financial advice or your ideas about the market or affordable housing. RPGs, on the other hand, often run into conflict between the “sensible” choice (both in objective terms and in terms of the most efficient exploitation use of the game rules) and the “character-driven” choice, wherein the character’s fictional preferences are taken into account.

RPG character are (at least obstensibly) unique. Even if they fit various niches and archetypes (or character classes) they have their own names, personalities, histories, and such. Little wonder gamers are often invenerate tinkerers, who monkey around with the rules trying to get just the right “feel” to them. Add to that the fact that people play and enjoy RPGs for different reasons, having different ideas of what constitutes a “successful” RPG system, and it’s no surprise that we see so many variations of our favorite games, with more coming along all the time.