A common instinct in new tabletop groups is to buy their way to a better game: more sourcebooks, more campaign supplements, more official adventures, more options. The shelf fills up and the game does not get noticeably better, because the thing that actually makes a tabletop campaign great was never in the books in the first place. It is the person running it — and one prepared, engaged game master matters more than an entire library of supplements.
Where the magic actually comes from
A tabletop roleplaying game is a collaborative story improvised at the table, and its quality lives in the running of it: the game master's preparation, their feel for pacing, their ability to react to what the players do, to voice a memorable character, to build tension and pay it off. None of that comes from owning more rules. A great game master makes a thin ruleset sing; a pile of supplements cannot rescue a session nobody prepared or cared about. The content is generated live, by humans, not purchased.
What's actually worth owning
You need remarkably little: the core rules, some dice, a way to track the action, and imagination. Beyond that, supplements are seasoning, not substance — buy one when your group has a specific itch it scratches, not as a general upgrade to the game. The money is far better spent on snacks that keep people at the table than on books that sit on a shelf as evidence of a richer game that only preparation could actually deliver.
The takeaway
Stop trying to buy a better campaign. The richest games come from a prepared, present game master and a group that shows up engaged, not from a deeper bench of sourcebooks. Invest your effort in the running of the game and your group's chemistry, keep the book-buying minimal and purposeful, and you will have a far better time than the group whose shelf is full and whose sessions are flat.