Recipes Are Still A Good Place to Start
I appreciated this recent post by Blark comparing TTRPGs to cooking, and I fully agree with everything there. Sticking too closely to recipes or to the “one true way to play” a game will make for a joyless experience and rob you of the joy of improvisation in both. However, as the saying goes, you have to know the rules to break them, and I was immediately struck between some parallels between my own cooking journey and something I see with a lot of people branching out into indie TTRPGs.
I taught myself to cook in high school mostly initially by just trying stuff out without following recipes. I made some stuff that tasted alright, but only much later learned how much better things could be by actually following the recipe at least once to have a baseline for how to improvise. I’ve been making “fried rice” for over 20 years now, but only this year followed a true recipe for it and it is so much better.
The same goes for TTRPGs. Adventures are the most analogous thing to recipes for me, and a lot of people just look down on them as inferior to homebrew. The problem is, when people branch out from what they’re familiar with, they often ignore the adventures made for the game and come in trying to homebrew something based on assumptions about how other games they played work. I see this most prominently on Reddit in forums for OSR and PBTA games in posts where folks new to those games describe what they’re planning only to receive a chorus of replies telling them how to actually prep and run those games. This ranges from people over-prepping plot lines for Monster of the Week to questioning how important exploration procedures and random encounters are for Cairn. But, if they looked at the Tome of Mysteries or a published Cairn adventure and ran that, they’d see better how to run it.
I’ve even run into this myself recently, starting up a campaign of The One Ring and initially looking at home brewing a campaign before stopping myself and digging into the published adventures in Ruins of the Lost Realm and Tales from the Lone Lands. I know I would have ended up prepping the wrong kind of material for the wrong kind of game, and I’m much happier and more confident improvising in it now having gotten a start with the published stuff.
This has gotten kind of long winded, but the point is that it’s still a good idea to at least try out the way something is meant to be done before you make it your own. Cook a recipe by the book to learn a dish. Run a published adventure to learn a game. You’ll have a better time, I promise.