TTRPGs are like cooking

I am often confronted with the problem of explaining my enjoyment of TTRPGs to a non-TTRPG-playing audience.

Many explanations are conventionally deployed: some people point to actual play shows, some describe TTRPGs as a kind of improvised audiobook drama¹, and some just spew forth a definition of what these games are (and hope the audience can cotton on to why they might be fun). I have never been very satisfied with any of these approaches, nor have I seen much success whenever I have used them.

I prefer the analogy: "TTPRGs are to board games what home cooking is to eating out." I think it gets a lot right; maybe more than you might expect at first glance.

1. Do It Yourself

A board game, like a restaurant meal, provides a premade experience. You sit down and are entertained for a couple of hours by what a professional in the field has painstakingly assembled for you with all their care and skill. A TTRPG, like a recipe book, expects you to create something by yourself. The experience is only able to come alive with active participation.

2. Season to taste

Good recipe books leave the door open for you to tinker, substitute, and create something to your own tastes, or perhaps something to the tastes of your friends, too. Although on paper, there's nothing stopping you from doing the same with board games, or from asking for a very specific set of modifications to a menu item in a restaurant, it's not the cultural norm.

3. Expectations aren't binding

If I go to a restaurant called "El Pastor," I don't expect to find chicken tikka masala on the menu. If I invite you over to play "Ticket to Ride," you're going to be pretty disappointed to find out it's not Alan R. Moon's version but instead my hastily cobbled-together take on it with a clearly unnecessary and shoddily implemented stock market system. But, if I invite you over to try and make "Gordon Ramsay's profiteroles," I think you wouldn't really care if we decided to make some caramel sauce to add to the recipe. That's pretty reflective of the typical attitude in TTRPGs, too.

4. Breadth

Restaurants and board games both offer you a limited slice of things you can experience². Some recipe books and TTRPGs are also focused on producing a specific experience, but there's a whole range out there that aim to give you the support and tools to produce any kind of experience you want. I've never been impressed by a restaurant where you can "order anything" or a board game where you can "do anything," but a recipe book that teaches you how to cook almost anything you want to can be a thing of real beauty³, as can be a game system that supports you with the tools you need to tell almost any kind of story. Relatedly, it's much easier to be a home cook with fluency in many different cuisines than it is to run a good fusion restaurant.

5. Nobody has good words for what they're doing

Some of my friends treat home cooking as a fine art, and always take the time to produce beautiful meals with ingredients they've gone out of their way to acquire. Others pretty much tip the contents of their cupboard into a pan. If I'm having dinner at a friend's house for the first time, I can maybe guess at what kind of a home cook they're likely to be based on personality, but nobody ever puts a label on it. That would be weird. It's similar to the lack of labels for different GM styles in the TTRPG world. On the other hand, phrases like "fine dining" or "street food" or "medium-light wargame" are pretty well-understood.