This post is a bit rambly. I wasn’t quite sure how to get my thoughts out, and probably reads as I’m waxing philosophical for no real reason. But, I do promise it relates a bit back to how we engage with tabletop roleplaying games, and I think it’s an important area to think about.

Overly Productive

I’ve noticed a bit of a trend in people wanting to optimize everything in their lives, especially with the proliferation of LLMs and their use as productivity tools. Some of this seems to genuinely improve people’s lives, and I’m happy for that, but I do see a lot of stress and desire to speed-run through boring parts of a process to get to the end result.

I think the phrase, “it’s about the journey, not the destination,” is a bit overused and corny, but I believe it applies for the context of this post. There is an amazing joy in getting through a very monotonous, slow, time-consuming process to reach an end result you’re proud of. This is especially noticeable in traditional forms of art like drawing, writing, music, etc. but it also applies to other aspects of life like doing the laundry, cleaning your house, and paying your taxes.

The current landscapes of our lives are filled with distractions. We talk a lot about companies wanting our information and finding every opportunity to get it, but the two main other resources they are looking for you are time and attention, and I think succumbing to this new normal our world has established has made people a bit more reluctant to embrace the monotony of things that are part of our lives.

Videos have gotten shorter, everything is getting automated from writing emails, to programming software, to turning on and off the lights in your home, and overall everyone’s attention is being split into pieces by advertisements, notifications, and chat applications.

With the world around us starved for our attention, it can make it feel like anything you do needs to be done optimally. That you must be productive so that you can give the world your attention, while the things you either enjoy or need to do get brushed aside. I don’t think this is healthy, and I think we need to reflect a bit more on where we put our attention.

Back to TTRPGs

A practical example of what I’m talking about relates to how I prep for my games. I know there are hundreds, if not thousands, of tools out there to help you speed up prep. There are NPC generators, planet generators, fancy tools that can generate a map, let you put generated points of interest on that map, and populate those points of interest with randomly generated towns, characters, and encounters. This can all happen very fast, and save you time, but I’ve largely moved away from using most of these tools.

I think I do better prep if I take it slow, if I spend time with a few tables to manually roll a die, read the result, interpret the result, and then write it down in my notebook. Sometimes I have to go through the five or so tables I need to generate an NPC using Perilous Void (and some tables like the Traits one requires rolling multiple times). Sure, it can take a few minutes to get one NPC, but I know a lot more about that NPC than I would if I had just gotten a generated one from donjon.

However, more importantly, once I’ve made my list of random NPCs, I feel a bit excited to use them. I’ve met all these NPCs, however briefly, wrote a little about them, and changed some details that just felt wrong. Sure, they’re randomly generated, but I had a much stronger hand in that generation than with an online tool.

I also like to key and draw my own dungeon maps. There is a lot of monotony here, from sketching the general layout, to inking in the walls, adding shadows, drawing little doodads and other details to make it come alive, and including a bit of texture to make it more interesting. And, least importantly, I’m not fantastic at it. My drawn maps are middling at best. But it’s something I enjoy, and sure I could be more optimal and use a random dungeon map generator or use any of the amazing ones drawn by Dyson Logos, but I do find joy in the monotony of the process, and always feel proud of the end result, even if it’s a bit subpar.

I’m not saying everything has to be done by hand. There are automation and digital tools that I do use to help me out. I use digital whiteboarding tools to help me plan locations, I use a drawing app on my tablet to draw my dungeons for my online games, and I do frequently use a5e.tools over pulling out the book if it’s more physically convenient for me at the time. I do think, though, we all should think a bit more about not if we can automate something, but whether we should automate something.

Final Thoughts

I think we can ask ourselves two questions when determining if we should automate something:

• “Are you actually using the time saved by automating some process on something that brings you joy?”
• “Is the process you’re automating something that you actually enjoy doing, but are just worried about time?”
• “Do you need to spend less time on this part of process, or is there something else you don’t enjoy you can try to automate instead?

Most importantly, we all should try to find joy in the monotony, allow ourselves to be bored, and give ourselves a break from giving the world our attention.

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