D&D General Being a DM is like being a cook

[EzekielRaiden]

Cooking is more art than science. You need recipes/instructions to get the baseline of what to do, but you just following directions leads to mediocre results. Many cooks personalize everything, making minor adjustments to the baseline in order to make the final product more desirable. D&D is the same: following instructions can be a fine game, but personalization often leads to excellent games.

Though I stand by what I said above. Learning how to do the recipe first--really understanding exactly what the recipe is doing and why--is very important for being able to effectively personalize dishes after that.

Learn how to cook a basic, no-frills steak before you start trying to make filet au poivre. Really, really learn how to make basic steak. Because when you know how to make that, then doing the variations on a theme becomes a conscious and deliberate choice, rather than a wild seat-of-your-pants experiment every single time. You will have already built the intuitions to get a good idea of how those variations will affect the final result.

It is much easier to build intuitions while doing simple things in simple settings with simple results. And once you have those intuitions, they will serve you well long, long after you've opted exclusively for stacking complexity upon complexity.

 

[prabe]

There is actual science happening when you cook--Harold McGee and Shirley Corriher have demonstrated that in print far better than I could--but there is plenty of room for adjustment to personal taste. "Season to taste" as a last step in a recipe is nigh-universal when applicable.

The parallels between cooking and GMing are obvious to me, not just in the sense/s of following instruction/personalization, but also in the parallels between cooking for friends and GMing for friends: A good cook asks after dietary restrictions, food aversions, and such, as well as positive preferences; and a good GM asks after (or at least keeps track of) the things their players do and do not enjoy/engage with.

 

[prabe]

Though I stand by what I said above. Learning how to do the recipe first--really understanding exactly what the recipe is doing and why--is very important for being able to effectively personalize dishes after that.

Learn how to cook a basic, no-frills steak before you start trying to make filet au poivre. Really, really learn how to make basic steak. Because when you know how to make that, then doing the variations on a theme becomes a conscious and deliberate choice, rather than a wild seat-of-your-pants experiment every single time. You will have already built the intuitions to get a good idea of how those variations will affect the final result.

It is much easier to build intuitions while doing simple things in simple settings with simple results. And once you have those intuitions, they will serve you well long, long after you've opted exclusively for stacking complexity upon complexity.

Many of my favorite things to cook are in fact variations on other things I cook. Taking some plural number of recipes apart and putting them together as a single recipe has been a favored approach of mine for some time.

That said, if you're going to cook steak in a skillet, you might as well learn to make a pan sauce at the same time.

 

[Cordwainer Fish]

Celebrity British chefs storm in to yell at you?

I would watch that show.

 

[jmartkdr2]

I don’t think it’s a great analogy- I’ve likened dming to hosting a dinner party but largely because there’s a lot more to hosting than just cooking.

You need to take the specific needs and wants of your guests into account, create a welcoming atmosphere, and then cook. Possibly from a recipe or five, but you need to select the right recipes and maybe make some adjustments.

Or you can just buy ten kinds of meat and veg and fire up the grill. That works too.

 

[bloodtide]

Well...."cooking" is a bit of a vague word. Just about anyone can "make food" : the dumbest dumb person can drop some meat on a fire and "cook" it. Just about anyone can put "food" between two slices of bread. But is such a person a "cook" and are they "cooking". Is making a sandwich even count as cooking?

And sure most people can read and follow instructions made for them by a person smarter then they are.....maybe, to a point. Of course, a great many people don't understand things or even have average reading comprehension

And to just "follow instructions" is really just "Food Preparation",. And lots of people can do that.....but that sure is not "cooking".

Though once you get past Food Preparer, Cashier, and Person that Stands on a Corner with a Sign.....most other tasks or even jobs are a lot more then just "following instructions".

A DM can't just "follow instructions"....there are no instructions. And if there were.....it would be the worst Railroad ever.

Not everyone can be a DM....the same way not everyone can simply just be anything....

 

[Ruin Explorer]

This reddit thread about cooking reminds me of discussions here about being a DM.

Being able to follow written instructions vs adapting on the fly? What do DMs need more of??

I feel like cooking is a dumb analogy because being a DM doesn't require many of those skills, it requires completely different skills, like people management, and suddenly maybe the analogy has to be being a chef, but it's still a really bad analogy.

Following written instructions is also not a major needed skill as a DM. UNDERSTANDING written instructions and rules is, and why to follow them or not, but that's very different from just following them. Certainly just following written instructions, even perfectly, will make you an absolutely awful DM. You need more than that.

But again, cooking is a silly analogy, because with say baking, a subset of cooking, if you follow the instructions perfectly, you will usually get a top tier result. There is no subset of RPGs where that's true.

 

[Malmuria]

Just have to post this here…

 

[MichaelSomething]

I would watch that show.

Gordon Ramsay has got you covered!

Edit: This is from the UK version of Kitchen Nightmares. He's much more yelling in the US version...

 

[Ruin Explorer]

He's much more yelling in the US version...

That's largely down to the apparent behaviour of the restaurant owners in the US one though.

In the UK, the vast majority of the failing restaurants on the show are just kind of sad. People have lost their energy, lost their vision, are chasing a fading market or the like (the restaurant market in the UK is more changeable than that of the US outside big cities, even in smaller communities), they can see they've screwed up but don't know how to fix it and most of the owners are downbeat and kind of depressed, and do want his help (he often has to yell at the chefs rather than the owners, as I recall).

In the US, there's a lot more in the way of owners who feel like their failure is caused by an outside force or simply the stupidity of customers, even though in the vast majority of cases it's sheer pigheadedness, menus the size of planet Jupiter, corner-cutting to the point where the food is gross, or simply capricious and irrational visions of how restaurants "should" work. So many of the owners are belligerent and defensive, and it takes a lot more yelling to get through to them.

I don't know if that's a genuine cultural difference, a difference in how the restaurants were selected by the team who sets that up, or just an editing/scripting decision to make the US episodes more fiery. Probably a combination of all three, I'd guess.