On Hobby Best Practices - Part 5

 

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Part 5 - Practice your actual hobby

I have saved the most blatantly obvious of these posts for last. Yet it feels sometimes like the obviousness of this is not as clear as I or others might think, so it bears stating it out loud.

First off, let me direct you to Weird Writer’s excellent post on the roleplaying hobbies. She breaks things down in an excellent manner, and frankly much better than I ever could. Going by their list, this post will be specifically about participating in the “core hobby”.

To do so first one must define what their core hobby is. In the case of TTRPGs, as that is the primary focus of this series, it can be rather tricky, however for the purposes of this post I will say that playing at a table (in person or virtual one) with other people is the core hobby of playing tabletop RPGs.

That might sound like a hot take, or even “controversial”, but the fact that it does is the same reason it needs saying. Playing tabletop RPGs, with other people, is the core of the TTRPG hobby. Buying books, reading books, writing and preparing adventures, scenarios, locations, sub-systems, magic spell lists, writing session reports, doing solo play, engaging in the community, watching actual plays - all of those are perfectly nice and enjoyable activities, but they are not engaging with your core hobby.

However one can’t become a more engaged and better hobbyist at their chosen hobby by simply nibbling around the edges. I put off writing this post for over a year, because due to various life reasons I was not able to do much of any gaming until the very tail end of 2024, and it felt disingenuous to declare the importance of play as I was not engaging in any myself.

TTRPGs are in a lot of ways a craft and crafts require purposeful, focused practice to become better at. And surely we, as hobbyists, should desire to become better at the thing we love and enjoy doing right?
This was the last planned post in this series. I might add further ones if I feel a specific thing benefits from being highlighted as a best practice. Or even better, I encourage you to contribute to this list yourself! If you do, please share it with me.

Thank you for reading, and go do more hobbying!