Sausages: Tasty and delicious, although too many can be bad for you. Made of little bits of things that aren’t necessarily tasty on their own, but blended together they’re awesome. Can be purchased in packages, or (for the enterprising) made on your own. Eating the same sausages gets old after awhile.
GMing: Lots of fun, although too much of it (especially without also playing [1]) can lead to burnout. Involves a variety of activities, both before and during games, that aren’t always fun on their own (for me, that’d be prep [2]) — but when blended together, they add up to awesome. Adventures and sourcebooks can do some of the heavy lifting for you, but you can also do everything on your own. Never varying your style [3] gets old before too long.
5 Comments To "GMing Is Like a Sausage"
#1 Comment By Stephen W. On October 16, 2006 @ 1:49 pm
I couldn’t help but raise an eyebrow when the title for this post came up in my feed reader. It’s definitely an accurate analogy, albeit not one I would’ve ever attributed to GMing. Worded correctly, I think you could apply it equally to cooking most foods. Of course, I’m not a big fan of sausage, so I prefer comparing GMing to baking a cake, or maybe pizza. Mmm, pizza…
Dangit, now you’ve got me hungry. Where are the Cheetos? Where’s the Mountain Dew? Can I have some Mountain Dew? 😉
#2 Comment By Dylan Zimmerman On October 16, 2006 @ 4:46 pm
Interesting comparison.
#3 Comment By ScottM On October 16, 2006 @ 5:16 pm
Of course, politics is also like sausage… therefore, GMing is like politics.
(Um, yeah, I’ll go stand in the corner now.)
#4 Comment By Cassandra On October 17, 2006 @ 4:59 am
I have to agree with the old saying also: like sausage, games are better if you don’t see them being made. Knowing all the ingredients can spoil the flavor, resulting in a failure of suspension of disbelief. From the player’s perspective, all that’s important is the tasty result.
#5 Comment By Martin On October 17, 2006 @ 10:20 am
This one was a bit of an experiment. It has none of the hallmarks of most TT posts, and it’s really pretty silly.
And yet, writing it got me to think about GMing slightly differently than I had before — and it got Cassandra to post her own GMing:sausage analogy, which is about 10 times better than mine. 😉