DB

One of the snacks that I have been enjoying for a while was a semi-generic brand of wasabi cracker, which was sold with a label of a Hawaii food wholesaler, Family Food Co. While their reputation hasn’t been the best in recent news, their snack foods, and particularly, that wasabi cracker has been a shining spot in the small moments of my life to serve as a pick me up.

Let me tell you about this wasabi cracker. It comes in pretty generic wrapping, with a large plastic package holding lots of different small, snack sized packages of soda crackers. There are 4 soda crackers in each small package, and there is no branding or special packaging on the little packages. If you could picture an off-brand, or TV safe cracker snack, that is what it looks like.

Taste wise, it’s excellent. It is a classic soda cracker, with a wasabi salt situation going on. It’s salted on one side, and its quite potent in the classic cheap/fake wasabi experience, with a huge hit to the sinuses. It’s very refreshing and sharp, and you can turn the cracker on the salt side up to avoid direct contact with your tongue if you don’t want as large a hit. It goes really well with poke and cheese, as a means of cutting into those flavors and balancing them out.

We are on our last 4 packs.

It’s been a few months, and whenever I’ve gone to the grocery store, the snacks haven’t been there. There have been other soda crackers there, a seaweed flavor which is pretty nice, but it’s not…it’s not the wasabi crackers. It’s not the same.

It’s a small thing in my life which isn’t there anymore.

When it comes to foods and snacks, you can always make the dish. There is an established understanding and a history of a dish that encompasses what it is. A cacio e pepe is a black pepper pasta dish. A pizza has dough and–well, let’s not open that box of worms. A soda cracker is a cracker made with flour and is leavened with baking soda.

The dish will always be there, but it won’t always be the same. It depends on the recipe, who’s cooking it, what their influences are…lots of things.

And so, like food…like snacks, what parts of TTRPGs are things that can’t be easily preserved?

It’s the games.

I’m not talking about the rulebooks and play materials, or any of the physical trinkets and doodads that people use in their games. I’m talking about the ethereal thing that gets trapped into memory. The experience itself.

It changes with the people that you’re playing with, the things that you bring to the table during the game day, and the way that you listened to and fed off of each other’s energy in that moment. It’s the most primal part of storytelling, like playing on the playground or telling stories around the fire. You will never have the same story twice, even if you play the same game, or play with the same people. You can never experience that twice.

But, you can carry over some prevalent flavors from those games. Maybe it’s humor of the group. Maybe it’s the strong characters. Maybe it’s a kindly give and take. Maybe it’s a mastery of a system. Maybe it’s being the snack captain. Maybe it’s a long-running meme or catch phrase.

Maybe we won’t have the wasabi cracker anymore. And one day, you won’t have the same game anymore. But, we’re the life of all the stories and experiences that have come before us. And like how a dish can change over time, I would love to see our games change over time as the tradition of TTRPGs continue over generations.

I will still miss what is gone, for they are good, and they are ours, and they are forever. With that being said, though…

I would love to see what happens next.