Kitchen Sinking
You finally get the chance to run a campaign, and you cannot wait. As you prepare for session, you make a list of everything you want to have in your game. Maybe you want to homebrew monsters to make them fit your story better. You also want to spice up your campaign, to make everything fit just right. You have lists of optional rules, custom races, and much more to make this adventure all your own. With each passing day of preparation you add more and more to your game, making it exactly what you envision. Finally, the time comes to run the game. But when you run the game you start finding issues. The system feels slow and clunky. You may be suffering the effects of Kitchen Sinking.
What is Kitchen Sinking?
At this point you are probably asking yourself what Kitchen Sinking means. The term refers to the effects of feature bloat that comes from adding a lot of extra elements to a tabletop game, using everything “but the Kitchen Sink”. The additions can take various forms, but the main attribute of Kitchen Sinking is that there are multiple ones. They can be official optional rules, such as the Gritty Realism Variant in the DMG, 3rd party published content, or just your own specific homebrew. Every element add on to the game adds a little bit more to this effect, causing it to build.
Causes
As Gamemasters, we all want to make our games unique. Whether it involves making your own stories, or tailoring an existing one, we all want to make our table stand out. We strive for creativity in our games, it comes with the role. There is nothing inherently wrong about wanting to customize your game. Making a game your own makes your experience at the table unique. The issue, however, comes when this is done in excess.
Imagine, as an example, that you want to create more involved crafting rules. You have a player who really wants to lean into alchemy, or potion making has always been something you wanted to see in more detail. So you find a system or add one of your own. On its own, that change will add to the game in a small amount. By itself, that change is minor.
But imagine you add more. You really want to alter the game to fit the image in your head. Maybe you add Gritty Realism to up the dangers of traveling the wilderness. You also add in different armor levels, to give a wider range of gear for martials. Each takes a step away from the original system, and these steps add up.
NOTE
This is not saying that you should not use third party material, or change the game. Just that you should use them with thought, and a bit of moderation.
Symptoms
As you add to a game, like 5e, you will slow down. Take, for example, the Gritty Realism rules that I mentioned above. If you are not familiar, these rules alter how rests work. Short Rests take 8 hours, and long rests take 7 days. By itself, this change will slow down the pace of your game, making every combat scenario cost a bit more. However, other rules can compound on that, adding to the loss of momentum. Other rules, such as a Training for Leveling that adds a gold and time cost to adding to your character, will only slow down the game further. Steadily your game goes from a normal pace to a crawl. Campaigns already have a tendency to last years, and this will extend that even further. If you are not careful, your campaign progression will come to a screeching halt.
Your game can also become unbalanced. Combat focused TTRPGs, like D&D, rely on a set progression of abilities and resources in order to maintain balance. This all works to match player capabilities to one another, and to allow a DM to create battles that are both challenging for the players but possible to win. (Whether 5e does this well is a topic for another day). Adding magic items, spells, or abilities to the game that allows the players to do more in combat can slowly unbalance that system. On the other side, homebrewed monsters can do the same if you are not careful. Giving creatures too many abilities or extra actions in a turn can create an accidental TPK. The games balance falls away, and it becomes harder to create consistent encounters.
The focus of the game can also shift. This is especially true with any sort of change that adds to downtime. At its core, TTPRGs are about collective storytelling. While you are solely in charge of your character, the story comes from everyone working together. When you add elements to the game that add more agency or power to one character over the others, you can accidentally make that character shift to focusing on themselves instead of focusing on interacting with the party. I have found this especially prone when you expand out Downtime rules. Referencing Xanathar’s gives a player a lot to do already, and adding anything else can give a player reasons to focus on the downtime more than time in play. It can go from a game where the players cannot wait for the next encounter, to players awaiting the next set of downtime to complete their own personal quotes.
Avoiding Kitchen Sinking
Now that I have talked about Kitchen Sinking and what it can cause, you probably want to know how to avoid it. You would rather have a balanced game, but at the same point want to adjust the game to make it your own. I was very much the same way when I realized what it was doing to my games. I saw how it affected the focus and pacing of my adventures, and wanted to avoid the game succumbing to these effects. So I found a few methods to combat Kitchen Sinking.
Play Vanilla
One of the easiest ways to get a feel for how Kitchen Sinking will change the game is to become familiar with how the game runs on its own, with no additions to it. Running a game Vanilla, or RAW (Rules as Written) can seem a little bland if you are used to customizing the game, but it helps you establish a baseline for what the game can do, and what changes could potentially mean. You can think of it like “calibrating” your mind to the intention of the system.
A great example of this is understanding how bounded accuracy and Armor Class (AC) work in 5e. Compared to previous editions of D&D (as well as similar systems like Pathfinder), the numbers in 5th Edition seem a little small. I know coming into the game from Pathfinder 1E such low numbers confused me. But those lower numbers mean that bonuses and increases can have a large effect on the game. Granting a bonus higher than a +2, for example, can really skew in favor of a successful roll. Add on advantage to that, and you will see how these lower numbers can swing easily. The creators of 5E planned for this in how they designed the game, keeping this in mind when a player could gain a bonus or advantage.
While you can understand the intent of the rules of a gamejust reading it, the full scope of what that means becomes much more clear when you experience them firsthand, and understand how the rules interact on their own. It might make you think a bit more when you potentially add ways for the party to gain benefits, such as the optional Flanking Rule.
This does not mean you need to play through campaigns without additions, or lock away your adjustments for a time. Playing a few quick games can help you get a good idea of how the game interacts and grant some foresight. This is a situation where playing SHORTER GAMES can really shine. Playing a shorter adventure that lasts a few sessions means you can get to customizing the game, but first getting a bit more understanding of things.
Question Add Ons
Once you have a feel for the game, questioning your additions can help make sure each feature you add has a purpose. As someone who has a tendency to fixate and hyper-focus, I do this in my everyday life in order to make sure that I am not caught up in the excitement of the moment, and am thinking about all the implications. Whenever I make a large choice, I try to take a moment and think about the decision. I find asking myself questions can help me determine whether this choice makes sense. It translates very well to customizing your tabletop games.
When adding in some 3rd party or home-brewed content to your game, try to have a series of questions that you ask yourself before deciding. Some questions I like to ask myself are:
What does this add to the game?
Does the game have a way to do this already? If so, why does it not meet your needs?
Will this add or detract from the core story of the game?
Will this add or detract from the overall fun of the game?
As an example, imagine you want to add a custom monster to your game. You see nothing in the official material that meets your needs, so you look elsewhere. Maybe you make your own monster, or find one already created online. Before adding that monster, it makes sense to go through these questions. Oftentimes when I am looking to homebrew monsters, less is more. I can often reskin a monster, changing the description and images but keeping the mechanics the same. So instead of bringing something entirely new into my game, a smaller change of aesthetics and flavor preserves the balance. As an added benefit, it becomes a lot less work for me, and allows me to spend energy in other areas. The time you save by not creating your own monster, testing it, and preparing it for your game can be used in other areas.
Testing Any Additions
Even going through the above, some additions might have unforeseen effects on the game. Maybe your players found an exploit you did not imagine.The effect might not create the change in the game you were hoping for. Communicating with your group about the additions or adjustments can help and let your group know they might adjust a bit.
This mindset helps when you alter a game that is already in play, but can also work well when starting a new campaign. I have a blanket rule at my table regarding any potential changes to our game. If something added accidentally creates an imbalance or, worst-case scenario, causes a permanent change to the campaign that we did not expect, we can always retcon it. The primary focus of this for me was to avoid accidental TPKs because of changes in the game. A great example is adding monster abilities to lower levels. The first tier (1-5) of 5E can vary. A series of poor dice rolls can lead to a party getting steamrolled. I have found firsthand that adding more difficult monsters early on can cause an unsatisfactory experience for all involved. If the threat you brought in to be a challenging but rewarding fight accidentally drops most of the party, it can really sting. Since these situations can arise no matter how careful you are, being prepared to retcon in a worst-case scenario can make sure everyone has fun.
This goes both ways, though you want to make sure to not appear spiteful. If you give your party a magic item that turns out to trivialize your encounters, it will make sense to talk to the party and adjust it accordingly. Maybe that scepter you gave the wizard should have had significantly fewer charges, and you did not realize it in the time. Talking with your party, acknowledging the imbalance, and then correcting it will help. I try to prepare the conversation ahead of time, by letting the players know that “Any unofficial material might be adjusted if it does not preform as intended”.
Sparingly, but still Do It
While I talked in depth about the dangers of using additional material, I want to clarify that this is not saying to not use any material at all. You should incorporate homebrew, house rules, and third party content into your games, understanding the changes it can cause. The TTRPG community is full of amazingly creative individuals who all put their own spin on the systems, and put their work out there for you to enjoy. So use it, but make sure to not bloat your game. I highly recommend checking out some of the community’s work available.
Conclusion
Changing your TTRPG is fun, but avoiding the creation of bloat is important. When you add too much to the game, you get Kitchen Sinking. You can slow down the game, unbalance the elements in it, and shift the focus of the game to something that you were not intending. This can happen easily if you are not keeping aware. But avoiding Kitchen Sinking can be done easily. You want to understand the Vanilla game, so that any time you make a change, you understand what it will affect. Once you have that idea, come up with some questions to ask yourself when you intend to bring in something new to your game, so you can make sure you are not needlessly adding things. Finally, make sure that the rest of your table knows you do not write any additions in stone. If something goes wrong, swaying things in either direction, you may have to adjust and, in worst-case scenarios, retcon away any accidents in order to maintain fun.
This method has worked for me and any game I have run. I used to bloat my games down, but now I am more aware, which helps me decide. Have you run into bloat in your games? How do you avoid adding everything but the Kitchen Sink? I would love to hear.
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