It's always been an odd thing for people to seek advice for being a better player. You're just playing the game right? If you can't play the game wrong, then it stands to reason that you can't play any better. It's different on the GM side. There's a lot of backchannel talk between GMs of dissapointment that things they experimented with aren't landing like they wanted them to. A lot of GMs take it in stride but y'know, rejection of stuff you're excited about is going to be hard when you're starting out. I think a lot of advice in the past 5 years emphasizing communication around the table has been a huge boon for this, to the point where someone could start playing ttrpgs and a month later feel comfortable giving that advice.

So I think we're due fresher, more critical advice that we can reflect on. I will share three skills you can practice that will help you begin your journey in maximizing your enjoyment from ttrpgs. (TL;DR in the tags below lol, you can now go comment and tell me how stale and self-evident this advice is).

This is more a discovering my own biorhythms thing than a universal principle, but I really like running my games with ample time to piece together their prep, so I like starting at about six. However, when I’m playing, I really like having an early start (10:00am-12:00pm) so the session can get me out of bed, get myself put together (a brief walk, breakfast), and offer the rest of the day to come down from it (exercise, stretching, general restless legs management). Being at a wakeful hour makes me find that I’ll play better as well.

With that in mind, I wonder if I could dispel my tendency to overprep and that might let me have those benefits when I’m gming. I know the European crowd that tends to appreciate my gming style would like that. It’s an experiment to consider, though it’s outside my schedule at the moment.