thy dungeon gal (non US citizen mode)

I don't think it's entirely impossible, but I think it's worth thinking of why it's so fun in video games: in video games the process of farming/grinding and other repetitive tasks is often very predictable to the point of the player being pretty much able to go on autopilot and not have to be at a 100% at all times. Tabletop RPGs differ in the sense that many of their mechanics are based on conversation and it's sort of expected that the mechanics only be brought in once the right conversation is done.

But now like tabletop RPGs aren't the only tabletop games out there and there are in fact heavily mechanized solitaire games where playing them can be heavily automated. Completing a puzzle can be a solitaire tabletop game, as can be a playing a game of the card game Solitaire, etc. and I feel those games can hit the same kind of spot as "doing a repetitive task in a video game that still feels rewarding and fun."

So like: if you want to model it through the traditional tabletop RPG framework of "two players in conversation and once the right conversation happens the mechanics are brought in and then the procedure is followed" then I think you might struggle with making repetitive tasks fun and rewarding in a tabletop. There's too much friction there, when the reason why those activities can be fun in a video game is due to them being almost entirely frictionless. However, if you accept that one of the modes of play in your "tabletop farming sim" could literally be "a player literally plays a bean-counting mini game on the side as an abstraction of their character being involved in the bean-counting side of farming and collecting resources and so on" and just let them do that, then yeah. Maybe.

Considering how many board games functionally revolve around getting satisfaction out of taking a series of solitaire-ish actions for points, I think the same sorta structure would easily work to replicate the feeling of repetitive tasks in video games. Then you just tie it into the TTRPG gameplay loop: e.g. if you've got some kind of card based engine-builder board game about mining or whatever, certain cards could cause things to happen in the narrative that you'll need to deal with through the TTRPG side of the rules.

I don't think it's entirely impossible, but I think it's worth thinking of why it's so fun in video games: in video games the process of farming/grinding and other repetitive tasks is often very predictable to the point of the player being pretty much able to go on autopilot and not have to be at a 100% at all times. Tabletop RPGs differ in the sense that many of their mechanics are based on conversation and it's sort of expected that the mechanics only be brought in once the right conversation is done.

But now like tabletop RPGs aren't the only tabletop games out there and there are in fact heavily mechanized solitaire games where playing them can be heavily automated. Completing a puzzle can be a solitaire tabletop game, as can be a playing a game of the card game Solitaire, etc. and I feel those games can hit the same kind of spot as "doing a repetitive task in a video game that still feels rewarding and fun."

So like: if you want to model it through the traditional tabletop RPG framework of "two players in conversation and once the right conversation happens the mechanics are brought in and then the procedure is followed" then I think you might struggle with making repetitive tasks fun and rewarding in a tabletop. There's too much friction there, when the reason why those activities can be fun in a video game is due to them being almost entirely frictionless. However, if you accept that one of the modes of play in your "tabletop farming sim" could literally be "a player literally plays a bean-counting mini game on the side as an abstraction of their character being involved in the bean-counting side of farming and collecting resources and so on" and just let them do that, then yeah. Maybe.