Role-playing fans let the dice decide their sandwich every day – making them a TikTok star

Dice the lunch. Does that sound too absurd? A TikTok star became successful with it and wows with terrible sandwiches.

Some decisions in everyday life have to be made every day. For example, the vital question of what you want to put on your own bread today. What may only take a second to survive for most people is staged by some as a fateful decision – which then gains worldwide attention.

So did Jake Pauwels. He turns his daily lunch into a real event and never really knows what he’s going to eat today until he rolls it.

What does Jake Pauwels do? On TikTok, Pauwels has a small recurring show called “Roll for Sandwich” – in English something like: “Cubes on your sandwich”. And that’s pretty much all you need to know. Instead of filling his sandwich as he pleases, he asks fate for help in the form of various dice.

Depending on how many ingredients are available in a certain category, he uses different dice. Larger categories use a 20-sided die (“D20”), while smaller categories, such as type of bread, use a standard 6-sided die.

The result is sometimes quite uncanny creations that cause discomfort just reading the ingredients. Or which one of you would relish a multigrain sandwich topped with crabmeat, cheese, pickles, salt, pepper and a savory chocolate sauce to finish? You can do the beautiful suffering of this creation on tik tok see.

The idea was born out of his passion for role-playing games – especially D&D (Dungeons & Dragons), a more classic pen and paper role-playing game where the fate of heroes and villains is often decided by dice.

Why was that so successful? More than 880,000 people have now subscribed to Pauwel’s “Adventures in Aadria” TikTok channel. Watching him with which possible and impossible combinations he fills his daily lunch seems to have a very special appeal.

According to Pauwels, this method tells you a lot about the taste of different ingredients and you come up with combinations that are much better than you originally thought. A lot of the fascination also seems to be witnessing directly how Pauwels eats a sandwich whose ingredients don’t harmonize with each other at all. To the question from Magazine polygonwhether he eats every sandwich, he explained:

Yes, that was important to the concept of the show. Simply rolling out a meal that I can then throw away if I didn’t like it wouldn’t have weighed the same. There are real consequences to the throws you make in D&D. Well, at least real-life fantasy consequences. I was hoping to include that in this project as well. It’s not like I have anything dangerous on the list either – I can suffer for five minutes and eat a bad sandwich to keep the show’s integrity and keep people entertained a little.

Another important point for Pauwels is that he doesn’t want to waste any ingredients either.

There’s so much food waste on TikTok, where people create horrible, horrid things and then don’t eat them. I’m not in the financial position where I can buy groceries every week and then throw away half.

It is clear that with this approach, every lunch will become an adventure – but whether you would like to take part in it yourself is another matter.

Can you understand the fascination for such a format? Or would you even do it yourself for your lunch if it wasn’t so much effort?