This is another Friday the 13th, a day rife with superstition. It follows another session of the tabletop roleplaying game I am running for middle-school-aged students at my local public library (where, I am pleased to note, Ms. 8 volunteers a couple of days each week). Following from last week, the players continued along with the published adventure materials, moving further into the more or less traditional dungeon on which the game is centering. Pre-generated random results yielded some interesting encounters, and there are more to follow for them.

It occurs to me that I inadvertently introduced something of a plot-hole in following the published materials. Part of what drew the characters into the intended narrative was the escape of an interpolated non-player character into a fissure in the rock. Given the published materials, there is really no place for that character to have gone. While I am not certain any of my players noticed it previously (hi, kids!), I am somewhat ashamed to admit to the gap in continuity; I will plead that I’m not as practiced as I once was and ask forgiveness for the failure. And I do have an explanation; there will have been a door or fissure the players’ characters missed, the oversight due to player absences, and which they may well encounter on the way out from the published materials. Provided I remember to put such a thing in my notes…

As to the nod to today: Friday the 13th holds a place in superstition, a conjunction of unhappy associations. Tabletop roleplaying games are, themselves, rife with superstitions, most frequently concerning the dice used to play them. The overtly educational portion of the session, which I include due to institutional concerns, treated probability (in a very introductory fashion), noting that, given equally weighted outcome generation, no specific result could reasonably be expected to follow any other specific result. That is, an honest d20 can roll twenty 1s in succession, although each roll has a 5% chance of resulting in a 1. (In contrast, a roll of honest 2d6 has something like a 50% chance of resulting in a 7, there being more combinations of two six-sided dice that add up to that result than any other result; it’s not an equally weighted outcome generation.) Much of the superstition regarding dice involves how to make outcome generation unequally weighted, and in the roller’s favor, and the overt education touched on such things. I am not immune to such superstitions, myself, and some of my past and current practices in that regard were laid out; I also invited my players to consider their own such thoughts.

Imagination matters, after all.

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