After last week, I was obliged to have a discussion with the participants in my local library’s Dungeons & Dragons program regarding behavioral expectations. Nothing terribly bad happened, of course; it’s simply that the program runs at a library and my participants, kids ranging from sixth to ninth grade, got a little louder and rowdier than a library generally admits of. The discussion went about as well as could be expected, and I was able to return notes to the participants who had submitted ideas for their own little one-shot games to run, so I feel like the administrative portion of the meeting was a success.

As I continue to run games and to play in them, and as I look forward to sitting in on the games the participants in the local program run, I am, as might be expected, looking at characters to play and thinking about what I might put forward. I’m in one online game at the moment, and while I would like to comment about the character I’m playing in it, I really cannot at the moment, save to say that it is a far different sort than I usually play. Of course, that’s one of the fun things about TTRPGs, that they allow for exploration of different ideas and ways of thinking, and even when, as is the case for my current character, they prompt discomfort (and I do admit that playing as my current character is an uncomfortable stretch for me), they have some revelatory power.

The game at the library started off much as planned, although matters quickly pivoted to go otherwise, the PCs deciding to test themselves against the town guard and finding quickly that that was a bad idea. It was, for them, a lesson in actions having consequences; several of them took some minor damage without doing much in return–dice being dice, the results were as the dice would have them, and mine tend to like when I run games–and soon thought themselves better served by standing down. Next week, they will proceed to the next step of the planned adventure, one of five remaining plot points in what I have put together for the term; once those are done, with such time as remains, the group will start playing their own members’ one-shots–again, something to which I look forward.

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