Nelson’s word today was ‘laugh’, yesterday’s was ‘donate’ and Monday’s was ‘surmise’, which means to suppose something is true without proof. Sounds like a weak version of faith. I surmise that my car is still parked outside. Of course I can’t be sure of that… I surmise that the blood I donate has saved lives and that that involves, ultimately, a baby's laugh. That was a little bit forced, but I finally used some more of the words which Nelson got from his sister to use as prompts this month. I was pretty sure that I could use the word ‘laugh’ in my all but forgotten surfboard story, and I should do that, but instead I want to write about roleplaying games for a bit.

A player character is the role the player takes on in a tabletop roleplaying game; same with live action role playing games, LARPs without the ‘G’, but we don’t talk much about my love/hate relationship with those beasts… PCs have innate traits in traditional TTRPGs, such as attributes like strength and dexterity, skills and abilities. Your character does things, you decide what those things are and characters can fight, run away, hide and sneak, die… almost anything, like a movie or a play. There are many possibilities, but what we definitely need to know is how well a PC can fight, run away, dodge, block or parry attacks. We also need to estimate how hard they are to kill, how easily they can be damaged or injured and how that affects them. Each character needs at least some ability to fight, defend, resist damage, etc. even if these are essentially zero! What I intend is a dead simple system of six-siders added to a standard roll of two six-sided dice, looking for successes on a five or greater, or, if using percentiles dice and random generation, rolling and adding versus a target number.