and Words
I can see
When you stay low, nothing happens
Does it feel right?
Late at night
Things I thought I’d put behind me
Haunt my mind
I just know there’s no escape now
Once it sets its eyes on you
But I won’t run, have to stare it in the eyes
Lyric excerpts from Musixmatch.
On a typical Florida day, I wander to the courtyard in my high school. Friends and I meet on a familiar table near the boy’s locker room. Our group of misfit geeks gather on one table among a sea of cement that separate us from others; there are both young men and women among our group. I met most of these friends in middle school, though some I met in this first year of high school. We’re here to adventure and slay monsters.
We gather with paper, pencils, and thumbnail-sized (and mostly regular) polyhedrons. The latter have numbers scribed on each side, and we use them as dice. They come in varying shapes and have 4, 6, 8, 10, 12, and 20 faces. We use different dice to determine success on different tasks. For instance, if you only have a 1 in 20 chance to successfully accomplish a task, rolling a 20 on that d20 (shorthand for 20-sided dice) indicates success; anything else is failure.