March 04, 2018 at 04:58AM

Today I learned: 1) Can you guess the most-played race in D&D? Today I learned that it's humans, by a pretty wide margin, according to Wizards of the Coast's polling. 2) Here's a potentially useful narrative trick -- the main character of a story doesn't have to be as interesting as the other characters, especially if it's a first-person story. In general, you can get a reader to go along with a main character by sheer dint of them being a main character. Learned this from a fellow student and part-time writer who had a problematic character that needed to exist for plot/connective reasons, but wasn't very interesting. So they flipped the story to first-person around that character. Instant fix. 3) Romans... ancient Romans were a special people. Incredible, but also so, so terrible. Case in point on the "Romans are the worst people ever" side of the ledger -- fatal charades. This was a Roman practice of performing plays using condemned criminals as actors. The only catch was that the plays involved the deaths of main characters, which were performed for real, live, on stage. Like... imagine Hamlet, but all the actors are on death row, and they actually die on stage. The Romans did that. I'm a bit curious how they convinced the prisoners to go along with it. Also, they must have had awful rehersals.