Some years ago, back in the early 90s, our gaming group was briefly joined by Jenny. Unfortunately that nasty thing called Real Life pulled her out of 'gamerolling' (as she called it), but she enjoyed it while she could. There was, however, one aspect to the hobby that put her off a bit, and that was all the dice you had to roll and modify. Jenny, as she declared herself on more than one occasion, was Not Very Good With Numbers.
Now, AD&D wasn't much of a problem, since most times you just roll a die and read it straight, maybe add a bit or take off a bit. But one day she turned up to be told that we weren't playing AD&D today, we were playing Star Wars instead. Fine by her, she knew the movies, just like virtually everyone else in the world. And then we began to explain the system.
The original Star Wars RPG, as you probably know, involves rolling several if not lots of dice and adding them all up. Jenny, remember, was Not Very Good With Numbers. It was one of the few occasions when I've seen someone's face actually turn white with terror. I think her lower lip may even have been trembling a little.
Of course, we reassured her that there was nothing to worry about, all she had to do was roll the things and we could add them up for her, and other patronising remarks that no doubt consoled her no end, and play eventually began. I can't remember where we were or what we were supposed to be doing or anything, bar one little event that in its own small way turned the session upside down. Jenny - or rather her character - somehow got her grubby mitts on a heavy repeating blaster.
The exact specifics of this weapon elude me, but the words six dice of damage remain firmly lodged in my brain. This was clearly an intimidating bit of hardware for someone who was, by her own admission, Not Very Good With Numbers. But we reverted to condescending type and assured Jenny that all she had to do was roll the dice and leave the rest to us numerically literate superbeings etc.
However, once Jenny realised that she could blow away whole squads of stormtroopers with one squeeze of the trigger, our generous assistance somehow got marginalised. Not even marginalised, really. More like utterly redundant. For someone Not Very Good With Numbers, Jenny did a pretty good job of adding up all those dice before we'd even realised she'd rolled them. And once they'd been totalled, they were back in her hand ... rattling ... eager for the next deadly salvo.
And that's about it, really. If I was writing an editorial for a magazine that might have the same name as, let's say, a big scaley fire-breathing monster, I might go on to say something cheerily upbeat about how this proves that role-playing games don't deserve to be slagged off as infantile escapist nonsense. However, since a fair few sessions I've played in have been precisely that, I'm not even going to dare. Star Wars itself scores heavily on both points. I'll just let the incident stand on its own. You can draw your own conclusions.