Instagram: A Writer in All

Rules for the A Writer in All Game:​

Most of us are avid readers, and if not, we prefer writing the books instead! To make Fridays a little more fun, I have created a game that combines one of my loves and pastimes, tabletop roleplaying games with another favorite of mine, reading.

How it works is like this: Every Friday, I will use my roleplaying dice to give you a page number and a line number of whatever book you are reading at the moment (or more than one book if you are crazy enough to do that!). I will roll my dice and state the result of the roll in my Instagram story for that day.

The dice I use are the following:

• 2 D10 (ten–sided dice) and 2 D100  (one hundred–sided dice) for the page number

This will give your page numbers a range of 4 as the lowest possible page number to be picked, and 220 as the highest possible number to be picked.

If your book has over 220 pages, you must add the two D100 results to the given total.

For example, if I stated that I rolled the following:

• 50 on the first D100

• 75 on the second D100

• 6 on the first D10

• 8 on the second D10

and the book has 220 pages or less, the page number for the game will be 139.

If the book has more than 220 pages, you add 50+75 to the original roll of 139. In this case, the new page number will be 264, which will be the page number you will use for the game. If your book has more than 440 pages (double the maximum rolls for the pages), you can multiply the D100 numbers or just pick a random number from your head and use that!

• 2 D10 for the line number.

To calculate the line number for the game, you add the two results given on the website from the D10s.

If the book you are reading has many lines (more than 20 per page), you can do what I explained for the page numbers above:

Add one dice result to your page number based on my roll. For example, if I stated that I rolled the following:

• 5 on the first D10

• 7 on the second D10

You can add 5 or 7 to the original 20 lines. These new line numbers will be 25 or 27, respectively, and this is the page number you will use for the game.

For example, I am currently reading Star Wars: Shakespeare, and I rolled the following for the page number:

30 on the first D100

28 on the second D100

9 on the first D10

6 on the second D10

My page number will be 73 (30+28+9+6) because there are less than 220 pages in the book. If the book had more than 220 pages, my page number would be 131 (this is less than 220 but the dice don't always roll low, so it could have been more than 220 if the results were higher from the beginning).

And my line number is 15 (6+9).

The line is:

"For such a sum as this."

—William Shakespeare's STAR WARS® Verily, A New Hope

by Ian Doescher

Your goal is to go to your book/s and provide the line or sentence found on that page and line number provided. All genres are welcome (you can even include textbooks or any religious books you are reading) and it doesn't matter if the line isn't safe for work. I will put a default NSFW button on the respective page on the main site page just in, case and this will be the norm.

This 'event' will last for a week (until the following Thursday, before the lines/rolls reset), and I will post a short story based on the provided lines on Thursday with a main theme as one line from the previous week. I won't repeat any of the lines, of course, that is plagiarism, but I will create a story based on the prompts/lines.

The 'game' part of this is as follows:

Since I will write a short story on all the provided lines, I will naturally gravitate towards lines that I would love to see and read in my own books (not written books, books I'd like to read). If your line becomes the main theme of my short story, you will receive five points to your name that week and I will track these points offline and give regular updates on the forum (in the Header).

When you write the line based on the numbers from Instagram, don't forget to state the following based on the type of book:

• Novel/nonfiction book: Which book it comes from and any authors attributed to the book.

• Religious book: State which religious book the line is from (the Bible, the Quran, the Torah, and so on) and which version that line comes from.

• Textbook: State the author/s, the title of the textbook, and the edition.

Please look at the examples below to see how the page number and lines work in real time and these examples on the game page at the bottom of the blog page.

If we take my example from the Rules Page, where the page number I have to use is 73 if the book has fewer than 220 pages, and 131 if the book has more than 220 pages. If the book has more than 1000 pages, you can add a zero to my base result (73 in this case). In this case, my page number would be 730. My line number is 15 because the page has 20 or fewer lines. If the page had more than 20 lines my line number would be line 20 based on these rules.

The winner will be announced the following Friday before the next Caption Find quiz begins. I will give the winner (or winners) a shoutout in the comments, and as the winner/winners, you could request a specific Influential Ethics article or topic for the following week.