This is Faith in Play #7: Coincidence, for June 2018.
If you follow this series, odds are fairly good that you followed, or at least were aware of, the previous series, Faith and Gaming. It originally ran monthly, as this one is scheduled to do, beginning in April of 2001 and ending in that same month in 2005. The series was always popular, was compiled with several other articles on the subject and released in printed form twice, and then in May of 2016 the Christian Gamers Guild decided to republish it as part of a website overhaul. My contribution to that reposting process amounted to giving permission for it and sometimes finding free artwork that fit with upcoming articles, if I managed to get to that before our efficient webmaster.
I mention this because something happened in that process that got me thinking, and since I had already committed to writing this series I made a note of it for this article. What happened was, in the very literal sense, a co-incidence: two events occurring simultaneously without an identifiable causal connection between them. I mentioned it then, but did not pursue it, and it’s worth taking a moment to discuss it now.
Bryan Ray, our diligent webmaster, had begun posting the Faith and Gaming series, as I mentioned, on May 10th, 2016. It was a Tuesday. At that point he had quite a volume of material to post, given the years for which the Guild had been publishing material and the people willing to contribute, so he was posting material every Tuesday and Thursday, and an installment of Faith and Gaming hit the web every week, on Tuesday. He ran through the first seventeen of the forty-nine original series articles at that rate, along with materials by quite a few other contributors and one other of mine, and then on September 1st realized that he was going to exhaust the stores faster than new material would replace it, so he cut back to posting on Tuesday only. Faith and Gaming appeared every other week thereafter.
The coincidence is that the twenty-ninth article in the series appeared on February 14th, 2017. At the time it was decided to post on Tuesdays and not Thursdays, no one was aware that Valentine’s Day would fall on a Tuesday, nor gave it much thought. Nor did anyone ever count out what article would appear when, other than calculating when the series would end so we could know when to start this one. However, the twenty-ninth article, which by this string of unrelated unconsidered causes happened to fall on that particular romantic holiday, is Faith and Gaming: Sex, discussing the propriety of sexual relationships within our role playing game worlds.
It was unexpectedly appropriate. Yet, as I hope I have persuaded you, none of us took any specific steps to make that happen. I did not realize it was happening until I saw it that morning.
These “coincidences” are interesting because they happen. I worked in Christian radio for a time, and there were stories of “mistakes” that were exactly what was needed. One that came to me was that the disk jockey had started a prerecorded program that came to us on a vinyl disk, and had left the studio to get his lunch; he had half an hour, he figured, so he took his time. A few minutes into the program, the record started skipping. Meanwhile, someone was listening. He was in his car, headed for the Delaware Memorial Bridge with the notion that he would get around the safeguards and jump into the Delaware River below. He flipped the station on his car radio and somehow hit us, where he heard the record skipping—a man saying, “Jesus…Jesus…Jesus…Jesus” for perhaps twenty minutes before the DJ caught it. Once the station identifier played, the man found a phone and called; he did not jump into the river.
I’ve written a book under the title Why I Believe which discusses the evidences for the existence of God and the divinity of Jesus, and one of those evidences is something Carl Jung called synchronicity and Wolfgang Pauli attempted to explain. It is about coincidences that defy the odds to the point that it is thought they must have an “a-causal connection”, that is, that two events regularly occur together without either causing the other or being effects of the same cause. Their occurrence strongly suggests the existence of something like a god, pulling the strings behind the scenes. How many fictional detectives have said, “I don’t believe in coincidences”? Whenever two events seem suspiciously connected, we always assume that someone had a hand in them. I recently heard a quote from Albert Einstein: “Coincidence is God’s way of remaining anonymous.”
It can be argued, but then, in our role playing games we actually have someone like a god pulling the strings behind the screens. In Multiverser we call him the referee, but his original title was Dungeon Master, and he has been called Game Master, Storyteller, and many other titles over the years. That means that those incredible coincidences can happen precisely because someone manipulated events behind the scenes—and if a referee is going to “play god” in his game, what better way to do so than to create exactly the kinds of events that look like someone up there likes someone down here, or conversely does not like them much?
Of course, you couldn’t do it all the time; you couldn’t really do it very often, probably, or it would seem contrived. However, you could do it in critical moments. You probably already do—you fudge dice, decide that the reinforcements for the player characters arrive in the nick of time or those for the villains are too late. You just aren’t sure of the justification for it. In Multiverser we included a “General Effects Roll” system, by which when the referee was not sure what was going to happen a die roll would guide him as to whether the outcome was generally good (from the character’s perspective) or generally bad, and the extreme rolls called for the one-in-a-thousand outcomes, good or bad. That kept it controlled, and balanced—but it doesn’t need to be so rigorous.
The point is, inexplicable coincidences happen, just as if someone were causing them, and there’s no particular reason why you, as referee, can’t be that someone.
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