Peter Sanders (pictured to the left with his awesome Mennonite beard) at the D&D game that changed his life. Tommy Lindquist (pictured to the far right) is also present, for some reason.

ST. PETER, MN- “It was literally out of my hands,” said sophomore Peter Saunders. “My grades rested on the outcome of that dice roll!”

It’s been a turbulent semester for Peter Saunders. After receiving underwhelming marks on all four of his final exams last semester, Saunders has been fighting tooth and nail to get the results reversed. He insists that the outcome of his finals was beyond his control. As he explained to a reporter from the Fourth Crown, he had been jinxed by a bad stroke of luck in a Dungeons & Dragons game he participated in the previous evening.

An avid Dungeons & Dragons fan, Saunders had been spending the weeks leading up to finals immersed in a game with his friends. It had been a long and colorful campaign that Saunders claimed he “could not afford to put aside.” His character, a sorcerer named “Saladin the Indolent,” had leveled up many times and become a master of the arcane arts.

However, disaster struck when Saladin and his comrades were ambushed by a ravenous ghoul while exploring a crypt. Saladin moved to cast a fireball  in an attempt to charbroil the foul creature. The game master rolled a twenty-sided die to determine the outcome of this action. Receiving an abysmal “1,” Saladin failed to cast the spell and was subsequently eviscerated by the ghoul. Saunders flipped the table over in a fit of rage, furious that his character had died.

“Looking back now, it’s so clear to me,” Saunders said. “When I woke up ten minutes before my calc final with a bottle of Jameson in my hand, it hadn’t yet sunk in what had happened.”  

At first Saunders accepted responsibility for his bad grades, resolving to study harder in the future. It was only during January that Saunders thought back to that fateful evening and connected the dots.

“That’s why it’s not my fault,” Saunders said. “Fate decided that my grades would be poor!”