Wolds & Wednesdays: Candied Courage

Candied Peanuts and the Courage to Find Your Party

Many years ago, I was a new college student. I was young, and so was everyone around me. On one of those first days, the school gathered all of us freshmen and split us into groups of about fifteen people. Each group filed into its own room, sat down in a circle, and waited to see what would happen next.

Then someone passed around a bag of candied peanuts.

The facilitator told us to take as much as we wanted, but there was a catch: we couldn’t eat them yet. I was hungry, so I grabbed a big handful and dropped it into my cup. I felt pretty good about my haul.

Once everyone had their candy, the facilitator explained the rules. For every piece of candy we took, we had to share one thing about ourselves with the group.

I looked down at my heaping pile of peanuts and realized I had made a tactical error.

The Quiet Kid in a New Town

You have to understand who I was back then. I wasn’t particularly social. I was not one for sharing personal details with strangers. I had no friends at the school, and I didn’t know the area. It was a brand-new town, and I was a brand-new face in it.

Every instinct I had told me to mumble a few safe facts, pass the turn, and hope no one remembered me.

Instead, I jumped in. I took a chance and committed to the exercise.

I didn’t know it then, but that decision would do more than help me make friends that day. It would help me make friends who would last the rest of my life.

One Candy at a Time

I pulled out the first candy and said my name.

I pulled out the second candy and said where I was from.

Then I looked at my cup. I still had a lot of candy left. Something had to give, so I decided to tell the truth about the one thing that mattered most to me.

With the third candy, I said that I was a Game Master.

With the fourth candy, I admitted that I didn’t have a group yet.

With the fifth candy, I said that I wanted to pull a group together.

With the sixth candy, I said that I was free that weekend to start a game.

That was it. In six peanuts, I had gone from a stranger in the corner to a GM posting an open table. I sat back and waited for the circle to move on, half sure I had just made myself the weird kid in the room.

The Circle Answers Back

Then the next person spoke. They said their name. They said they were a player. They said they didn’t have any friends here yet, and they would like to join a game.

The person after that said much the same thing.

And it kept going like that, around the circle, one candy at a time. By the time the bag had made its full trip, I had my first college gaming group. I hadn’t printed a flyer or posted a sign-up sheet. I had simply said out loud what I was looking for, and the people who were looking for the same thing heard me.

Why Gaming Brings Us Together

Gaming brought us together, and to a large extent, it kept us together.

We didn’t know each other. We had met in a strange place, under strange circumstances, with sticky fingers and a cup of peanuts. But we shared something deeper than a hometown or a major. We shared gamer logic.

That’s hard to explain to people who haven’t sat at a table. It’s the unspoken understanding that a dice roll can change everything. It’s knowing why the rogue checks for traps twice and why nobody splits the party. It’s the inside jokes that begin in session one and are still getting laughs years later. When you share a table, you share a language, and that language gives strangers a head start on friendship.

College is full of uncertainty. New classes, new routines, new pressures, and a lot of time spent wondering where you fit. Our weekly game gave us a fixed point. No matter how chaotic the week got, we knew we had a seat waiting for us, a character to play, and people who were glad we showed up. That shared camaraderie made everything else easier to bear.

What Worries Me Now

Here’s my concern, Crow Crew. I’m not sure the kind of intimacy that made that moment possible is as common as it used to be.

Social media has expanded our social circles in ways we never could have imagined back then. We can connect with thousands of people across the world in seconds. Yet somehow, the field for real individual expression and real social courage seems to have narrowed.

Online, we curate. We edit. We wait for likes before we decide whether something was worth saying. Sitting in a circle and announcing, “I’m a Game Master, I have no group, and I’m free this weekend,” takes a different kind of nerve. There’s no filter, no delete button, and no scrolling past. There’s just you, a room full of real people, and the chance that they might say no.

But that risk is exactly what makes the reward real.

There Is Still Hope

Never fear, my dear Crow Crew. There is hope, and it’s simpler than you might think.

New friends, real friends, are often as close as asking real people if they would like to play a game.

Ask a coworker. Ask a neighbor. Ask the person in your class who has a d20 keychain or a dragon on their notebook. Ask the friend who once said, “I’ve always wanted to try that.” You don’t need a perfect pitch. You just need to say it out loud, one candy at a time.

And when they say yes, don’t wait. Don’t let it fade into “we should do that sometime.” Pick a day. Pick a place. Pick a game. Make a plan to begin.

That’s how my first college group started, and that’s how great tables still start today. So go find your circle, Crow Crew. Your party is out there, waiting for someone brave enough to call the first session.