Photo Above by Cory Doctorow. Photo Below by Tom Conder. Final Photo by Kyle Flood.
If you couldn’t tell, I have been on a bit of a D&D kick as of late. I guess the passing of Gary Gygax has awakened a bit of my nostalgia for the game - I grew up on this stuff, after all. Looking back, I can tell that the game influenced my spiritual beliefs along with broadening my mind and my imagination. The life lessons I’ve learned playing D&D might have been learned through other avenues of experience, but perhaps not as soon and perhaps not while having so much fun.
Life Is About Gaining Experience
D&D was the first game ever developed that used experience points and levels to measure the growth in power of the player’s “piece.” Most people don’t seem to grasp how revolutionary that idea truly is. In poker, your growth as a player depended entirely on your own mastery of the game. With chess, each player started the game on a level playing field. While in playing Monopoly, your piece gained more monetary capital and real estate, your control over the game always remained dependent on the roll of two dice. Only in Dungeons & Dragons did your playing piece, your character, have the chance to develop separately from your own experience. Of course video games have now made the concept of character levels and constant improvement through game play more popular than ever, but they all owe a dept of gratitude to D&D.
The reason why experience and levels were introduced into the D&D game in the first place was to simulate the personal growth of each individual person. For me, this provided the first and most important lesson - life is about gaining experience. While in real life I don’t have to hack up monsters to grow and to becoming a stronger person, there is little doubt in my mind that the human experience is about learning more about how to better live. With each step that we take in life, we gain the experience necessary to take the next.
Potential Failure Makes Life Worth Living
I’ve been through my fair share of characters. I’ve seen their triumphant mistakes land them six feet under more than a few times. However, if D&D did not allow for the chance of failure, than it would not be as interesting to play. In fact, if I knew the outcome of every die roll, I don’t think I would be as much of a fan of this game as I am today.
The same goes for life; if we all knew exactly what to expect, I doubt that life would be as rich and vibrant. Can I handle a new management level position at my place of employment? I’m not entirely sure, to be perfectly honest. Am I going to shoot for a management level position? Yes, if only because I want that experience. I am sure I will stumble along the way, but it is worth trying if only because I don’t know what to expect.
We Each Decide Our Own Conditions For Success
As a Dungeon Master (the referee of a D&D game), I’ve seen a number of fair maidens go un-rescued due to my players deciding that the kingdom is better without her anyway. Sometimes, the goal which I had set out for the players is ignored completely and the game goes in a completely different direction than what I originally intended. I have even ran a game where the players have taken over a town which they originally had pledged to save. I may have been a little disappointed at these turn of events, but my players felt triumphant. Why? Because they have set their own condition for success and have achieved it.
In a similar manner, we can decide for ourselves the conditions for what we consider a successful life. I don’t need to be married with two children, making a six figure salary, owning a home I can barely afford filled with the newest technological gadgets to be successful in this life. That is someone else’s definition of success. My definition of success could be to live without answering to anyone, to make my own schedule, and to roam where ever my heart leads me without the tethers of responsibility. The definition of what society believes to be success is just a suggestion - a suggestion based purely on material things. I, as well as you, can make up our own minds as to what constitutes a successful life.
You Can Change Who You Become
One of the more challenging aspects of Dungeons & Dragons is wrapping your head around all the choices you have in terms of creating your character. Sure, I could make it easy on yourself and choose one of the standard classes and standard races, but what if I change my mind latter on? That is where multi-classing comes in; I can choose to alter or tweak the role of my character as I advance in levels. I may not be able to alter who that character was formally but I can change who he becomes. For example, if my brutish dwarven warrior later tires of battle and instead finds new interests and challenges in healing, he will still know everything he knew as a warrior but begin learning how to best mend wounds instead of how best to create them.
Like my dwarven warrior, you too can change who you are becoming. This is a life lesson that not many people until their later years - I’m just glad that I’ve learned it early. It may be hard to see a way out of your current circumstances, especially if you find yourself destitute. However, there is always one thing that you do control; your own personal development. Who you become as a person is still completely up to you, even if the necessary education seems out of reach. All you need to do is to put yourselves in situations which expose you to the skills you need, and challenges you in the areas you need to develop. It isn’t easy, and it will never change who you were, but we should never be lead to believe that we cannot change who we become.
Morality & Ethics Are Not Simple
The way in which Dungeons & Dragons simulate morality is through a system of “alignments” which dictate the way in which a character views the world. There are nine of these alignments, these being Lawful, Neutral, and Chaotic on one axis, and Good, Neutral and Evil on the other axis. Even with the possibility of neutrality as an alignment choice, it has never been an easy task deciphering what exactly constitutes good and evil, law and chaos. These moral and ethical presumptions that are injected into the game have spawned an ongoing discussion that almost every gaming group has.
For being a dysfunctional mechanic in an otherwise fun game, alignment has taught me much about right and wrong. It is never a simple matter of one or the other. There are no absolutes when it comes to morality and ethics, and to assume to know those absolutes does not some how show more integrity, but instead points to the laziness of the one who makes that assumption. Despite the decrying of moral relativism from some, I do not see it as a downward spiral of loosening ethics and morality. Quite to the contrary, moral relativism demands constant inquiry into the nature of our deeds and their impact on those around us, for good or bad. Moral absolutism judges a thing by its name, while moral relativism judges that thing by its fruits.
It may seems strange to attribute so many virtues to something as silly as a fantasy role playing game. Perhaps it could be argued that I learned these lessons elsewhere in life which were later reinforced by the game… but there is a great deal to be said about reinforcing what is learned. For this I own a dept of gratitude to Mr. Gygax, as well as for the time spent in the presence of friends both in the past and in the future.
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