I wrote this about three months ago but never posted it for some reason.
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I joke around a lot about how I like to surround myself with people who are smarter than me. It’s not really a joke though. I honestly do enjoy learning and the most fun way to learn is to listen to smart people have intelligent conversations. I’ve long had a theory though, and this goes back to my days as a pen-and-paper Dungeons and Dragons nerd. For the uninitiated, when you play D&D, you create a character that you will play in a story that is written by the Dungeon Master (or Game Master). How the characters behave and perform is up to the discretion of and is dictated by the choices of the player characters. It’s a collaborative way to tell a story that involves a lot of pizza, Doritos and Mountain Dew as well as cooperative problem solving and a little bit of math all marinated in a nice broth of too much time on one’s hands.
Just like in real life, there is some randomness that dictates what a character will be. It’s the beautiful fickleness that nature gives us that makes one person’s eyes blue, and one person’s eyes brown, and another person have one of each. In an attempt to mimic this randomness, dice are rolled and the numbers modified in one way or another to determine if a character will be super smart or dumb as a box of rocks, super strong or a 90 pound weakling, super good looking or if they hit every branch on the way down the tree that grows the ugly sticks. There are several categories such as charisma, strength, constitution, dexterity, wisdom and intelligence that these numbers may be assigned to. You’ll roll 3 six-sided dice and write down the totals several times, then assign those totals to the various traits. For instance, if you want a Conan the Barbarian knock-off, you could assign the highest total you rolled on 3 dice to strength and the lowest total to intelligence. Some DMs will actually allow you to redistribute a few points to really skew your character in one direction or another, the theory being that the best stories are told about people who are both truly great and truly weak at the same time. Think Superman with his little problem with a certain glowing green crystalline substance.
So my theory is that real people are much the same. We’ve all distributed the possible points to different aspects that make up who we are. A bookworm who spends all his time in study can get pretty flabby around the middle, and likewise, a jock who spends all his time working his deltoids probably doesn’t get a lot of time to contemplate the finer points of string theory. Many of my friends tend to be heavily weighted in the intelligence and wisdom aspects and have traditionally lacked in the strength and constitution and even sometimes the charisma sections.
That seems to be changing for some reason though. Most of my friends are still smarter than me, but they seem to be becoming stronger, more adventurous and rugged. These pocket-protector-wearing nerds are doing things like white water rafting and very technical mountain biking. They’re hunting and fishing and planting edible gardens. Best of all, they’re approaching these new aspects of their characters with the process-oriented intelligence borne of high intellect. They’re not just getting on a bike and hitting a trail, they’re doing serious research about what kind of bike to get, how to maintain them, and the best techniques for finishing the trek without killing themselves. They’re researching knots and discovering which lures the fish are hitting in a specific river on a specific day on their wifi-capable portable devices.
They’re also looking in different places for new wisdom. We recently picked up a new member of the team that in no way resembles the pale, flabby geeks we normally hang out with. He listens to country music and is an incredibly experienced outdoorsman. He hunts, he fishes, he seems like an extension of the wooded places he frequents – in D&D parlance, he’s a ranger in a party of wizards.
This seems almost unnatural to me, but I love it. What if you could fuse Conan with Dumbledore? Maybe our characters have just all reached such high levels that the differences in character class have become a little blurry.
~~~
I joke around a lot about how I like to surround myself with people who are smarter than me. It’s not really a joke though. I honestly do enjoy learning and the most fun way to learn is to listen to smart people have intelligent conversations. I’ve long had a theory though, and this goes back to my days as a pen-and-paper Dungeons and Dragons nerd. For the uninitiated, when you play D&D, you create a character that you will play in a story that is written by the Dungeon Master (or Game Master). How the characters behave and perform is up to the discretion of and is dictated by the choices of the player characters. It’s a collaborative way to tell a story that involves a lot of pizza, Doritos and Mountain Dew as well as cooperative problem solving and a little bit of math all marinated in a nice broth of too much time on one’s hands.
Just like in real life, there is some randomness that dictates what a character will be. It’s the beautiful fickleness that nature gives us that makes one person’s eyes blue, and one person’s eyes brown, and another person have one of each. In an attempt to mimic this randomness, dice are rolled and the numbers modified in one way or another to determine if a character will be super smart or dumb as a box of rocks, super strong or a 90 pound weakling, super good looking or if they hit every branch on the way down the tree that grows the ugly sticks. There are several categories such as charisma, strength, constitution, dexterity, wisdom and intelligence that these numbers may be assigned to. You’ll roll 3 six-sided dice and write down the totals several times, then assign those totals to the various traits. For instance, if you want a Conan the Barbarian knock-off, you could assign the highest total you rolled on 3 dice to strength and the lowest total to intelligence. Some DMs will actually allow you to redistribute a few points to really skew your character in one direction or another, the theory being that the best stories are told about people who are both truly great and truly weak at the same time. Think Superman with his little problem with a certain glowing green crystalline substance.
So my theory is that real people are much the same. We’ve all distributed the possible points to different aspects that make up who we are. A bookworm who spends all his time in study can get pretty flabby around the middle, and likewise, a jock who spends all his time working his deltoids probably doesn’t get a lot of time to contemplate the finer points of string theory. Many of my friends tend to be heavily weighted in the intelligence and wisdom aspects and have traditionally lacked in the strength and constitution and even sometimes the charisma sections.
That seems to be changing for some reason though. Most of my friends are still smarter than me, but they seem to be becoming stronger, more adventurous and rugged. These pocket-protector-wearing nerds are doing things like white water rafting and very technical mountain biking. They’re hunting and fishing and planting edible gardens. Best of all, they’re approaching these new aspects of their characters with the process-oriented intelligence borne of high intellect. They’re not just getting on a bike and hitting a trail, they’re doing serious research about what kind of bike to get, how to maintain them, and the best techniques for finishing the trek without killing themselves. They’re researching knots and discovering which lures the fish are hitting in a specific river on a specific day on their wifi-capable portable devices.
They’re also looking in different places for new wisdom. We recently picked up a new member of the team that in no way resembles the pale, flabby geeks we normally hang out with. He listens to country music and is an incredibly experienced outdoorsman. He hunts, he fishes, he seems like an extension of the wooded places he frequents – in D&D parlance, he’s a ranger in a party of wizards.
This seems almost unnatural to me, but I love it. What if you could fuse Conan with Dumbledore? Maybe our characters have just all reached such high levels that the differences in character class have become a little blurry.
