Levels—And Other Ways Dungeons & Dragons Is Like Real Life
Apparently, we can now talk about Dungeons and Dragons.
I played the game in high school and college, during a time when this pursuit—a game that is collaborative and imaginative and not competitive or tactical—was too countercultural to easily defend or explain, so most of us did not try. Playing the game was at best an open secret kept by the players, and that complexity in part made the pursuit too difficult to sustain once post-college careers and relationships began to take over.
Today, the culture has shifted. Adults in my daily life play the game openly; a friend of mine has even made a show out of doing so; and the game’s popularity is such that a D&D movie was recently in theatres. All of this suggests I can now offer a post founded on the workings of the game with a decent hope the piece will land and be understood. This is that post.
I have an observation—an appreciation, really—to make about the game. It is simply this: In my life since D&D, I have discovered that certain aspects of the rules of Dungeons and Dragons are so powerfully descriptive of the operation of life that they have helped me frame my understanding of life even decades removed from playing the game.
I can think of three elements of the rules of D&D that are true to life in this way.
Let me quickly say, most of the game’s rules are not like this. The mechanics are clunky. For those who do not know, Dungeons and Dragons uses various individual numerical scores to rank different attributes of a player’s character in the game, and uses the rolls of different dice (the distinctively shaped dice are a well-known aspect of the game) to determine the success or failure of various actions and the occurrence of various events in the game. Among the clunky elements are the game’s crude simulation of combat: One would never learn anything meaningful about using a broadsword or longbow by pretending to do so within a session of D&D.
And yet, in a few places, the game offers rules that frame clear-eyed truths so plainly that my memory of the game has enabled me to see those principles at work well beyond the game itself.
Here is what I mean—three powerful ways Dungeons and Dragons offers insight into real life:
1. Intelligence and Wisdom (and their difference)
A character in Dungeons and Dragons has separate scores for “intelligence” and “wisdom” (among other attributes), and they can be very different scores. This strikes me as a truer description of people’s inner lives, of their cognitive and thoughtful interactions with the world, and of the differing windows of clarity people possess than the assumption that we tend to make. That is, we tend to understand intelligence and wisdom as overlapping terms, with wisdom at best representing a greater intelligence that comes with maturity. The difference is surely more than this, and D&D gets it right. Intelligence and wisdom are two different things.
We can see a clue to this in a topic much in the news in the past year. Between intelligence and wisdom, only intelligence is the attribute that might credibly be qualified as “artificial.” As opposed to artificial intelligence, artificial wisdom is impossible.
What are the differences, then, between these attributes? Exploring intelligence and wisdom:
One can be intelligent without being wise. Start there. As a term, “intelligence” is slippery to define, because one meets the limits of one’s own intelligence in articulating the scope of intelligence. But the facility this term describes has to do with the speed and confidence of making mental connections, of sampling many ideas, and of simulating the course of an idea before speaking or acting on it. The person who has this facility, but lacks wisdom, might see the logic of an idea but not the reasons why others do not see it. At negative extremes, the one with intelligence but not wisdom might be the overbearing intellectual bully, or might be the overthinking worrier.
Meanwhile, one can be wise without possessing the clarity of making connections we might name as intelligence. There is a different level of interconnection, one that links human perspectives and experiences, and this forms a stratum beneath the more current and urgent world our clever thoughts move in. The wise person perceives and appreciates this level, and thus recognizes, for example, how a given course of action is likely to be futile even when the intelligent minds have calculated all the steps. Conversely, the wise person might see how hope is taking root and preparing to bloom even while the intelligent minds are despairing.
Intelligence without wisdom is cold and might even be ruthless. Wisdom without intelligence can enshrine error and might even revere it.
Intelligence and wisdom are different, and it is worth appreciating how different they are, particularly when they are opposed. Intelligence sees precisely what to do; wisdom knows when not to do that thing.
2. Saving Throws
The “saving throw” is a seemingly arbitrary aspect of the rules of Dungeons and Dragons, yet one that has come to me to feel like an accurate picture of the course of events. In D&D, a character faced with certain devastating or overwhelming attacks, afflictions, or setbacks can try a saving throw: a roll of the dice for the chance that the damage or effect is not so bad after all.
When looking back on the course of my life, how many situations do I find in which I clearly benefited from the equivalent of rolling a successful saving throw? That is, the situations in which I reasonably could have suffered or lost more than I did. One might call this “good luck,” but luck as a phenomenon cannot account for its own nature; something other than luck must describe the tilt upon events by which good fortune can come.
I see instead a protective grace in life. That grace, while not predictable and certainly not manageable, does act to cushion and guide us by sometimes saving us from the worst possible effects of our own foolishness, or the unexpected events that come.
Indeed, if a person has arrived at a certain age and still has some battered but working remains of health, safety, security, love, and happiness, then this is only because of the grace that has helped protect these valuable possessions. Saving throws in D&D are random rolls of the dice, but the very existence of the rule offers a credible simulation of grace in action.
3. Levels
This is the big one, and the observation that led me to write this essay. As I age, it is hard to miss noticing that life has levels just like D&D. In the game, a character rises in “levels,” meaning a character’s abilities and powers advance in incremental steps with experience and success. But then, in parallel with this happening, the monsters get incrementally harder: More powerful foes appear to challenge the character at each higher level. And much the same seems to be true in real life, too.
That is, as we proceed, as we advance in experience, our powers become greater. Yet the monsters we fight keep pace, becoming proportionally more powerful as well.
The description of real life is an analogy, of course, albeit not one that is veiled all that much. Our “powers,” in real life, take the form of connections, skill, resources, perspective, and knowledge earned. These advance. And our “monsters,” in real life, take the form of challenges and threats both real and imagined, notably including worries. These advance as well.
The younger, less experienced person naturally has less of these powers to bring to bear in facing these monsters. The analogy is far from perfect, because certainly there are some who meet with events and afflictions beyond their personal resources to cope with or overcome. However, in the course of a life that proceeds as it should, the advance through life seems to offer a continual escalation of difficulty, a continual deepening of understanding of the stakes, and a continual extension of vision to see what the challenges actually are.
Here again, one meets one’s own limitations. I can feel the extent to which I have leveled up in my sense of the relative smallness of the concerns that might loom large for those who are, say, my children’s age—social mortifications, for example—even though I fully remember how those same concerns were large for me at that same age. I also feel my level in my current dread of monsters I cannot quite name—they loom within the shadow of a mounting experience of loss that comes in this season of life. Yet even so, it is little consolation to me to imagine there must be people at higher levels still who now consider these threats to be small as well.
The monsters must come. They are part of the game, part of life. But in how and when they come, there is a proper order. There is even a sort of restraint.
In D&D, the first-level fighter and the tenth-level fighter each has faced orcs, but the frost giant is something only tenth-level fighter has seen. And life proceeds the same way. The monsters appear when we are at the right place and point of experience to have a fighting chance against them.
Photo: “Dungeons & Dragons dice 2” by lydia_shiningbrightly