I've been spending a good bit of time in the mystical land of Faerun. It's a pretty dangerous place. I'm pretty new to the land, but I've encountered my fair share of adventures. I've slaughtered reptilian humanoids in combat, watched a dragon decimate a town, liberated a governor's daughter from nefarious cultists, and gained some gold along the way. Currently the gang of rag-tag adventurers and I are en-route to battle an evil witch.
It's just a game, but it's a problem-solving game. Real life doesn't have
these guys, but it does have a whole lot of other problems. Here are a few things that using my imagination and rolling some dice have taught me about the real world.
1. Evaluate the situation
When questing, you investigate everything. How many enemies are there? How far away are they? What's the terrain like? Are those guys wearing armor? How much flame is coming out of that dragon's mouth?
Before taking ANY action at all, you have to know the situation like the back of your hand. If you don't know what's happening, it's impossible to make an educated decision. That's my line of thought
when I'm pretending to be a dwarf named Spikit. In real life, I need to be DOUBLE as informed about what's going on. Wrong moves can get you in a predicament in the blink of an eye.
2. Use what you have
You have resources. You have things (a rope, a lantern, a dagger infused with the spirit of a banshee), you have talents (stealth, persuasion, imitation), and you have people. You have friends and allies that will stop at nothing to ensure your survival for the continuation of the quest.
In real life, you have resources; things, talents, family, friends. At any given time, you can use what you have. In DnD, you keep a list of everything you have in your inventory. You can use ANY of these things. If you forget what you have, you'll hit yourself later. You'll realize that a problem could have been solved in a much better way if you had used the resources available to you.
3. Get creative
Sure, you could run up and ambush that group of dragon cultists. You could risk it all with foes that could obliterate you with one swing of their scimitar.
Or, you could disguise yourselves in cultist costumes that you looted from previous enemies, approach with confidence, and buy time while someone else steals their weapons.
The point is that more often than not, there's more than one way to approach a problem. Don't rush into something stupid without pausing to consider that there may be a slightly less stupid way to do it.
4. Don't hesitate
In the first 10 minutes of the quest, we stumbled upon a town being obliterated by a gargantuan dragon. Instead of rushing to the scene (you know, like heroes do), we decided to "play it safe" and "wait it out" and "see if the dragon just goes away or something". When we finally wandered into the town 4 hours later, the destruction was devastating. Could we have taken out the dragon? Probably not. Could we have saved some people? Maybe. Either way, there was nothing to gain by sitting around and waiting for our problems to go away.
The above scenario sounds painfully similar to lots of my own real-life scenarios.
5. Remember what matters
There are so many opportunities to get sidetracked. There are so many opportunities to get caught up in the moment and completely lose sight of what matters. Will you let your rage consume you and make stupid decisions? Will you do something just to look cool that ends up being a setback for the whole team? If your goal isn't constantly on the forefront of your mind, you'll end up losing sight of it. Backtracking is never fun.
Don't lose sight of what matters. What are you questing for? What dragons do you need to slay? Are you going to sit around and wait for them to go away? Whatever you do, don't forget that you're not alone: and don't forget that 30 feet of rope has more uses than you think.
- A
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