Character Attributes

I played an awful lot of Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) as a kid.

We seemed to have an unlimited amount of free time to fill, and my friends and I were eager to take advantage of every moment. We’d spend summer afternoons when we weren’t in school playing D&D, and on weekends, we’d have marathon sessions that sometimes lasted well into the early morning hours.

I drew a lot of creative energy from a lot of sources during middle and high school, but there was probably no activity that generated more creative thought than playing D&D with my friends. Sure, I read a lot of books, drew comics, and took advantage of the most eclectic and interesting shows on TV, but Dungeons and Dragons was a different sort of activity.

My books

For one thing, it was collaborative, unlike the other creative activities I mentioned. It meant several friends staying together for several hours at a time, then agreeing to meet up again for another session. This was probably my first foray into project management, since I was typically the DM (Dungeon Master), the person who came up with the adventure and sort of walked the players through the story.

This collaborative storytelling helped me learn how to write, too. I owe a lot of my ability to keep readers interested to those early days of telling stories to my friends. I also owe a lot of my business success to planning all those campaigns out, then pivoting whenever something new came up.

Suffice it to say, D&D has been an important influence in my life. I remember the very first time I was offered the opportunity to play the game, and the first thing to do was to create a character sheet. This was a sheet of paper that sort of represented you in the game, insofar as it kept a list of things you carried with you, your experience level, and what type of character (fighter, magic user, cleric, etc) you were.

These sheets also had something called character attributes. These were the innate qualities you had in the game, and they were listed along the side of the character reference sheet. To fill these numbers in, you rolled three six-sided dice and added these numbers together (I’m oversimplifying a bit—if you played D&D and ever fudged these numbers, I want to hear how you did it).

The Deth Guild, CC 3.0

You ended up with six of these character attributes, all between the values of 3 and 18. If you roll three six sided dice millions of times and look at the probability distribution, you’re going to have lots of numbers in the middle range between 8 and 12, and not terribly many 15s or 16s. 17 or 18 was extraordinary in the game, giving you bonuses whenever applicable.

The attributes (when I played) were:

• strength

• dexterity

• intelligence

• wisdom

• constitution

• charisma

You can probably imagine that strength and dexterity were incredibly important if you were a fighter, but you really wanted to focus on intelligence and wisdom if you were a magic-user. Dwarves had greater constitution, but lower dexterity than elves. Elves had the inverse of dwarves.

This is a really simplistic way to classify what human beings are capable of, but it’s really useful in a game like this. It also provided a new framework for me, where I could see abilities through a different lens.

Over time, these became a reasonable measure of my own holistic health, and I began to think about whether some of them could be improved over time. I realized that they all could.

Physical strength was easy enough: you could lift weights or work out if you wanted to be stronger. By the time I was heavily into D&D in early high school, I was introduced to wrestling, a sport that would ultimately be with me for decades, and I did grow stronger by working out with the team. I also grew up and into my frame a bit as I got older, so of course strength was a variable I could control to a degree.

Dexterity is being physically skillful and nimble. I think about wrestling here, too, and how I had to become good at movements that were counterintuitive. These techniques were the genesis of my jiu jitsu game, and I’m eternally grateful for having stumbled onto wrestling.

Intelligence is the attribute with the most baggage. I will concede that there is such a thing as absolute intelligence in a person: there are some folks who can simply hold a great deal more in their minds than I can, and they can process that information unbelievably quickly. At the same time, someone can know a vast amount about one thing and be a complete dummy in another area (trust me—for everything I’m good at, I’m equally inept at several others).

That means I can’t really talk about intelligence without simultaneously thinking about wisdom. Wisdom is the way you apply knowledge, and if this publication is about any one thing, it is surely wisdom.

Both wisdom and intelligence can be improved over time. When you’ve acquired some wisdom, you can create a sort of virtuous cycle, whereby you appreciate knowledge more. This hunger for knowledge drives you toward a better understanding of where to find new knowledge in the first place, and how to differentiate more important from less important knowledge.

Wisdom takes time, but you can also learn from the mistakes of others. The more you look around and take your time in thinking things through, the more your intelligence and wisdom will increase.

Constitution is pretty straightforward. You need to be healthy in order to survive and to perform at your best, but genetics plays an enormous role here. Nevertheless, there are personal decisions we can make to ensure we’re as healthy as possible within our range, so please be sure to drink plenty of water today!

Charisma, always the final attribute on our character sheets, was the easiest one to ignore. That’s largely because we didn’t really appreciate how effective and important this attribute can be. This would have required a more nuanced understanding of the human condition, and we had not yet developed the wisdom to see this.

Charisma is the way populist politicians rise to the top. It’s how cult leaders get their followers to drink the metaphorical Kool-Aid, and how Ponzi schemes work. It’s also how leaders inspire people to take bold and righteous action, like Eisenhower’s D-Day speech or Kennedy’s Moonshot speech.

It’s also how relationships form, both at the micro and macro level. Every family is glued together by charisma, and charisma is the key to getting anyone to do anything with you, ever. TL;DR: charisma is incredibly important, and shouldn’t be neglected or trivialized.

Over the ensuing decades since I played D&D regularly, I’ve continued to use the attribute-driven framework to try to improve myself, although I’m a great deal less rigid with categorizations and such.

If you want to spend some time “improving yourself”, you’re probably thinking along similar lines, whether it’s becoming stronger, faster, smarter, or wiser, so it’s not a bad framework at its core.

Did you play D&D when you were a kid? If so, which edition was it? We played 1st edition AD&D, and we were disappointed with the 2nd edition, which is now a classic. If you didn’t play D&D, were there other games that gave you a similar idea or framework?