Time played a rather rude trick on me a few days back. As missionaries, we each pay $400 a month into a missionary slush fund to diffuse the cost a bit. It goes towards rent, electricity, gas, and all that fun stuff. Less expesive missions need less, while more expensive missions need more. In this mission, we get all of the housing taken care of, and we get $130 per month to spend on food. Since we go grocery shopping every monday, and since October has five mondays, this means that this month we have slightly less pocket money than usual. I was sitting at my desk, looking at the calendar and the amount of cash that I had left, working on my budget. I flipped up the calendar to the month of November, to see how many weeks were in November, when I stopped short. The six week period we're in, at the end of which I return home to Washington, ends half-way through November. I just sat there and thought a bit: in three weeks in this month, and three weeks next month, I'd be sitting at home.
So what do I do now?
It kind of felt like something out of Dungeons and Dragons. There's this whole class called the Rogue. They're schtick is that they sneak up on something and stab it. It does more damage than usual, and is a real pain. (Since I like to play big guys with big swords, I'm usually the target.)
Sometimes, we have something similar in life. We're just going about, doing our job, helping others, when something comes out of nowhere and smacks us. Why does this happen to us? Is God punishing us?
Of course not. To say that bad things only happen to bad people is also to say that good things only happen to good people. God is not punishing you. He loves you, and wants you to be happy. Sometimes bad things just happen.
However, God has a plan. It is so wide in scope that we really can't take it all in. He has his eyes placed on Eternal Life. These eighty-or-so years that we have are just a drop of water in the Pacific Ocean compared to that. While it seems everything to us, God knows what is truly important.
I know that as we trust in Christ and repent, and are baptized and receive the Holy Ghost, enduring to the end, we will have the eternal life that God wants so badly to give us. If we move forward even in the tough times, we'll have eternal life.
When I say the word Genesis, what does that call to your mind? It has the potential to be the first book in the Bible, or perhaps a failed attempt by Sega to keep up with Nintendo and Sony.
In my case, it summons images of creating worlds, of new life, of incredible power.
In other words, it sounds to me like the spell, Genesis, from Dungeons and Dragons.
Genesis is a ninth level spell, which translates into being about the same amount of power as calling down meteors, totally reprogramming someone's mind, summoning a controllable black hole, or changing reality. (You could say that that's what all D&D spells do, is change reality, but that's beside the point.) Basically, Genesis gives you the power to create your own miniature universe, 180 feet in radius. Inside that sphere, you can do whatever you want.
Should you so choose, you could fill that 360 foot sphere with pure gold, and single-handedly solve a good chunk of the national debt. (If we crunch the numbers, let's see what we get. The volume of a sphere with Radius of 180 feet= (4/3)Pi(180*180*180)=24429024.47 cubic feet of gold. Google informs me that a one-foot cube of gold would weigh 1206 pounds. So, that mass of gold would weigh... 29461403516.02 pounds. Since gold prices are usually done by ounces, we need to multiply by 16 to get 471,382,456,256.36 ounces of gold. Assuming that the market were not to crash because of the amount of gold, and taking the price of gold today at about $1700 dollars per ounce, we have a staggering $801,350,175,635,812 dollars worth of gold, enough to dig the US out of its ~$10 trillion dollars of debt, and perhaps buy the country on the side. Even were the gold to sell for just a dollar per ounce, you'd still be able to pay for the country's debt and still be fantastically rich.)
You could make it so that for every six seconds that passes in this world, eight hours pass in your mini-universe. (Helpful when you need to cram for tests, or perhaps a bit of vacation.)
You could make it so that those annoying telemarketers would never find you again. Of course, you'd also make it impossible for us missionaries to teach you the gospel, so let's not do that.
This single spell would make the smart user thereof invincible. Nothing could defeat him. Anything he needed, he could create in his mini-universe, and then use.
Think of that next time you're trying to outthink God. He has his own universe. Best of all, he's willing to share it with us because he loves us and wants us to be happy.
Click on the links to read Part one and Part Two of a series of articles about Dungeons and Dragons.
So, I've just been thinking a bit lately about Dungeons and Dragons. A guy has to think about something, after all, and I've had a lot of practice thinking about D&D. (I first got started in a library near my house when I saw a copy of the Dungeon Master's Guide on a shelf and figured, why not? After all, I had seen some of my dad's old AD&D figurines, so I was kind of curious.)
Anyway.
Once I got my start, I was hooked. What were these tables of feats, dice charts, adventures, characters, options, prestige classes, sourcebooks, weapons, character traits, flaws, monsters... Oh yes, lots of monsters... From there, I branched out at the library. I knew from the internet that I'd need the Dungeon Master's Guide (DMG), the Players Handbook (PHB) and the Monster Manual. I couldn't find the PHB, so I got the Player's Handbook II. (Yes, there's a second PHB.) Since I couldn't find the PHB anywhere, I got really frustrated. After all, the PHB is the only book of the main three that is absolutely indispensible; everything else revolves around it, since it explains the character rules the most clearly.
Imagine trying to play Monopoly without the rules. Imagine playing any game without the rules. It would become chaos, everyone trying to get their own way, trying to get all they can grab, and with noone really being sure when they've won or not.
It kind of sounds like today, now doesn't it? Everyone's running around like a chicken with their head cut off, trying to scratch all the money that they can out of life. All the times, they've lost the point of life. Just like the point of D&D is not to get rich, in-game or out, the point of life is not to get rich but to be happy. Certainly, having enough money to get by is healthy and good, but we just need to focus on being happy. Christ is the best way to achieve that. I know this to be true.
Next time you need to know what to do, try reading the scriptures. They're the instructions for life.
(A Postscript: I still don't actually own any of the PHB, MM, or DMG. They're very hard to find in the thrift stores I shopped at. I haven't gone on Amazon yet. Maybe when I get home from my mission.)
Really, the wonderful thing about Dungeons and Dragons is that you can be whoever you what, whereever you want. Let's say you want to be a midget who wields a hammer bigger than he is. With the right combination of feats and weapon, you could do that. (Playing a gnome barbarian with the feat Monkey grip, and the Gloves of Powerful build ought to do it. Match with a Minotaur greathammer for some real fun.)
Let's say you want to be a giant who throws his enemies around. Play a Goliath barbarian with the Martial Throw feat, and you can pull it off.
How about a ninja? You'll never be able to be Naruto, but for a regular ninja, a Human Swordsage comes pretty darn close. Pair it with a pair of short swords and the Two-Weapon Fighting feat for the best results.
How about something difficult? Let's say you want to be a master of two different types of magic, and be powerful in both. Start as a human wizard, and take the Precocious Apprentice feat. Next, take three levels of Druid. At that point, you can join the prestige class Arcane Heirophant, which will allow you to progress in both classes at the same time. Finish off with three levels of Mystic Theurge, and you have full spell-casting abilities in both classes.
Like I said in my previous post, you can be whatever you want, except possibly Naruto or Superman. So long as you work within the rules, there's a way to achieve what you want.
It's the same way with life. God has given us the greatest gift possible: life itself. With that gift, he's also given us the ability to choose for ourselves what we want to be. We choose that by what we desire. If I want to be a good person, I will. If I remember correctly, Andrew Carnegie said "It's no great trick to be rich, if what you want is to be rich."
So long as we want eternal life, we will eventually bend that way. It requires much, but if we want it more than anything else, there is nothing that can stop us.
In case any of you didn't know this, I am an avid gamer geek. It says so right in my Mormon.org profile. If you name a game, I've probably seen, heard about, or played it. I've noticed, once in a while, that random stuff often has parts of the gospel in it. Today, I'm going to talk about one of my favorite games, Dungeons and Dragons.
Now, don't run away. Don't worry, I'm not a total geek. Now, let's see what YouTube pulls up when we type in Dungeons and Dragons.
No, that little clip to the right is not what Dungeons and Dragons is. It's the results of people trying to cash in on what it really is.
Nor is the clip to the left a full representation of D&D, though it is somewhat more accurate. (For one thing, I've never gamed with candles, dressed up, or spoken in funny voices.
Basically, Dungeons and Dragons is a fun game where you play as a character in a fantasy medieval world. You create a character, and for the length of the game, that is you. Put it this way; World of Warcraft is a downgraded, online game that was inspired by D&D.
D&D is all about choice. Let's start with your character. You have many options, but we're going to start with This will all sound a bit complicated, especially if you've never played the game, but it makes sense after a while. First, you pick a race, something like Elf, Halfling, Human, Dwarf, or another. In the basic set of rules, you have a choice of seven races, each with their advantages and disadvantages.
Then, you choose a class, which is something like a profession; you could be a wizard or a rogue, a barbarian or a ranger, a paladin or a sorcerer, and so on. Depending on which class you choose, you'll be able to do different things. (For example, rogues are able to deal extra damage when catching people unawares, clerics are able to heal people, and wizards are able to cast a great variety of magic spells.) There are eleven of these, so you have 77 choices before we even go into other options. (For example, you could be a dwarf sorcerer, an elf paladin, a half-orc rogue, or whatever combination strikes your fancy.)
Now, let's add in the diversity of feats. Feats are not those things attached to your legs. Instead, they are special abilities that you get every once in a while. Usually, they provide either a new thing that you can do, or provide some numeric bonus. For example, "Weapon Focus" would allow you to attack better with a certain weapon, and "Forge Ring" would allow you to make magic rings. There are literally too many feats to count. If you don't believe me, go to this page. Those are the feats contained in the basic book. There are millions of possible combinations. If you still don't believe me, go here. It's a consolidated list of all feats in all books.
You see, all of these are options found in three books of options: the Players Handbook, the Monster manual, and the Expanded Psionic handbook. There are more options, more classes, more feats, and each one adds more options for people.
I googled to see if anyone had figured out the total number of possible combinations in D&D. Nobody seems to have invested that much time.
Just think: there are these many combinations in a game. In life, we all have many more options available to us. It's all about choice. We can choose who we want to be, how to get there, and what we will do. I know that as we go and follow Jesus Christ, we can all come to God again.
