Life, Gaming, and the Gospel: D&D part 2

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.

For a really good talk about choise, read The Three R's of Choice.  I love it.

On Rube Goldberg and Simplicity

This is only the most awesome Lego machine ever made.

So, I'm more than a little impressed with this machine.  If not for the Lego engineering skills that I know this required, than for the sheer number of Lego pieces required.  To the unseen maker of this work: Sir, I applaud you.

(Here's a fun bit of trivia: Go through and count how many balls there were.  Do you have any idea how many lego soccer and lego basketball kits that must have taken?  Plus, I counted at least fifteen different Lego programming modules.  That's a whole lot of fiddling around to make that work.)

Here's a fun fact about Elder Tryon:  He loves Legos.  (You know, this Google spellcheck is really annoying.  It keeps insisting that Lego in the singular is correct, but lego, legos, and Legos are not.  I say, "Hang the code! They're more like guidelines anyway!" and a cookie to the first person to name that movie.)  Anyway, Elder Tryon loves legos.  He has a great big box of them at home, accumulated over more than twelve years of scrimping and saving money from yard work, gift cards, and begging Mom for more legos.  And from personal experience, he knows just how hard it is to make a big project.

I think that the closest that I've ever come to making something like this was back in ninth grade.  They had us do a project on Rube Goldberg, a cartoonist back from the 19th century.  He made a lot of cartoons, depicting machines that accomplish a simple purpose in complex ways.  I'd say the most well known adaptation would be the game Mousetrap. You turn the crank, which turns the gear that hits the lever, which collides with the boot, kicking over the bucket containing the marble which rolls down the ramps, down another ramp, which knocks into a large pole.  The pole then shoves a larger marble down a ramp, into a bathtub, through the hole in the tub down onto a small see-saw.  The weight of the steel marble sends the man on the other end of the see-saw flying through the air into a bucket.  The force of the impact sends a small cage falling down a pole, trapping the unsuspecting mouse below. 

My project back then was a device to turn off my alarm using dominoes, a rat-trap, string, scissors, a lego robot, and lots of legos.  Not that all of this blabbing really has anything to do with what my point is.

There's a number of reasons, but the simplest reason that I quit most of my Lego projects is that I run out of pieces, time, or interest.  It requires planning, accounting, and careful placement of resources.  That's usually why reasons number two and three come about.

That's kind of why most things fail in life, I think.  Either we run out of materials because of lack of planning, or we run out of interest or time.

I've found that generally, it's good to apply the rule found in Occam's Razor:  The simplest explanation [or plan] is usually the right one.

For me, the best plan is always the simplest.  All we need to do is apply what God tells us.  He always knows what is best for us, and wants the best.  If we work according to the plan that he gives us, we'll always come out wiser and happier.  I know this.   Getting into heaven is deceptively simple: It only has five steps:

1. Believe in Jesus Christ to the point that you'll get out and do stuff.
2. Repent, in other words change your life to be like God wants it to be.
3. Be baptized by someone holding the proper priesthood authority.
4. Receive the Gift of the Holy Ghost.
5. Endure to the end, which means you do steps 1 and 2 for the rest of your life.

If we do this, we will go to heaven.  I hope to see all of you there.

Also, a small music video to go along with this: