Hello, everyone! I think this week’s post will be more of a quick musing. The topic, Session 34: Is it Wisdom or Intelligence? is one that I actually really enjoy pondering.
We all know the old adage used to explain the difference to a new TTRPG player: “an intelligent person knows that a tomato is a fruit; a wise person knows not to put the tomato in a fruit salad.” Ok, great, that’s a very clean-cut example. Another one that I personally love to give is “Captain America runs on wisdom, Iron Man runs on intelligence.” But sometimes it’s harder to tell in real life, isn’t it? Because people have “stats”, too. People in the real world are dexterous or charismatic, or they’re not and that’s ok, too. The soft stats are always harder to assign in the real world. You hear a friend, or a family member make an argument and you wonder if they are using one or the other, or either.
And I know I’m not breaking any new ground here: part of why TTRPGs are so fun is because they take some of these more frustratingly hard to define social interactions and made them NuMeRiC, which for the most part makes them easier to understand and easier to resolve. Leave it to nerds and geeks to engineer a way to make the things we hate most more fun! The added benefit of that is that with practice these interpreting skills get sharper. I can promise you that at 30 years old, I understand people (and their stats) a lot better than I did when I was 20.
What scares me the most is when people DON’T care about one another’s stats, you know? When people get stuck in the mode of thinking that all that really matters are their own stats, their own understanding and capabilities. When the party members start ignoring each other, in favor of only their own strengths… putting a tomato in fruit salad despite what the cleric said, or telling everyone the tomato is a vegetable and getting embarrassed later…. can you tell I’m writing this in an election year, haha?
I don’t want my Little Dragon to grow up in a world where people overlook the virtues of others. I don’t want to teach him to only value his own. So, no matter what happens out there, please remember that I want to be on this journey with you. I’ll walk my talk. How about you?
