Stats
In role playing games there is a process your character can undergo called a re-spec.
Usually you have to talk to some type of immortal gatekeeper, hairy old wizard, or glory babe sitting by a still pool dangling her fingers in the water. The process and payment varies, but the outcome is always the same; you sacrifice all of your skills and outstanding stats that you have been working on since character creation, or your last re-spec, in order to build your character up again to the level of their former glory, but different, more suited to your current play style, or even environment. You don’t get any more points, but what you do get is the chance to distribute those points into the skills you believe will be most efficacious in your future endeavours.
We all get older, inevitably. Our strength and constitution wanes as our wisdom and intelligence grows. We can’t jump or flip huge logs onto the bonfire anymore, or at least it’s not the greatest idea, considering the state of your dexterity and you’re liable to end up IN the fire instead of making use of your heightened wisdom and charisma to tell great stories around it. That sort of thing.
As a preacher’s kid, I was never allowed to play Dungeons and Dragons, but I played a lot of it, and lied a lot about it. The reason, or more accurately, the fear, was a brainless parroting of what some religious tabloid vomitted into the media that some kid had lost his D&D character, and had killed himself as a result. How could I resist a draw like that? Just like the mania over the evils of rock music like Black Sabbath and Blue Oyster Cult with their devil lyrics and backward masking, the books about the perils of the devils music and role playing games were the only christian publications that I ever read with enthusiasm, aside from parts of the old testament, which was my introduction to fantasy, and is metal as fuck.
When my D&D character died, I didn’t kill myself. I just un-killed my character and kept playing because IT’S JUST A GAME. Why start over when you can just make some adjustments, maybe suspend disbelief a little more, and carry on with a renewed strength and vigor seldom seen by few. (The end of that sentence has been floating in my head for a very long time, and I don’t know where I got it from, so if you recognize it, let me know.)
Kids don’t kill themselves because their D&D character died, nor because Ozzy tells you to enjoy life; kids kill themselves because they have severe, untreated, and probably unacknowledged mental health problems that no one ever helped them through, and it was easier, and better for the parents, to blame a game, or music, than take responsibility for being a waste of stat points.
Thankfully, my parents weren’t like that, they just had bible goggles on all the time, and they were naive. Seriously, it must have been quite baffling to them how much I loooooved Monopoly and Stock Ticker.
Maybe they knew I was lying to them. I don’t know. I didn’t really care either because I re-specced into an atheist at age 12, and didn’t believe in hell.
