A Roll of the Polyhedral Dice

Everything I Need to Know About Management I Learned from Playing Dungeons and Dragons

Quartz

Such as: Often, the best candidate for a given job isn’t the person who’s most skilled at fulfilling its primary requirement, but instead is a more well-rounded individual, a lesson learned from character creation in D&D, writes Christopher Mims: “A complete set of ‘perfect’ stats [in a new character] is vanishingly improbable, and most of the time you’ll have a mix of strong and weak ones.” And: A diverse team is essential to survival, a point underscored by the impossibility of winning in D&D unless you have a warrior to beat things up and absorb damage, a wizard to fight magical foes and occasionally drop the hammer on something big, a cleric to heal your party members, and so on. The game, 40 years old this month, appears to be about Orcs and warhammers, but, says Mims, it’s actually about the experience of growing older — and that’s what’s so appealing about it. “Its ordered universe…is catnip to teenage geeks who are trying to make sense of the adult world.” —Andy O’Connell