ars heroica

by Spider Rinaldo Luke

It may seem a silly question. “Different people are different,” you might say,”Everyone has different strengths or skills- no one class could encompass all of the different ways to be a hero.” While I agree with the sentiment, I see a greater point in having more than one class of hero: teamwork.

There are three major benefits to working as a team. The first is purely psychological. We feel safer in groups. If you are walking alone on an unfamiliar street, you feel more confident if you are with a half dozen people you know than going it alone. The second is distributive. A team of ten can work a lot faster than a single individual.

While both of these reasons are important to general teamwork, they only lightly apply to the school. Don’t get me wrong: it IS helpful to know that there are others of a heroic mindset out there, and group projects like Ars Heroica can be produced a lot more quickly if more than one or two people is contributing.

But the biggest benefit of having a group is that everyone has strengths and weaknesses. One person can shore up another’s weaknesses. The Fighter may be a great leader, but without a Paladin to act as his conscience, many a great leader has become arrogant or tyrannical. Without a Wizard to give him information, he may not know where to go with his mission or how best to beat it. Without the stories of a Bard, he might never have become a hero in the first place, or might despair along the way, or might have trouble gaining allies for his cause.

Similarly, a Paladin may know what]s right, but they may need a Bard to help convince others of it. And a Fighter is a welcome addition to actually gaining ground on those good intentions. And a Wizard might be able to find information that will help guide the Paladin’s conscience.
The list goes on for each of us. We all have strengths and weaknesses. And even if you are great at everything, it’s problematic to actually *do* everything. By fitting us into classes and archetypes, we are able to communicate what our strengths and weaknesses are before even getting to know each other well. Which can help if we ever decide to do anything with this inspiration to act heroically, ya know?

And it doesn’t have to be immediate, practical help. It can just be having another point of view around to bounce ideas off of. I am a bard of sorts but sometimes I need a bard who is better at communicating to an audience, since my specialty is with mental games, puzzles, and strategy. And while I can be a good go-getter, it doesn’t hurt to have someone who is really specialized like that. And since I hang out with the “scum of the earth” (I call them buddies, but to each their own) it helps to occasionally listen to a Paladin, to make sure I am still basically doing good things. And a Wizard is always welcome for information that I didn’t learn in a game.

Since the theme of this article seems to be helping each other, I am going to start off with a little of what I like to call “Back Alley Bard,” help. Like I said, I know a lot of games and puzzles. This includes con games. I don’t con people out of money, though. I use the games to beguile, and then I get their attention by explaining the games. It’s fun to see them trying to puzzle it out, and in the end when they get the answer, they are better prepared against any actual thieves or brigands and perhaps have learned something about the nature of the con.

Here’s one con I think everyone can learn a lot from, and we’ve all seen it or heard about it. It’s called, “The Shell Game” and most people *think* they know how it is played. Let me set up a scenario for you, and let you see what you think of it.

You are walking down a street, when you see a bunch of guys crowded around a card table. Curious, you see what’s up, and you see a guy playing the “Shell Game.” Three cards are face down, and if the Ace of Spades is picked, the guy wins ten bucks, with a five dollar bet. You see that the guy running the game is actually pretty fair about it. The guy is losing some and winning some, and you get the impression after watching for a bit that you could do better, having seen him fail a couple times where you would have made it. He steps away from the game, and the dealer looks at you, “Want to play? 5 bucks gets you in.”

Now, a trick of the shell game is this: sometimes the dealer will let you win to get you more invested in winning. But when he plays it right, the “right shell” (a card in this case) will always end up in the same place.

So if you were playing this game, would you pick the card to your right, your left, or in the center?

Take a moment to guess before reading on.

If you guessed it was on the right – not quite. If you guessed it was on the left – sorry. If you guessed it is in the center – nope. But wasn’t that all of the options? No. Because he palmed the card when you were distracted by his fast hand motions, or when a person bumped the table, or when someone spoke to you. The first guy, who kept winning and losing? He was a friend of the dealer. No money was really won or lost when he did that. He only wins money from people who assume the game is fair, because they see others winning and losing. The shell game runs on the assumption that the rules of the game are still being followed, when at some point the rules changed.

A lot of cons are like that. The more fair the rules seem, the more likely it is that the game is rigged. I know a couple of games that seem completely fair, but in reality are completely rigged. Why should the dealer give you a 1 in 3 chance of winning if he can give you a 1 in 0 chance? Some of these games use slight of hand, some of these games use tricks of probability that people are notoriously bad with, some games have principles that are unstated, but which allow one side victory, and finally, sometimes the rules of the game have just switched on you and you didn’t see it happen. The first rule of a con is, “Don’t bother getting sucked into one.”

Why bring this up to my fellow heroes? Because someone came up with this game. People play it every day. Not every person who runs a con is a bad person, but if you are out there in the world, eventually you are going to run into someone who is operating a con. Maybe it’s office politics, where one person seems to have an uncanny edge on everyone else. Maybe it’s a friend who always seems to be able to say just the right thing to make you do what they want. Maybe it’s something else. But half of my job as a disbarred bard is to run the tables to help the little guy, but the other half is to warn my fellows against thinking they can beat the house.

What special skills do you have from your class that others can benefit from? We could all use a little wisdom in our lives. Help out your fellows by showing them what makes YOU special and teach the rest of us how we might shore up our weak points while maximizing our strengths.