I have always loathed the New Age theory which mumbles something fuzzy about how we have chosen everything which happens to us. This particular bilge is offensive to every raped child on the planet, but even discounting that for a moment, it’s the shoddy logic which gets me: It implies that human souls are like children who like repetition in their stories. Why on the literal earth would you go through the inordinate trouble which is having a life when you already know what it’s going to be like?

I suspect the people holding this belief to be significantly entitled (at least more so than I am, and that’s saying a lot) and unfamiliar with other people’s suffering. If we’re going to seriously entertain the notion that we spend our pre-game warmup time in such a way, shouldn’t it be more like putting together a roleplaying character?

I do think it’s reasonable, in this posited green room outside of Time, that we are instead given a certain number of points to be spent on a wide variety of probably vague categories. For example, I spent more points on being right-brained than left, and seem to have taken every single left-brained bit I have in linguistic intelligence: I’m a helluva wordsmith, but I count on my fingers, and ask anyone present at the Great Gingerbread Fail of 2018 what my recipe skills are.

It’s worthwhile taking a stab at what your character sheet might look like in this system. I’m pretty sure I traded in some stamina for extra wisdom (nobody ever asks how you get wisdom, which is why all those Zen sages spend so much time whacking people over the head). I also made the apparently pointless choice of IQ over Health (both Physical–I’m looking at you, fibromyalgia–and Mental: ooh, somebody rolled a 1 on Family of Origin over here, although I feel like if I bitch too much about this, the natural 20 I got on One’s Own Children might somehow evaporate on me), but maybe in the last round I was like, rilly stupid, y’know?

At any rate, I’d rather see the Supreme Deity as DM instead of child-abuse instigator, wouldn’t ya think?