what d&d character are you?

It occurred to me the other day to figure out what’s the deal with dungeons & dragons.
Sounds like a kind of nerdy thing that I would have been into, if I had been a little younger. I was completely nuts for the Lord of the Rings trilogy. That would seem to be relevant. I remember I read it through for the first time when I was about thirteen. that was 1969. I’d been through all of Jules Verne and plenty else by then. My whole life, I’ve been out there. But I was never plugged into a network, or maybe I was plugged in but to the wrong network, like a 60hz appliance plugged into a 50hz world.
I read Lord of the Rings for the second time in 1974, putting my time in suspension to good use, I think. I’d gone through the entire science fiction aisle at my town’s rinky dink library, and I’d taken to riding my bike over to the nicer libraries in the neighboring towns, Wantaugh had a really nice facility I thought, and Massapequa’s facility was old and funky, worse than ours in a way, but with a more eclectic collection. I couldn’t find anything I liked, but I did find Ezra Pound’s Cantos. What a brilliant wacko. Imagine a 14 year old nerd trying to make sense of that stuff.
My favorite authors of the time were Asimov, Heinlein, Vonnegut, Herbert and the occasional brilliant piece of others like Poul Anderson, Ursula K. LeGuin, Harlan Ellison, Clifford D. Simak, which I found mostly by following the lists of Hugo and Nebula award winners.
So one day I asked the web, “What d&d character am I?” Turns out there’s a page for that.
But before I go on, I also found out lots of other people were asking that same question, and many of them were interesting.
So, the first thing is that one point of a role playing game, is that you assume a character and interact with other people, likewise assuming their own characters. So there’s another barrier to entry, not only am I from another generation than most people who know anything about this kind of crap, I fall short in another way. Even the biggest geek out there at least seems to be able to participate in some kind of community. Each to their own, I guess. What few friends I do have are old and antisocial, just like me.
The next thing to bear in mind is that your character doesn’t have to reflect your actual personality or values. In fact, it probably shouldn’t. Where’s the fun in that?
But after thinking it over, the interwebs told me I was a chaotic good human strong fighter. Sounds good. Anti-establishment. Value oriented. Strong. Hm. I can be that.
It even gave me enough to jog my creativity, and I allowed myself to imagine and research a backstory:
The Asturs were the Celtic Gallaecian inhabitants of the northwest area of Hispania encompassing a portion of the Mountains of Cantabria to the west, and facing the Bay of Biscay and the Celtic Sea to the north. It is an ancient kingdom dotted with Roman ruins and traces of human activity from the Neolithic, Megalithic, Bronze, and Iron Ages. Cantabria has iron, and Asturias is home to a few gold mines, making it very interesting real estate.
In Roman times, Cantabrian and Asturian fighters were renowned, having fought as mercenearies against Rome for Hannibal and later for themselves. They were expert with short sword, lance and cavalry. Their tactics were so innovative and influential, they entered the Roman martial lexicon in terms such as the ‘circulus cantabricus’ and the ‘cantabricus impetus’. Cantabrians were among the very few ever to have acquired a Roman standard in battle.
The medieval Kingdom of Asturias was overrun by nobles and ne’er-do-wells retreating to the mountains from the advancing Moors of the great Caliphate.
I imagined myself the rightful prince of Asturias, deprived of my birthright through intrigues by my scheming cousin, Alfonso, King of Leon, who had designs on my lands, and my beloved .
My name would be Juan-Gaspar Santiago Asturias de Cantabria. I roam Gallaecia, Brittany, Normandy, England and Wales, a chivalric knight, romantic and brooding of character, landless but leige to no lord, righting wrongs and doing good when I can.