Undoing Decisions

In D&D, players make choices that affect their characters' builds. They chose a race and class for each of their characters. They chose their characters' backgrounds and personalities. They even have some say in what equipment their characters use, though you can never just decide that your character has many powerful magical items or thousands of gold pieces worth of armor and other goods. There are rules, but there are also always choices.

Having choices is great in that it allows you to personalize your characters' traits and skills to reflect your mental image of them. However, things get tricky when you make a wrong choice. For example, when I created Hector, my current D&D character, I knew I wanted him to be a paladin who also took some levels of cleric. I decided that I wanted Strength to be his strongest stat, followed by Constitution and Charisma, with Wisdom coming in fourth, but still being a bit above average. This turned out to be a bad decision. Wisdom is an important stat for clerics, and if you want to multiclass into cleric, it's essential. Upon further review of the rules for multiclassing, I realized that Hector, as I had created him, could not exist. His Wisdom was too low to meet the prerequisite.

Fortunately, I was given permission to change his stats. I made it so his Wisdom is now tied with his Charisma as his second-highest stats, and Constitution is now his fourth-highest or third-lowest stat. Unfortunately, life is not quite as forgiving. When we make decisions, it's not easy to take them back. In some ways, and in some cases, it's not even possible to take it back.

If you say something mean to someone, you never get to rewrite the past and decide that you didn't. In fact, that goes for every decision we make. Once we do anything, it's done, and it's impossible to change the fact that we did it.

Thankful, through the Atonement and forgiveness, we can sometimes escape from the consequences of some choices. If we sin and repent, it's almost like it never happened. Of course, it did happen, and some of its consequences will still linger, but its most dire consequences can be undone.

We can't truly undo anything. We can't change the past, and that includes not being able to take back decisions we made in the past. You just decided to read this, and that is a decision that you will never be able to take back. But you can try, and you can partially succeed. If you don't like what you just read, you can make an effort to forget it, or just let it fade from your memory. If you're worried about the time you wasted reading this, you can't get that back, but you can strive to use your time more wisely in the future. You can't take back your decision to read this, but the consequences of doing so don't have to be permanent.

We can't undo any of the things we've done or take back any of the decisions we've already made, but through the power of the Atonement, and/or a forgiving Game Master, we can sometimes change our minds and even change what consequences we will have to face.