Valonor Kharagon, my Noble Dragonborn Paladin D&D character, is dead. He died in my most recent game of D&D last Wednesday night. There are several factors that contributed to Kharagon's death; several decisions and die rolls that the DM and I made, and two die rolls I didn't make, all conspired to seal Kharagon's fate. For the purpose of this blog post, I'd like to focus on three factors that led to Kharagon's death and on the spiritual lessons we can learn from this minor, fictional tragedy.
First, Kharagon wasn't wearing his armor. As a Paladin, Kharagon was proficient with Heavy Armor. But to gain the benefit of armor, you have to wear it, and to wear it, you have to put it on. Putting on armor takes time, so when Kharagon woke up to the sound of someone or something breaking into the tavern he and his coworkers run, he didn't think he had the time to take 10 minutes to put his armor on.
And, of course, he didn't. The moment one needs ones armor is not the moment to put it on. If you want your armor to protect you when you need it to, you need to have put it on well in advance. Thankfully, we don't have to take our armor off when we go to bed, but we do have to put it on when we wake up, and we have to regularly tend to our armor to keep it in good condition. Without that armor, the namesake of my blog, we're likely going to take some serious, perhaps fatal, damage.
This leads me to the second factor that contributed to Kharagon's death: he didn't get healing. Without his armor, he was a pretty easy mark for the intruders, and his Hit Points dropped faster than I realized. There was one point at which Kharagon had taken some heavy damage, and he had an opportunity to heal up a bit, but I had him attack instead, thinking that he'd have plenty of time to heal up after the battle. Unfortunately, Kharagon didn't last that long. If he had healed himself right then, he might not have gone down to zero Hit Points and fallen unconscious, and if any of the other characters had healed him after he had fallen unconscious, he almost certainly wouldn't have died. Now, I don't mean to blame anyone else for Kharagon's death because 1) he's a fictional character; his death is no big deal, 2) his death was almost entirely my fault, as I'll explain in a moment, and 3) most of the other characters didn't know that he had fallen unconscious, and those who knew couldn't do anything about it. The others bare no blame in this. I just wanted to make the point that, when you need healing, get it.
All of us carry some inner wounds. Some of them are from sins committed by us or those around us. Some of them came as a result of our circumstances and/or the tragic events that fall upon us or upon those we care about. I won't pretend to be able to guess what anyone is struggling with, but I will say that inner wounds need healing just as much as outer wounds, maybe even more so. So do what you need to do to get the healing you need. Take some time for yourself, if you can. Definitely pray. Maybe meditate. Listen to some good music. Heal. And if you can't heal yourself, get someone else to heal you. Friends, family members, Bishops, counselors, angels, and God Himself are all potential healers. Seek them out. Get the healing you need. If you have taken any damage at all, do whatever you need to do to heal.
Finally, and ultimately, Kharagon died because he didn't seek Divine Favor. When a D&D character drops to zero Hit Points, he or she has to spend each round after that rolling Death Saving Throws until he or she stabilizes, gains Hit Points, or dies. To make a Death Saving Throw, the player rolls a 20-sided die called a d20. If the player rolls a 10 or higher, that's a "Success," and if he or she rolls a 20, the character regains 1 Hit Point and their consciousness. However, if the player rolls a 9 or lower, that's a "Failure," and if he or she rolls a 1, that counts as two Failures. If a character gets three total Successes (and they don't have to be consecutive), the character stabilizes, they stop having to roll Death Saving Throws, and they are very likely going to survive. However, if the character gets three total Failures (again, not necessarily in a row), the character dies.
Kharagon's first Death Saving Throw rolled a 6, a Failure, but I knew that if I could increase that number by 4, I could turn it into a 10, a Success. Kharagon had an ability called Divine Favor, which would allow me to roll two 4-sided dice and add their results to a failed saving throw. However, I chose not to use that ability. He can only use it once per day, and I figured that just one Failure wasn't that bad. He had plenty of time for someone else to heal him or for him to stabilize on his own. I decided to save his Divine Favor for when he really needed it. But when his next turn came, and I had to roll another Death Saving Throw for the fate of Kharagon's life, I rolled a 1. That added two Failures to the one he had already gotten, and he died. At that point, there was nothing I could do. I could have invoked his Divine Favor, but it wouldn't have worked. Adding 2d4 to the result wouldn't change the fact that I had rolled a natural 1. Later that night, at home, out of curiosity, I rolled the 2d4, wondering if the Divine Favor would have been enough to change that first 6 into a 10. Between the two 4-sided dice, I rolled a total of 4. Kharagon died almost entirely because I didn't call upon Divine Favor.
The moral is perfectly clear: Call Upon Divine Favor. Unlike Kharagon, we aren't limited to doing so only once per day, and it's possible for that Divine Favor to help a lot more than those 2d4 could. You may think that you're not worthy of Divine Favor, but that doesn't matter. Ask anyway. God helps lots of people just because He loves them, whether they're worthy or not, and if God doesn't help you, it's probably because He knows that you don't need Him to, just like what happened the last time Kharagon almost died. The last (and only) time Kharagon called on Divine Favor, he got a pair of ones, which were almost no help at all, but he got healing later, so he was fine. I had thought that that lack of help meant that the God whom Kharagon worshiped was okay with Kharagon dying, but now I think
So those are the three lessons I have learned from Kharagon's death: Wear Your Armor, Seek Healing, and Call Upon Divine Favor. Any one of those factors could have made the difference between Kharagon's life and death, and they can still make the difference between our Eternal Life and Spiritual Death. Without his armor, healing, or calling upon Divine Favor, Kharagon passed on to his eternal reward, but if we don't use those things, we may not have an Eternal Reward waiting for us when we get there. So build up your armor, get all the healing you need, and pray for Divine Favor every chance you get. Kharagon's life depended on those three factors. Ours do too.
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