The Resume as a Character: Minmaxing Without Numerical Stats

This is an image of one of the many generic resume templates that is currently available on Microsoft Word. It’s about as helpful as any other template, although not how I’d tailor my own.

This is an image of the standard Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition character sheet. Classic, no notes.

And this is a image from a show that I have never actually watched, but manages to convey the central conceit of the rest of the article.

So earlier this year, a new position opened up within my company that my current manager thought I was uniquely qualified for; which, on one hand, was an exciting thing on several fronts, but it also meant that I had to go through the arduous process of updating my resume. I hadn’t updated my single page resume in ages, although I had made it a biannual habit to update both my professional website and my LinkedIn, so at the very least I didn’t have to think of too much verbiage and recall every facet of my professional career up until that point. That summer I was working on developing a one-shot D&D 5E module with a friend, and as we were sorting through the character sheets and the source books, I got stuck on this idea of the resume as a character. In essence, these two different documents serve an identical function: act as a reference document that marks several key pieces of information that can be reviewed easily, for both the benefit of the person who made it and the benefit of the person using it. As such, a lot of the core principl…