This RPG Doesn't Let You Fudge Rawls | DoodleDoodledayeo Round 18

The prompt for @opheliafu's Doodle Doodledayeo Round 18 has a bit of a scavenger hunt element, so I won't talk about the words directly. The premise for my piece this week is a play on philosopher John Rawls's "original position" / "veil of ignorance argument", which is that when you're envisioning an ideal structure for society you should do so with the notion that you might randomly end up in any of the possible roles in it (to make sure that you're not just making the argument from a self-serving point of view based on the role you think you'd end up in). This little comic puts a transhumanist spin on that: if you're “uploading” your consciousness into a simulated world, what kind of role do you have in that world? In this case the simulation is some kind of RPG-style fantasy world. In a lot of old-school tabletop roleplaying there's a strong commitment to sticking with whatever attributes you roll on character generation rather than the more “fair” or “balanced” point-buy or re-roll/arrange systems that you're more likely to see in more mainstream games nowadays. (In RPG parlance, “fudging” is the process of intentionally misreporting a die roll to get the result you think would be good rather than what the dice actually rolled. Some people with an old-school attitude consider systems where you're shielded from the harsh possibilities of bad luck in character generation to be essentially legalized fudging.) In the world in the comic apparently you're not just rolling to see how strong, smart, or charismatic you are but also what kind of creature you are as well. So basically it's a rolls/Rawls pun.

One of the characters in the comic has a much more glamorous-seeming role in that world, and also seems much more suited to the activity they seem to be primed to participate in. But here's a second-order twist – should they care? If they know their physical appearances and physical capabilities are defined by the simulation they were uploaded into rather than anything real, what's the reason to value being one kind of fantasy creature rather than the other? And now the third order twist: We obviously value some things, like beauty or athletic talent, in our presumably non-simulated world. But is it the non-simulated nature of our world that makes those things seem good, or is there an element of arbitrariness there as well?

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Here's a scan of the pencil sketch I started with:

Which I traced and colored in Inkscape:

To get to my final piece: