A thought occurred to me today while I was doing my accounting (paying my bills, really, but the other phrase sounds better): paying your taxes is much like rolling up a D&D character.
Both WOTC and the IRS issue books that contain directions on how to fill out the form in the back. Both D&D and the tax code have many arcane rules that may not make much sense at first, but work into a larger system. The form has several slots in which you put numbers; in only a few of those slots do you put numbers from outside the rule-set (dice rolls, income)--the other slots are used for numbers that you generate using formulas in the books.
And, of course, both Taxes and D&D encourage min-maxing. For D&D, minmaxing is a question of getting the biggest numbers; for taxes, minmaxing is getting the -smallest- numbers.
So this leads me to think that I should ask my grandmother, who's an accountant, to roll up a 4e character for me, as she'd be likely to optimize it a lot better than I could.
Does this seem plausible? Or do I perhaps need a lot more coffee?
