Yay possible competence on my part!

I could reasonably argue that, today, I fixed a furnace and a dishwasher. "Reasonably argue" because the furnace "fix" was trivial, and, indeed, basically routine, and because we still need to see if the dishwasher STAYS fixed. Still, I think it was a pretty good day.

I don't consider myself "handy." I just consider myself "accepting of the possibility of failure." Fixing stuff, when I do it, involves a lot of putting stuff halfway together, then realizing that one of the parts you've got lying around was supposed to go in earlier, and taking it all apart again and putting it back together again, and, on the third iteration, realizing that there was this OTHER part that was designed to come out FIRST that makes the whole "removing that section" much, much easier, and so forth.

I guess, in gaming terms, you'd count it as a situation where a person with a very low skill is allowed to keep rolling the dice over and over, attempt after attempt, and, so long as they don't critically fail and break something badly enough to require a competent person to come in, they can just keep going until it works. That's more or less how I think of it. I can call the professionals in FIRST, and have them do it, or I can try it myself first, and maybe I'll get it working, but if I'm in over my head, I can call them THEN. Honestly, so long as I don't lose pieces or force things into place, I'm not TOO likely to break stuff VERY worse than it would have been had I called them first. KINDA likely, but not VERY likely.

Historical and/or mythological examples of "never bring a knife to a gunfight".

Over on Facebook, james_nicoll brought up the Battle of Myeongnyang in 1597, where Admiral Yi of Korea used his 13 ships to completely crush more than ten times as many Japanese warships.

Among the reasons he was able to do this was because the Japanese naval tactics were "close and board" -- their ships might have a couple low-powered cannon on them, but the Korean ships carried 22 guns or more, of much, much higher quality, range, and power. It doesn't matter how good your boarding parties are if they just plain can't get there.

A similar thing happened in 1610 in Nagasaki when 1,200 samurai attempted to attack a single Portuguese carrack commanded by Andrea Pessoa. The crew complement of a carrack could be a few dozen people, or, in the case of the Mary Rose, could be stuffed with as many as 500 people, but Pessoa's crew was probably closer to the 60-100 people. Waves of over a thousand samurai attacked night after night, and were blown out of the water before they could get there.

The earliest mythological/historical version I can think of is David and Goliath.

The general rule here, as exemplified by "never bring a knife to a gunfight" is "ranged weapons beat melee weapons, if you can defeat your enemy before they close." Any other good historical examples?