Come on, a total noob, and he gets handed a magic sword, a Mithril shirt, and the worlds most powerful magic ring? And he doesn’t even hang around the shire and kill a couple rabbits to gain some levels. Cheating bastard runs right out to hook up with a 45th level ranger and sets out to the big dungeons. Gets healed by Elrond? Yeah, So Gandalf and Elrond had been buddies way back in beta still doesn’t justify saving his pathetic ass after he attacks a Nazgul. Dude didn’t even know enough to rest outside their pathing. Then hooks up with a whole guild of uber characters. Then off to the Mines of Moria. That has to be a 45+ area, Frodo probably got about 10 levels when the Baalrog died, hell Gandalf even timed it perfectly so he died too and frodo got more experience and everybody else ran out of range so he could get it all. Then even more twinking, yeah here’s the secret potion to defeat the 50th level giant spider.
Clearly, Gandalf is the GM’s favorite NPC - even when the party’s incompetence forced him to be sacrificed to save their butts, he was brought back almost immediately.
Frodo is not expressible in a RPG campaign. Just have to except that he is a force of destiny with great courage and resolve.
He had many advantages but is by Stat based systems a weak character. Problem with taking a character who is all about “Character” and translating into game.
Now Aragorn, he was an extremely high level Ranger with a +5 (+25%) Sword of Sharpness with some special abilities.
I once read an article that claimed, if they were expressed in D&D terms, the Fellowship were all surprisingly low-level. Sauron himself was level 12, and I think Aragon was 8. The rest went down from there.
There are characters in fiction who do not convert easily to AD&D characters. I posit also Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz, and any similar “goose-girl” character from the Brothers’ Grimm. These are characters who are extremely lucky (or for whom destiny takes a hand) far beyond their abilities. “Everyone helps that girl!” is the witch’s complaint.
It was a very old article in the “Dragon” from the early 80’s maybe even late 70’s.
The reasoning was not sound back then. It did not account for Legolas’s ability to shoot a Nazgul flying beyond the sight of the hobbits in the middle of the night and bring down a fell beast with one arrow. The level/ability of Legolas would be extremely high. Aragorn (not an area of Spain) was probably underrated. He was able to hold off a huge number of orcs with only Eomer at his side at Helm’s deep.
One more note on the article. At time written 20th level was a fantastically high level. Now with online games we do seem to 45th level characters running around. These characters would all be vastly more powerful than any of the Deities spec’d out in Deities and Demigods. So the level rating were also low as the benchmark was lower.
That just means that Aragorn, Legolas, and Boromir were just campers who got off slumming around low-level areas to kill a bunch of wolves and orcs that conned gray to them. They should’ve known that the level difference was too high to form a party with four level 1 halflings. Frodo couldn’t have been getting any experience for any of the kills up until Moria. The Balrog would’ve been at least an orange elite to Gandalf, but he has to go and ruin it by logging out before the kill and then coming back with an alt character. And dumb-ass Aragorn didn’t even have enough sense to get his sword repaired when he was back in town.
If you ask me, Frodo was the only one who knew what he was doing – he recognized that the Fellowship was a waste of time so he disbanded the party and went to explore areas where he could get better experience. The rest of them just went off to another mid-level area to play around with their new mounts and just do some simple guard and fetch quests. And Legolas and Gimli are the worst kind of “power-gamer,” not exploring or anything, just camping one area and waiting for monsters to respawn so they could compare how many they’d killed and see who leveled up faster; you know they went straight to the message boards afterwards and talked about what bad-asses they were.
Great, because it’s not enough for a thread just to be impossibly nerdy. It’s got to be nerdy and gay.
For those interested: Rikkukin, Kessdona, (misspelled the name in my previous post) Yar’Lir. (From the Dragons of Norrath Everquest expansion.) Here’s a closer image of Yar’Lir, her skin has storm clouds that move across the surface.
Boy Sauron, what could you have against Frodo , besides it was Gollum that did you in and you were the fool that let him loose. At least the Elves were just very bad jailers.
How do you feel about the ancient stupid article that described you as only 12th level. You had the abilities to dominate others, influence events 100’s of leagues away. Summon a storm that covered half a continent. All this with most of your powers but into a small gold ring.
What I actually said to the Ringwraiths after we tortured Gollum was “Cook his goose.” What they heard was “Cut him loose.” I should’ve known not to use regional colloquiallisms when giving dispensation orders regarding prisoners. I wanted to kill the one who set Gollum free, but there was some question about morale, not mention a lot of crap regarding symbolism and balancing light and dark forces that I frankly didn’t understand.
Ehhh … it ain’t worth getting upset about. That’d be like George Bush getting upset over a negative editorial in the Mayberry Gazette.
