If I was a DM running a high level group, and if during the epic facedown between the PC party and my uberbaddest monster encounter, the 20th level Wizard in the party said, “No, I don’t think I’m going to cast ‘wish’ or ‘time stop’ or ‘sphere of annihilation’. I’m going to talk first. The rest of the party can go, I’ll take care of it.” And then that PC left the battle victorious and rejoined the party back at the local inn, dressed in cool new flashy white robes, well, I’d hand that player my DM screen right then and there and bow down to his awesomeness.
Whatever. Anwar, my level 22 Sha’ir would probably have just wished Gandalf out of existence or stolen his body.
In the first Age, the full magical might of the Valar host was unleashed against the Fortress of Angband, and practically sundered the continent.
It’s possible that the Valar (and Gandalf) do not wish to bring forth such terrible power again.
Real world parralel: Atom bomb. A weapon used in anger, so powerfull we hope to never use it again, and indeed, the superpowers intentionally limit themselves to “alliance building”, economic competition, and third party proxies, as opposed to direct confrontation.
Sha’ir? Did you have to chisel your stats into a stone block when you made the character or did they have paper back then?
[tangent]
I’ve read The Hobbit and the Ring trilogy, but nothing else in the Tolkein canon. What should I read to learn more about Tom Bombadil? He’s always been a mysterious character to me, a being in some ways outside of the world of the trilogy.
You’ve already largely read everything we really know about Bombadil. Tolkien was fairly coy about him, even in the Letters. We do know that he was more or less outside the power structure of Arda, although he may have been plugged into it previously (possibly a maia “gone native”). He appears to be completely content to just exist in his little corner of the world.
He is sort of a Hobbit-ish add-on, though, deriving from a doll that Tolkien’s children had and inserted into the earlier, more storyteller-type mood of the beginning of Fellowship.
Ol’ Tim Benzedrine, on the other hand…
Actually you have summed him up perfectly. In one of Tolkien’s letters (144) he talked about how Tom was an enigma. Not everything was known and he was different. The conjecture about who Tom was beyond a children’s toy is hopeless and Tolkien himself did not know.
You could pick up the *Adventures of Tom Bombadil *for a little bit more about him though. It has two poems on Tom and maybe 10 other poems.
I still have the papyrus leaf on which I kept his stats. He was quite the badass, if I do say so myself.
The Gandalf of the “The Hobbit” seemed to be a far weaker entity than the “Lord of the Rings” Gandalf. When cornered by wolves and orcs, he was pretty much reduced to throwing flaming pine cones and was, I recall, about to fling himself down and take as many with him as possible in a big fireball when the Eagles showed up. So there’s a bit of retconning done by Tolkien between the two books.
I thought that he was supposed to be an Angel in the book.
More or less. He’s a maia, which are of the same nature as the Valar (the big good guys), but of lesser stature. All of the Wizards are maiar, kind of “encased” in a mortal body and with their powers limited. They were sent to Middle-Earth to rally and aid the mortal races against Sauron, but had their powers “dialed back” because (at least in part) the Valar didn’t want a reiteration of the Drowning of Beleriand (caused by the full force of the Valar against Melkor) on their hands.
Tom Bombadil is the only character in story who knows he’s a fictional character. Thus, he transcends the story itself.
Pfft. Gandalf would have smoked his ass like it ain’t no thing.
I refer you to the passage in Book III, chapter XII, in which Gandalf says “Anwar, I’ll smoke your ass like it ain’t no thing.”
Actually, it’s a little more complicated.
The Theory bwas that Gandalf was a 5th level Wizard. Your spellcasting as a Wizard has a maximum SPELL LEVEL (not class level) of 1/2 your level, rounded up. Gandalf, as a fifth-level Wizard, was capable of casting 3rd level spells according to that analysis.
That’s actually better than it sounds. There’s vastly more difference between 1st level and 3rd level spells than between 3rd level and 9th level spells. The reason is that third level spells were originally the way upper tier stuff that you probably would never get. (They didn’t realize people were actually going to play the game, apparently.) Anyway, they glommed on more spell levels after that, but apart from a few tricks like teleportation, spells past 3rd are rarely better than thse 3rd level stuff.
I stand by my analogy. Are you saying you consider Jim Anderson to be in any way resembling god? Kitten and Princess and Bud would disagree…
And this made me laugh out loud:
I believe that is canon, gentlemen. 
There is something very Zen about Gandalf, IMO. He is not less able in The Hobbit, I believe he is distracted by other issues of the day.
Actually, another small point:
The Word of Power Gandalf uses may have been a spell or one of his innate abilities; we don’t really know. He was probably trying to ward the door, thugh, not smash the whole place up. And he wasn’t entirely sure, IIRC, that the Balrog was on the other side of it were some powerful orc sorcerer or something.
At that point he did not know it was a Balrog. He just knew it was something unexpectantly powerful.
I posted this earlier in the thread:
Years ago I was GMing MERP using ICE’s Rolemaster as the system. We routinely had wizards of 3rd or 4th level who could smoke Gandalf’s ass like it ain’t no thing. Not a one of them would be trapped at the top of a tower. I think that Levitate was a 2nd level spell, and Fly was maybe 4th or 5th level. And they didn’t need magic rings to turn invisible.
Those are a couple of the many reasons I eventually switched over to Harn.
Hash! Boo! Valvoline!
Clean, clean, clean for Gene!
RR
So Magic is alot like Kung Fu.
If you fight them, grasshopper, you have already lost.