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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 5000717" data-attributes="member: 4937">Depends on the President.  I'd much rather have had Andrew Jackson backing me up in a fight than have him as President.  Guy was evil, but he won the office in no small part on the strength of his personal prowess.  He's one scary stone cold killer.  George Washington was widely considered to be one of the finest horsemen in the world in his time.  Teddy Roosevelt was a crack shot.  I'd keep going but sooner or later it would get political.  Bit of a spoiler, but I was in a Chill adventure one time where the British Prime Minister went off on the bad guys and helped save our hides.  Or a battalion or two, but here we run into a problem.  Quite unlike the real world, our fantasy world has superheroes and active pagan dieties and political power is very closely tied to personal power - and vica versa.  The guy with political power has the backing of dieties (and possibly their blood in his veins), the blessings of his or her faerie god-mother, spells cast on him by the mightiest archmages, has been dipped into the river styx while his mother held his ankle, or what not.  In our fantasy world, one guy can take on a batalion of marines with a reasonable chance of success.  Sure, we can divorse political authority from personal prowess to some extent - the head of state doesn't always have to be the most powerful person in the domain or even close to it - but we can't fully divorse it because competence is so closely tied to prowess.  Besides which, mine is a 'lead from the front' sort of world because those battalions know that there are individuals that can take them down single handedly and they expect their leaders to protect them.   It's a 'Paul Atreides' sort of world where Princes are trained from birth to be worth at least a dozen lesser men in battle.  Still, that means what, maybe 5th or 6th level?The FR offends my sensibilities on all sorts of levels.</blockquote>

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