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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jay Verkuilen" data-source="post: 7767418" data-attributes="member: 6873517">Part of this is that generally the only way a game system like D&D has to handle things like this is through some kind of supernatural ability. Skill checks aren't supposed to be able to do things like that. Furthermore, having a character like Aragorn in the party is massively unbalanced and likely to create a good bit of inter-player issues in many groups. If you wanted Aragorn, you'd have to accept a substantial amount of imbalance among the characters or come up with another way to balance them. RPGs have fundamentally different premises than most fiction and thus there's almost always a good bit of distance between fictional inspirations and RPGs that try to emulate them. You can see this given how crazy the stats were for various fictional characters in the 1E Deities & Demigods. Over on Cubicle 7's forum people have tried guessing the levels of the Fellowship using the AIME rules. The hobbits are pretty clearly low level at the start and certainly grow to being fairly capable over time. Gimli, Legolas, and Boromir are somewhere around 12th-14th level warriors and turn out to be simulated by the system fairly well in terms of the abilities they demonstrate in the book. Aragorn and Gandalf are just off the hook.</blockquote>