Power Gaming vs Role Playing

[Celebrim]

Most people don't need to be told where to laugh. Kylo Ren's characterisation was consistent throughout the film - and they deliberately chose Adam Driver to play him. Seriously, how many more clues could they have dropped that that was deliberate.

Hmmm... you could be right about Kylo Ren being a deliberate 'Cobra Commander' villain. I hadn't considered that Driver could have been cast for his comedic acting ability. In which case, I still maintain there is a huge failure here, even if it wasn't the one that I thought it was. For one thing, you generally don't have the Cobra Commander commit a brutal on screen act of patricide.

This is because frequently less is more.

Yes!!! Yes!!! So much Yes you'll get tired of the yessing. Let's not get too derailed by my example from the main point. Less is often more! So many things getting ruined by trying to make them bigger, more over the top, until they try to out Herod Herod and it all ends up a bit silly looking. Like, Peter Jackson's fascination with vertical exaggeration or comically over the top horseman's flails. Less would have been more. But, let's not get derailed with more examples. The point is that when you have a push button mechanical reinforcement of a character's trope or quirk, you are almost guaranteeing Flanderization.

Vader as a villain wasn't made by flamboyant shows of power.

Totally agree with this and your remaining analysis. But my point remains that when Vader was on the screen, there had been very few movie villains with such sinister on screen presence. Yes, that force choke made Vader in the first film.

And this is completely wrong. The reason that Gandalf is such a poor fit for D&D is because D&D was using an entirely different model for what a wizard is from D&D.

Missing the point here. Regardless of whether Gandalf is a poor fit for D&D or not, the point of the reference is that compared to an average D&D wizard player character, Gandalf appears in fact to be quite low level. D&D's wizards eventually end up with capabilities fantastically beyond that of Gandalf or pretty much any pre-Gandalf wizard. Merlin, Prospero, Circe and so forth all end up being pretty small fry compared to the sort of wizards that can populate a D&D universe. The point of the article I was referencing was that DMs or players shouldn't assume that literary characters were maximum level characters, and that they shouldn't be surprised that if they wield characters of very high level the resulting play does not resemble some of their famous novels. Whether the magic system in Lord of the Rings can be approximated by D&D's pseudo-Vancian system is a whole other matter.

 

[Random Bystander]

The major reason this is a problem, I feel, is that the game is inherently imbalanced. When the decision to make a competent character can rapidly slide up the scale from "might not die when facing light cavalry riding warhorses at 1st level" to "the Ogre is already dead", still at 1st level... True, this imbalance is most apparent in the 3.x edition. However, as far as I am aware, all editions save perhaps *4th have some level of imbalance whereby a character may become essentially unassailable. 3.x is the zenith of this trend, but it is standing on the same hill.

And indeed, if some edition of Dungeons and Dragons were created which had no imbalance beyond some modicum amount of optimization, around perhaps the level of choosing a bonus to hit or to be more skilled at tripping, the problem may become that the game may inevitably become too constrained.

But I think, perhaps, **any edition of D&D can be played within a useful range of competence - Within certain constraints that do not, in general, restrict the genre/play. I find the 5th Edition a step in the right direction; and, certainly, its popularity proves itself.

In short, the problem of balanced or imbalanced characters is one endemic to the style of game of Dungeons and Dragons, and at most, the "range band" may be tuned. Some other games can allow optimized and un-optimized characters to happily co-exist, but are typically much more limiting in various ways.

* Which edition is not the point being discussed.
** Even the Third and a Numeral edition.