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<blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7696619" data-attributes="member: 4937"><p>Sure.&nbsp; But as the game system evolves away from the source material, we have to acknowledge that parts of it - even those that took a bit of kludging to make work in the source material to begin with - no longer work at all.&nbsp; The 3.5e Balor wasn't altered to make it fit better within the Tolkien legerdemain.&nbsp; By that point, D&amp;D had become self-referential.&nbsp; The stat block was created to serve a purpose within the game itself with no attention being paid even in the imagination of the designer as to whether this Balor was a good fit for the Balrog of Moria that likely originally inspired the concept (ape-like, may have wings, flaming sword, multi-tailed whip, immolates).&nbsp; Arbitrarily trying to fit Gandalf to the 3.5e Balrog and making it the point we take a the fixed frame of reference from which we derive all the rest of stats in Middle Earth makes absolutely no sense.&nbsp;&nbsp; Even within 3.Xe, Gandalf still appears from the text to be not much more than a 6th level Wizard.&nbsp; Why flex Gandalf and everything else around the Balrog, when we could just as easily use that as the fixed point of reference and adjust the Balrog of Moria to scale?</p></blockquote><p></p>

[QUOTE="Celebrim, post: 7696619, member: 4937"] Sure. But as the game system evolves away from the source material, we have to acknowledge that parts of it - even those that took a bit of kludging to make work in the source material to begin with - no longer work at all. The 3.5e Balor wasn't altered to make it fit better within the Tolkien legerdemain. By that point, D&D had become self-referential. The stat block was created to serve a purpose within the game itself with no attention being paid even in the imagination of the designer as to whether this Balor was a good fit for the Balrog of Moria that likely originally inspired the concept (ape-like, may have wings, flaming sword, multi-tailed whip, immolates). Arbitrarily trying to fit Gandalf to the 3.5e Balrog and making it the point we take a the fixed frame of reference from which we derive all the rest of stats in Middle Earth makes absolutely no sense. Even within 3.Xe, Gandalf still appears from the text to be not much more than a 6th level Wizard. Why flex Gandalf and everything else around the Balrog, when we could just as easily use that as the fixed point of reference and adjust the Balrog of Moria to scale? [/QUOTE]

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