Ideas that Fail to Transfer - Players

Sometimes you'll see an idea in a movie, TV show or videogame or you'll read about something that sounds awesome in a book and think "That'd be awesome to game in/with!"

So you implement it as a character concept or plot point. And then you realize that the idea failed and you're left with a pile of fail.

When authors create characters for their books, they don't have to worry about any kind of rules or level progressions; they can just create from scratch. As gamers, when we try to recreate those characters, we're forced to work within the constraints of a ruleset that, in all likelyhood, had nothing to do with the source material.

Say you want to play a Gandalf like character. Clearly he has some magical abilities (he is a wizard after all) but can also hold is own in melee combat. This is commonly referred to as a "gish" build and the amount of effort it takes to pull it off is ridiculous. Not only that, you will be operating at a subpar level of efficacy for some time because the rules have made a distinction between magical and melee ability.

Any epic hero from any series of books will not usually work as expected at first. The authors didn't have to worry about making a balanced or fair character, they had to worry about creating a story. As a player, you are stuck with the burden of fairness.

If you do want to recreate a character bear a few things in mind:

1. You won't be as bad ass as the literary version, at least not right away and possibly ever. 
2. Perhaps the rules explicitly forbid what you're attempting or feats don't exist to accomplish what you want.

The way to work around this is either acknowledge that you won't be as good as you expect as early as you'd like. If this is the case, just grow with it as best you can. If you've built the character correctly, you'll hit a point where you become effective.

The other options is to focus one specific aspect that you want to recreate. That will let you build to one aspect instead of the entire character; allowing you to reach the break even point faster.