Time & Perspective Quote by R. A. Salvatore

Salvatore is politely refusing a kind of fandom math that publishing keeps trying to make him do: reduce Drizzt and company to a spreadsheet. TSR and Wizards of the Coast aren’t just asking for trivia; they’re asking for authority. Put the characters into official D&D stats and you’ve turned narrative charisma into rules text, a move that quietly shifts power from novelist to system. Once Drizzt has a Strength score, he stops being a mythic hero who survives by timing, luck, and authorial intent and becomes a unit the table can audit.

“I’m never comfortable” reads like a creative boundary, but it’s also an admission of how fiction actually functions. In the novels, a character’s competence flexes with tone, theme, and stakes. In a desperate duel, Drizzt can seem superhuman; in a quieter scene, he’s vulnerable enough to stay interesting. Game mechanics demand consistency and comparability. They ask: What level is he? Who wins in a fair fight? Salvatore’s “It’s all relative after all” is the key tell: relative to the moment, the genre, the camera angle. Relative to the needs of drama.

The context is D&D’s long-running feedback loop between story and product. TSR/WotC want stats because stats are portable: they let readers bring beloved characters into campaigns, and they let the brand monetize narrative. Salvatore’s discomfort is a defense of the novel’s primary currency: not balance, but meaning.