Avid Dungeons & Dragons player and self-described critical reader Trevor Burke cannot read any work of fiction without attempting to build the fictional characters using the Dungeons & Dragons system, sources report.

"The whole mechanic, the abstraction of scores and flexibility of skills and feats, makes it a system that can account for just about anything," Burke wrote on his website, CharacterScores.com. "For example, it would have been tough to create Belgarath (from the David Eddings Belgariad and Mallorean series) under old D&D rules, but now that they've got a sorcerer class that can cast spells without preparation, it's pretty obvious that that's what he is. I'd put him at really high, like level 20 or something, with access to Polymorph Self, high-level telekinesis, and so on. His daughter Polgara is probably about level 17 or 18, still powerful but not quite up there. She's got better Illusion spells, though. I'm pretty sure that she uses Phantasmal Killer on a Grolim at some point."

According to friend Russel White, Burke's fixation with creating D&D characters to match the profiles of fictional characters started with Tolkien. "We were watching the Lord of the Rings movie, and Trevor started arguing with some geek in the next row. I mean, I play a little D&D now and then, but these guys were really getting into it about whether Aragorn was a straight-class ranger, a ranger with a few fighter levels, or some kind of ranger/paladin/fighter mix. The fact that they were making all these assessments based on a cinematic fight in a movie is just a little sad. Since then, he's kind of expanded outward steadily. Sometimes it's neat -- I mean, I guess I can see Jon Snow (from G.R.R. Martin's Song of Ice and Fire) as a ranger6/fighter4 -- but he goes into a bit more detail than absolutely necessary. Plus, the time he started talking about Lenny from Of Mice and Men and going on and on about high strength, low int, weapon focus:grapple, and power attack… it just wasn't pretty."

Burke's character assessments have provoked skepticism and controversy in the roleplaying and literary communities. PirateCat, a moderator on the ENWorld roleplaying messageboard, called some of Burke's character creations "absurd". "He's constantly inflating levels. I mean, does he really think that no one in the world is a better swordsman than Arutha (from Raymond E. Feist's Riftwar series)? He's got him listed as a rogue6/fighter7/duelist5, and he gives him an Int of like 17 or something so that he can run up his skills? Did we ever see Arutha disable traps himself? Did Arutha ever wriggle out of ropes or sneak attack an unsuspecting target? I don't think so. Doesn't he realize that the fight in Darkness at Sethanon against the Dragon Lord was an epic struggle in which Arutha could only compete because his sword was imbued with the power of the gods through the hammer sigil? I mean, Weapon Focus, Finesse, Specialization, and Improved Critical:Rapier are all well and good, but he keeps throwing in these superfluous min-maxy feats that completely undermine the verisimilitude of his character creation." PirateCat later allowed that it was just a book, for crying out loud.

The literary community remains skeptical as well. "We here at BookTalk.com support an environment of literary discussion and exchange," said Lilly Hyell, moderator and site manager. "To have someone come in and declare that Mister Darcy leveled and put all of his new skill ranks into Diplomacy between Volumes II and III of Pride and Prejudice does not really further our conversational goals. For that matter, trying to determine whether Leopold Bloom (from James Joyce's Ulysses) could be best represented by the Rogue character class, the Bard character class, or some combination of the two… that just isn't what we're going for. Mister Dimmesdale may well be a fallen paladin/cleric, and if it makes Trevor Burke happy to stat him out and then declare each point in The Scarlet Letter when he fails a Will save or Sense Motive check against Mister Chillingworth (who apparently is a rogue/necromancer with Skill Focus:Bluff), then bully for him. He can do it on his own site, on a domain far, far, far away from ours…"

Burke, however, remains unfazed. "As long as there's fiction out there, I'm going to read it," he declared, "and then I'm going to exhaustively analyze all the characters and try to map them to this roleplaying system." Burke went on to declare Rand from Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series "totally broken".