Milestones

[Trellian]

Hi. I understand milestones and action points, but what about milestones and the death penalty or the daily powers of magical items?

a) You get -1 on all d20 throws until you've reached 3 milestones. Do they have to be without taking an extended rest? I really hope not.

b) You get one more use of a magical item's daily power when reaching a milestone. I would think this only applies to this day, like the Action Point? So that after an extended rest, you can still only use it once?

Thanks.

 

[DracoSuave]

Hi. I understand milestones and action points, but what about milestones and the death penalty or the daily powers of magical items?

a) You get -1 on all d20 throws until you've reached 3 milestones. Do they have to be without taking an extended rest? I really hope not.

Extended rests neither count towards nor against the death penalty. So it's not that bad.

b) You get one more use of a magical item's daily power when reaching a milestone. I would think this only applies to this day, like the Action Point? So that after an extended rest, you can still only use it once?

Thanks.

Extended rests are the great reset button, and will reset your Magic Item uses for the day, whether for good (you're out) or bad (you've stockpiled a couple extra uses).

Basicly think of it as every milestones in a day increases your maximum--when you come out of extended rest, you've reached zero milestones that 'day'.

 

[Trellian]

Thanks. It was I had guessed. No more level loss. Huzzah!

 

[Alisair Longreach]

Milestones can potentially screw your character after a Raise Dead. The party could have a string of two encounters between extended rests in which you could never gain a Milestone. The -1 penalty you get after Raise Dead can kill your character if you are unlucky.

Milestones are in my opinion a major irritant in the 4E ruleset as it puts extra restrictions on PCs and is point of accounting to keep track of. Milestones are a lot of bother without any kind of fun payoff.

 

[AngryPurpleCyclops]

Milestones can potentially screw your character after a Raise Dead. The party could have a string of two encounters between extended rests in which you could never gain a Milestone. The -1 penalty you get after Raise Dead can kill your character if you are unlucky.

Milestones are in my opinion a major irritant in the 4E ruleset as it puts extra restrictions on PCs and is point of accounting to keep track of. Milestones are a lot of bother without any kind of fun payoff.

The pay off comes in the shape of an added AP and an additional use of a daily magic item. This doesn't mean you can use the same daily over, there is a hard limit of one daily item use (even if you have 3 daily items you can only use one on any day until 11th level pg 226 of the PHB) but if you have armor with a daily and a weapon with a daily you can use them both after a milestone. It's actually a decent rule designed to extend pc power over multiple encounters but not let you discharge everything in a single encounter day. It's actually pretty smart from a game balance perspective and it makes magic item stock piles less valuable for players in monty haul style campaign.

 

[GorTeX]

b) You get one more use of a magical item's daily power when reaching a milestone. I would think this only applies to this day, like the Action Point? So that after an extended rest, you can still only use it once?

not quite.

You get to use one more daily magic item power--but it cannot be the same daily magic item power you have already used.

(assuming heroic tier here)
Say you have dwarven armor and use it's daily power in the 1st encounter.

once you reach a milestone, you can now use another magic item's daily power, but you could not re-use the dwarven armor's daily power.

 

[eamon]

Milestones can potentially screw your character after a Raise Dead. The party could have a string of two encounters between extended rests in which you could never gain a Milestone. The -1 penalty you get after Raise Dead can kill your character if you are unlucky.

Milestones are in my opinion a major irritant in the 4E ruleset as it puts extra restrictions on PCs and is point of accounting to keep track of. Milestones are a lot of bother without any kind of fun payoff.

If you do two encounters between extended rests; you've reached a milestone - so if you have a string of such days, then at the end of the third such day you'll have passed 3 milestones. Two encounters a day is really not that much, but if, for some reason, your playstyle involves mostly 1 encounter a day, then I'd talk with the DM to institute something like a 10 encounter max.

I find the milestone concept to be a little oversold (I mean, two encounters is hardly a "milestone" in my book, but heck) but regaining an action point every other encounter sounds fine to me.