D&D 4E 4E Magic Items...

[OakwoodDM]

in 4E the unlucky PCs who only have three magical items (the primary ones) still have a good chance against monsters.
This of course means that PCs who have all their slots filled which will be the norm (see example PC) will have a easy time to kill any level appropriate encounter.

Really? Because I don't see how Boots of Water Walking, a Bag of Holding and a Helm of Perception (for example) are going to make killing an Ogre any easier.

 

[Belphanior]

Really? Because I don't see how Boots of Water Walking, a Bag of Holding and a Helm of Perception (for example) are going to make killing an Ogre any easier.

Ok, well... there's this Ogre Mage, right? And they can fly and become invisible, and this one's hovering above a lake. And he just happens to have a portable hole strapped to his chest as a clever defense against arrows.

So.

The fighter spots him with his helm's special sight, walks over the lake to get closer, and throws his bag of holding into the portable hole - thus creating an astral rift that will devour the ogre mage. Killed by his own defense. The irony!


So as you can see, this very plausible and archetypical D&D encounter was killed through the Christmas Tree Effect.

 

[UngeheuerLich]

Ok, well... there's this Ogre Mage, right? And they can fly and become invisible, and this one's hovering above a lake. And he just happens to have a portable hole strapped to his chest as a clever defense against arrows.

So.

The fighter spots him with his helm's special sight, walks over the lake to get closer, and throws his bag of holding into the portable hole - thus creating an astral rift that will devour the ogre mage. Killed by his own defense. The irony!

wow, thats mean... and very very expensive...

 

[jtrowell]

Ok, well... there's this Ogre Mage, right? And they can fly and become invisible, and this one's hovering above a lake. And he just happens to have a portable hole strapped to his chest as a clever defense against arrows.

So.

The fighter spots him with his helm's special sight, walks over the lake to get closer, and throws his bag of holding into the portable hole - thus creating an astral rift that will devour the ogre mage. Killed by his own defense. The irony!


So as you can see, this very plausible and archetypical D&D encounter was killed through the Christmas Tree Effect.

In this kind of situation, the character and monster levels are totally irrevellent.

The ogre mage could as well be a great wyrm or a small goblin. The challenge here is not really the monster itself, but the pseudo-trap it represent.

The same way, I sometimes use as an exemple an adventure were low level players must sneak around a sleeping adult dragon. (in a large cave, and noise from a nearby kobold village, so the skill check is in fact easy to do by taking 10)
Of course, the players once outside the cavern don't get the dragon XP.

Should one player manage somehow to have a brillant idea allowing him to bury the dragon in its own cave (and maybe kill, or at least neutralize him for now) (unlikely, but might be possible if I made an error and left some "securoty hole" in the cave description), the player would get an XP bonus of course, but not the dragon XP as expected from his CR. The situation would not have been really less or more dangerous had the dragon been a small one, or the tarrasque itself.
So the players get a level-appropriate XP reward.

Moreover, We can expect such extreme spells or items to be more controlled : invisibility might be higher level, magic items might have less continuous effects (a helmet of detect invisibility might be only useable a few rounds per day)

 

[Belphanior]

For the record, the Ogre-Mage-With-A-Portable-Hole was just me agreeing with OakwoodDM. There's no way those items are real combat powerhouses. I came up with a contrived situation that showed otherwise as satire.

Hence I said: "this very plausible and archetypical D&D encounter was killed through the Christmas Tree Effect. "