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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 5219468" data-attributes="member: 82106">It just isn't feasible in 4e. What is a 'spell'? Monsters don't have power sources, so there is actually NO mechanical way in 4e to determine which monster powers are magical or not and no definition of what constitutes a spell except 'an arcane power' which is not something you can determine.There is also already a perfectly good counterspell, Shield. The enemy attacks you with its power, you interrupt and gain 4 to your defense. Totally negating an enemy power seems a bit extreme, there really should be SOME sort of mechanical resolution of that and the way Shield does it seems perfectly reasonable.The other issue with anti-magic is that it simply isn't very effective, tactically. You burn a spell slot to negate some power of an opponent. What have you really accomplished? Its not helping you win, its at best burning an immediate action to take away a standard action of an opponent. Beyond that its a wash. It just isn't that interesting and tactically savvy players will ignore such powers in most cases. Even if they don't the net result is a longer and less exciting battle.As far as stealing other creatures powers nothing has been done about that AFAIK. Its a VERY difficult kind of mechanism to design in a workable way. First you still have the problem of 'what is a spell in 4e' which you can't cleanly resolve. Then there's the question of what said character does when there's nothing to steal. Finally any power of this type is likely to be devastatingly effective, or else trivially useless in every given situation. If the enemy has no one really strong power to steal its probably pretty useless, but if the enemy has some really strong power then it is suddenly winning the battle. Its hard to assign a tactical value to any such power. It also tends to get stronger against stronger enemies, unlike most powers.This topic has had a lot of debate over on the WotC boards at times. You might want to take a look over on the home brew forum there too.</blockquote>

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