Judging by the number of questions about it, and how long debate continues over the answers, Divine Challenge is one of the more confusing powers in the game. The version playtested at DDXP was already out-of-date: it had a loophole allowing a paladin to mark a target then flee the room, leaving it marked and taking punitive damage for attacking the rest of the party indefinitely. Clearly this was not what the Devs wanted, but their attempts to rule this out left the wording of the power a little convoluted.
However with the DDXP characters available for download from the WoTC website we can see what the earlier wording of Divine Challenge was, and it is somewhat illuminating:
The forum rules (and common sense) prevent me posting the full powers here, but I will discuss the differences.
"PX" is my shorthand for "text found in Paragraph X"
Text present in the DDXP pregen paladin that was omitted from the published version:
New text in the published version (taken from Compendium).
I think #7 can safely be attributed to the fact that there was only one paladin character in the DDXP party, so rules for how DC interacted with another paladins' DC were superfluous, and may even have confused players.
#3 Appears to be a genuine clarification rather than an alteration.
so that leaves us with three main changes.
Engaging: #2 and #5 are the added requirement that the challenger engage the target.
Frequency of Use: #6 places a once-per-turn useage restriction on what is already a minor action.
How often it does damage #1 and #4 tell us that Divine Challenge originally could do damage every turn (could this have been an error?), but got further restricted to (depending on interpretation) either once per turn the challenger takes or once per use of Divine Challenge.
Most of the questions I see on these board stem from these changes, so I thought that maybe knowing what was changed would help us work out what was intended, especially when the question is 'what does this sentence mean'?
e.g. Knowing that the earlier version of Divine Challenge did damage once per turn, it seems less likely that the new version is meant to only damage the target once per use of the Divine Challenge power.
However with the DDXP characters available for download from the WoTC website we can see what the earlier wording of Divine Challenge was, and it is somewhat illuminating:
The forum rules (and common sense) prevent me posting the full powers here, but I will discuss the differences.
"PX" is my shorthand for "text found in Paragraph X"
Text present in the DDXP pregen paladin that was omitted from the published version:
New text in the published version (taken from Compendium).
- P1: The target takes this damage only once per turn.
- P1: , or if you fail to engage the target (see below).
- P2: While a target is marked,
- P2: the first time it makes an attack that doesn’t include you as a target before the start of your next turn.
- All of P3 (The rules for engaging)
- P4: You can use divine challenge once per turn.
- P5:already affected by your or another character’s divine challenge
I think #7 can safely be attributed to the fact that there was only one paladin character in the DDXP party, so rules for how DC interacted with another paladins' DC were superfluous, and may even have confused players.
#3 Appears to be a genuine clarification rather than an alteration.
so that leaves us with three main changes.
Engaging: #2 and #5 are the added requirement that the challenger engage the target.
Frequency of Use: #6 places a once-per-turn useage restriction on what is already a minor action.
How often it does damage #1 and #4 tell us that Divine Challenge originally could do damage every turn (could this have been an error?), but got further restricted to (depending on interpretation) either once per turn the challenger takes or once per use of Divine Challenge.
Most of the questions I see on these board stem from these changes, so I thought that maybe knowing what was changed would help us work out what was intended, especially when the question is 'what does this sentence mean'?
e.g. Knowing that the earlier version of Divine Challenge did damage once per turn, it seems less likely that the new version is meant to only damage the target once per use of the Divine Challenge power.
