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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Rallek" data-source="post: 4010735" data-attributes="member: 8463">The following is my take on the “need to be level 11 to use rings” strangeness.Party kills a wizard flavored baddie. Party consists of 5 lvl 8s, Baddie is lvl 11 and surrounded by his lvl 6 lackeys. After the battle, Bill takes the big bad’s shiny gold ring. Putting it on, he finds that nothing happens. Still, the ring is shiny and has a nice emerald on it, so Bill keeps it anyway. A few (in-game) months later, Bill kills one more orc, and promptly becomes invisible. Guess he hit lvl 11.Perhaps Bill can only level over downtime. Ok, same deal as above, except this time Bill kills that one final orc, goes back to town, spends a week in training and promptly wakes up invisible. Guess he hit lvl 11 overnight after his training.In both cases the same problem applies, Bill can find the ring before he is lvl 11, he can wear the ring (one assumes), but the ring has no effect on him. If all rings in 4e need to be “invoked” in some way before their powers manifest, that is fine. However, I find it strange that rings that take effect when worn are gone now. The problem is the same when Bill wakes up one day to find that he has become some kind of undead in his sleep. Again, it turns out that he leveled during the night, and his long-inactive ring finally turned on, making him into some kind of vampire or lich thing. Oddly the wizard baddie that he took the ring off of wasn’t undead, despite being requisite level and wearing the ring, guess he was an NPC and his stat block didn’t require the ring’s effects to be noted…There are certain gamist ideas that need to be embraced, or at least tolerated to make D&D function as a game. However, I think the bizarre possibilities opened up/caused by the arbitrary “level for use” requirement on rings is not one of them. I honestly think that this just hurts the game. Maybe no character would know what “level” they are in-game, but it seems that that kind of meta-thinking has to be present in the world if a character gains that 11th lvl, and suddenly magic rings work for him. Maybe he doesn’t know that yesterday he was lvl 10 and today he is lvl 11, but he certainly knows, in the context of the in-game world, that he was “heroic” yesterday, but today finds him a “paragon”. Just my opinion.</blockquote>

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