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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 6577084" data-attributes="member: 82106">Right, adamantium is, in your example, a 'paragon environmental feature', and it makes sense. A bad guy wanting to keep out bad-assed paragon threats has to invest in adamantium doors! Level 15 challenges can still have wooden doors of course, but they're set dressing as far as being part of the challenge, although they still act as terrain.Yeah, they never QUITE made the full leap and put it that way, EXCEPT in DMG2 there are something called 'Terrain Powers'. This was a nifty way where the DM would codify some sort of environmental/situational thing as a power, which a character (PC or NPC) could then use if they took the appropriate action. Being powers these things at least technically have a level, but as close as they got to 'level 15 door' was just the chart that showed 'adamantium' as a DC30. I think it could have been made more explicit and removed some confusion but they probably were trying not to lard the whole game with too much terminology.Well, hmmm. There are of course always possibly some very mundane things that even high level PCs could do that would obviously be 'low level', like say 'drop a rock off the balcony onto the ogre'. A level 1 PC could do it and its not a rare resource or anything, so one line of reasoning is "OK, its a level 1 damage expression" and the level 20 guy would be ill-served by doing it. OTOH I would say the DM should be describing the situation such that this rings true. The level 20 ogre is a massive juggernaut of bone and armor plate, it just barely feels a brick sized object striking its head. On the flip side, I don't see anything wrong with putting a level 15 lava filled lamp in a level 5 dungeon, but the DM obviously has to know what he's up to. It could be used to create a puzzle challenge, tip over the lamp onto the otherwise undefeatable enemy. I did this in the 2nd encounter I ever wrote in 4e. The level 1 PCs enter a cave and they run smack into a Carrion Crawler (level 7 elite). The cave sloped downward a bit, and they had just passed a couple nice barrels of oil. Clearly there was a theme here! Anyway, I think you can mix things up, the game isn't saying not to ever do that, its just saying "this will be a routine element at this level", at level 5 the level 15 lamp is not routine, its a super potent weapon. Yeah, I guess its a bit different way of looking at it. I just welcomed it as a guideline IIRC. One of the things that 4e did was use 'level' in a totally consistent way, it always references to the 30 character levels. There aren't a separate set of spell levels, dungeon levels, etc "level 7" always means something that would be mechanically in scale for inclusion at level 7 as a fairly standard adventure element. This leads to things like traps that are actually just a variant on monsters, a single level 7 trap is literally the same XP and challenge as a standard level 7 monster, and can sub for it in an encounter.</blockquote>

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