ShadowSiege
2008-05-15, 11:45 PM
Original articles: You and Your Magic Items (http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/4ex/20080516a), The Quest's the Thing (http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/4ex/20080516b), and Shadar-kai Art Preview (http://www.wizards.com/dnd/images/art_preview/20080516_114853_0.jpg)
Magic Items article:
Excerpts: You and Your Magic Items
4th Edition Player's Handbook
In today’s preview, we asked Andy Collins to reveal a bit more about the role your magic items play in 4th Edition. Then we present three such items for your characters to quest after!
We’ve been saying for a long time that we wanted magic items in 4th Edition to take up a smaller portion of a typical character’s array of options than in previous editions. The primary method used to accomplish this was to expand the average character’s class- and race-based power options. Even if a 4th Edition PC carried around the same array of gear as his 3rd Edition counterpart, you could still honestly say that those items were a smaller percentage of his options than before.
However, that semantic flourish wouldn’t really change the perception among many players that the average character simply had to carry around too many items to keep up with the foes he faced. Between six different stat-boosting items and at least three AC-boosting items (four counting shields), the typical player character faced an enormous drain on resources simply to stay competitive with the enemy. Something needed to change.
In 4th Edition, only three magic items are important for your attacks and defenses to keep up with the escalating power of the monsters you face. These are your weapon, your armor, and your amulet or cloak (also known as your neck-slot item). Together, they enhance your attack rolls, damage rolls, and all four of your defense scores.
The game assumes that the “plus” of each of these three items follows the normal enhancement curve of items in the game: +1 from 1st to 5th level, +2 from 6th to 10th, and on up to +6 from 26th to 30th. Many (perhaps even most) characters will have at least one item slightly ahead or behind this curve, but if you’re more than a couple of points ahead of or behind the expected progression, you may find your foes notably less (or more) challenging than normal.
Beyond those three key items, characters are free to accessorize in whatever manner they prefer. If you like to carry only the choicest items, picking and choosing the most powerful pieces of equipment that you can find or afford, that’s a reasonable plan. In fact, you could reasonably survive with just a good weapon, a good suit of armor, and a good neck-slot item.
On the other hand, if you prefer to wield a larger array of lower-powered magic items, that’s OK too… with some caveats. Most items are tied to body slots, so there’s a built-in limit to the sheer quantity of items most characters can easily tote around. In addition, each character can only activate a few different magic item powers in a given day, so the guy who brings a loaded pack full of flashy items doesn’t get as much bang for his buck. Again, your class powers should be the main focus of your character, not the precious little trinkets you swiped from cave-dwelling fiends.
--Andy Collins
As you gain levels, the mundane equipment you purchased as a starting character becomes less important; it’s overshadowed by the magic items you acquire on your adventures. Magic armor that can cloak you in shadow, magic weapons that burst into flame, magic rings that turn you invisible, or Ioun stones that orbit your head to grant you great capabilities—these items enhance and supplement the powers you gain from your class and enhance your attacks and defenses.
Magic items have levels, just as characters, powers, and monsters do. An item’s level is a general measure of its power and translates to the average level of character using that item. In practice, your character will end up with some items that are three or four levels above your level and others that are several levels below. There’s no restriction on using or acquiring items based on their level, except that you can’t use the Enchant Magic Item ritual (page 304 of the Player's Handbook) to create an item above your level. If, for some reason, your 10th-level character finds a 20th-level magic sword, you can use it to full effect.
You can sometimes buy magic items just as you can mundane equipment. It’s rare to find a shop or a bazaar that routinely sells magic items, except perhaps the lowest-level items. Some fantastic places, such as the legendary City of Brass in the heart of the Elemental Chaos, have such markets, but those are the exception rather than the rule. Your DM might say that you can track down a seller for the item you want to buy or that you might have to do some searching, but in general you can buy any item you can afford.
You can also use the Enchant Magic Item ritual to create an item of your level or lower. In terms of the economic transaction, creating an item is the same as buying it: You spend money equal to the market price of the item and acquire the item. Some DMs prefer to have characters enchant their own items rather than buy them, particularly for more powerful items.
As you adventure, you’ll come across magic items as part of the treasure you acquire. Often, these are magic items much higher than your level—items you can’t enchant and can’t easily afford to buy. Ideally, these are items that someone in your party can use effectively, which makes them very rewarding treasure.
If you find a magic item you don’t want to keep, or you find an item that replaces an item you already have, you might end up either selling the item or disenchanting it (with the Disenchant Magic Item ritual; see page 304 of the Player's Handbook). This isn’t a favorable transaction for you—the sale price of a magic item, or the value of residuum you get from disenchanting it, is only one-fifth the normal price of the item. That means selling an item gives you enough money or residuum to buy or enchant an item that’s five levels lower than the original item.
Identifying Magic Items
Most of the time, you can determine the properties and powers of a magic item during a short rest. In the course of handling the item for a few minutes, you discover what the item is and what it does. You can identify one magic item per short rest.
Some magic items might be a bit harder to identify, such as cursed or nonstandard items, or powerful magical artifacts. Your DM might ask for an Arcana check to determine their properties, or you might even need to go on a special quest to find a ritual to identify or to unlock the powers of a unique item.
Prices
The purchase price of a permanent magic item depends on its level, as shown on the table below. The purchase price of a consumable item (such as a potion or an elixir) is much lower than the price of a permanent item of the same level. The sale price of a magic item (the amount a PC gets from either selling or disenchanting an item) is one-fifth of the purchase price.
Prices shown are the base market price for the items. The actual cost to purchase a magic item depends on supply and demand and might be 10 to 40 percent more than the base market price.
Magic Item Prices (first 10 levels)
Item Level Purchase Price (gp) Sale Price (gp)*
1 360 72
2 520 104
3 680 136
4 840 168
5 1,000 200
6 1,800 360
7 2,600 520
8 3,400 680
9 4,200 840
10 5,000 1,000
* Or equivalent gold piece value of residuum acquired from disenchanting an item
Magic Item Categories
Magic items fall into seven broad categories: armor, weapons, implements, clothing, rings, wondrous items, and potions. Items in a particular category have similar effects—all magic weapons give you bonuses when you attack with them, and all magic boots have powers relating to movement. Aside from those broad generalities, though, magic items possess a wide variety of powers and properties.
Within the broad category of clothing, items are grouped by kind of clothing—whether you wear the item on your head or your feet, for example. These are called item slots, and they provide a practical limit to the number of magic items you can wear and use. You can benefit from only one magic item that you wear in your arms slot even if, practically speaking, you can wear bracers and carry a shield at the same time. You benefit from the item you put on first; any other item you put in the same item slot doesn’t function for you until you take off the first item. Sometimes there are physical limitations as well—you can’t wear two helms at the same time.
Wondrous items include a variety of useful tools, from a bag of holding to a flying carpet. Each item’s description indicates how a character accesses its effects.
All magic armor gives you an enhancement bonus to your Armor Class. All magic weapons and implements give you an enhancement bonus to your attack rolls and damage rolls when you use them to make an attack. All magic cloaks, amulets, and other neck slot items give you an enhancement bonus to your Fortitude, Reflex, and Will defenses. Other magic items don’t generally give you bonuses to these numerical statistics, though there are some exceptions.
Flaming Weapon
Level 5+
You can will this weapon to burst into flame.
Lvl 5 +1 1,000 gp Lvl 20 +4 125,000 gp
Lvl 10 +2 5,000 gp Lvl 25 +5 625,000 gp
Lvl 15 +3 25,000 gp Lvl 30 +6 3,125,000 gp
Weapon: Any
Enhancement: Attack rolls and damage rolls
Critical: +1d6 fire damage per plus
Power (At-Will Fire): Free Action. All damage dealt by this weapon is fire damage. Another free action returns the damage to normal.
Power (Daily Fire): Free Action. Use this power when you hit with the weapon. Deal an extra 1d6 fire damage, and the target takes ongoing 5 fire damage (save ends).
Level 15 or 20: 2d6 fire damage and ongoing 10 fire damage.
Level 25 or 30: 3d6 fire damage and ongoing 15 fire damage.
Phasing Weapon
Level 14+
This weapon’s projectiles phase in and out of reality when fired, slipping through cover as if it weren’t there.
Lvl 14 +3 21,000 gp Lvl 24 +5 525,000 gp
Lvl 19 +4 105,000 gp Lvl 29 +6 2,625,000 gp
Weapon: Any ranged
Enhancement: Attack rolls and damage rolls
Critical: +1d6 damage per plus
Property: Your ranged attacks with the weapon ignore the penalty to attack rolls for cover or superior cover.
Holy Avenger
Level 25+
The most prized weapon of any paladin.
Lvl 25 +5 625,000 gp Lvl 30 +6 3,125,000 gp
Weapon: Axe, Hammer, Heavy Blade
Enhancement: Attack rolls and damage rolls
Critical: +1d6 radiant damage per plus, and you can spend a healing surge
Property: A holy avenger deals an extra 1d10 radiant damage when the power you use to make the attack has the radiant keyword.
Power (Daily): Minor Action. You and each ally within 10 squares of you gain a +5 power bonus to Fortitude, Reflex, and Will defenses until the end of your next turn.
Special: A holy avenger can be used as a holy symbol. It adds its enhancement bonus to attack rolls and damage rolls and the extra damage granted by its property (if applicable) when used in this manner. You do not gain your weapon proficiency bonus to an attack roll when using a holy avenger as an implement.
Quest article:
Excerpts: The Quest’s the Thing
4th Edition Dungeon Master's Guide
Earlier, we looked at the quest rewards, but what of the quests themselves? In today’s preview, R&D’s Stephen Radney-MacFarland explains the philosophy behind Quest XP… and why every character will want to earn some!
Everyone knows that in Dungeons & Dragons you earn experience points to gain levels. Heck, even people who have never played D&D know this— it’s become so ingrained in the pop-culture idea of the game and its mechanic has replicated itself with great frequency into the realm of digital games. But just how you gain XP has evolved since the game’s inception, and with 4th Edition it’s continued to evolve. One of the biggest evolutions in 4th Edition D&D is the inclusion of quest XP rewards.
Now, I can hear the old timers quibble: “Come on, Stephen, quest XP is nothing new, I’ve been doing it for years.” And if you quibble thusly, you’d be right. Almost every D&D campaign out there grants a bit of bonus XP for completing story objectives, and this has been going since the first time a gamer lifted a d20 and stared at it in glossy-eyed wonder. The big difference between 4th Edition and older D&D editions is that we designed it into the game; it’s not just an afterthought, an ad hoc idea, or a suggested house rule. We actually took into account that people already do this, then gave better guidelines on how to do it well, and crafted the numbers behind character advancement with quests in mind.
Dungeons & Dragons is both a combat game and a storytelling game. Fighting foul beasts and despicable villains is fun. The grand majority of pages in our rulebooks give you the means and the toys you need to play that part of the game. Storytelling by its nature is more fluid, more natural; it has few (if any) hard and fast rules, but many guidelines and points of advice. While D&D abounds with levels, powers, shifts, opportunity attacks, effects that push, ongoing damage, and grabs, it also features heroes (or, soft-hearted scoundrels) who take chances to achieve goals that we can only dream of doing and in ways that are only as boundless as our imagination. It’s purely in the realm of action adventure. And when action and story fuse perfectly, it’s gaming ambrosia—the perfect way to spend an afternoon with friends.
Quest XP, and the idea of quests as benchmarks for rewards in a larger sense (the story chapter ends where characters gain a pile of rewards in the form of XP, treasure, favors, titles, castles, whatever) is a rare, evocative, satisfying, and natural way for those two aspects of the game to talk to one another directly.
Quests also serve as the DM’s dangling carrot. Not only do they say “fun lies this way,” now they also point to rewards with some amount of transparency. People like to have an idea of the rewards they will get for tasks… or at least the minimum rewards. Your players are no different. Quests are a way in which they’ll have a basic idea of the minimum rewards for what they do, and they’ll appreciate it. You’ll find this very handy if you create a more sandbox approach to quests. Throw a few of them out there, and see which ones they bite at. Using quests in this manner allows you to make your world seem larger than it really is, and let your players make more choices for their characters, encouraging them to invest themselves even further in your creation.
XP Evolutionary Dead Ends
Quest XP is one of the newest evolutions in how PCs gain experience in D&D, but it didn’t get to this point without some other experience point ideas dying off. Let’s take a quick look at three XP evolutionary dead ends that got us where we are today.
Treasure Worth = XP
Isn’t treasure supposed to be its own reward? The problem in early D&D is that it wasn’t. In fact you couldn’t do a whole lot with treasure except for accumulate it and gain XP from it. That’s right; you gained XP just for picking up a gold piece. To be fair, how much you gained was based on how much challenge the treasure’s guardian represented, but a simpler method is to place the challenge XP fully in the guardian (in 4th Edition, this means the monsters, traps, hazards, or skill challenge) and let wealth be the reward wealth is by its very nature—purchasing power.
The Teeny, Tiny, Micro Story Reward
Back in my early days of the RPGA (2nd Edition AD&D), we used to get “story rewards” for the craziest things. Did you talk to the mayor? Gain 10 XP! Did you pick the flower that the mayor told you not to pick? 15 XP! Did you buy a pickle from the vendor on the Avenue of Swords? 25 XP! These story rewards were so pointless, small, and absolutely endemic that you would spend large chunks of the adventure talking to everyone you could just so you would get them all. These ideas were prevalent in a period of time where writers wanted to write wacky guess-what-the-writer-is-thinking stories, not sword and sorcery action stories, and pulled the PCs along a long line of encounters as “helpful” benchmarks. The problem was that it didn’t feel like D&D. This was especially true when you played through adventures based on the lyrics of 70’s pop songs or adventure where you got to play characters that were magic items, children, or furniture (I’m not joking).
The Roleplaying Reward
I’ve seen a lot of games (both in early RPGA and home games) that gave XP for good roleplaying. By good roleplaying do I mean the quality of your character acting? The problem with the roleplaying reward is this: You’re almost always going to give out the maximum to everyone at the table. Why? Because telling someone that they didn’t do a good job of roleplaying in a game where everyone is there to have fun seems overly judgmental, can create hurt feelings, and is… well… just downright crappy. It’s also so very meta and arbitrary that it begs questions about other forms of bonus XP. Why not give similar bonus XP for rule knowledge? Playing well with others? Bringing the most snacks?
--Stephen Radney-MacFarland
Quests are the fundamental story framework of an adventure—the reason the characters want to participate in it. They’re the reason an adventure exists, and they indicate what the characters need to do to solve the situation the adventure presents.
The simplest adventures revolve around a single quest, usually one that gives everyone in the party a motivation to pursue it. More complex adventures involve multiple quests, including quests related to individual characters’ goals or quests that conflict with each other, presenting characters with interesting choices about which goals to pursue.
Using Basic Quest Seeds
When you’re devising a simple adventure, one to three basic seeds are enough to get you started. A classic dungeon adventure uses three: The characters set out to explore a dangerous place, defeat the monsters inside, and take the treasure they find. One simple quest can be enough, such as a quest to slay a dragon.
You can combine any number of basic seeds to create a more multifaceted adventure. The more seeds you throw in the mix, the more intricate your adventure will be. You might add timing elements to one or more of the seeds to create more depth in your adventure.
Once you have your seed or seeds, you can start getting specific. Go back and answer the questions in “Components of an Adventure” on page 100, keeping your quest seeds in mind. Again, you don’t need to follow any particular order. You might come up with a set of monsters you want to use first, you might invent a cool place or item, or you might choose a seed or three. You can then use Chapter 4 and the “Adventure Setting” section of this chapter to help flesh out your adventure.
Major Quests
Major quests define the fundamental reasons that characters are involved. They are the central goals of an adventure. A single major quest is enough to define an adventure, but a complex adventure might involve a number of different quests. A major quest should be important to every member of the party, and completing it should define success in the adventure. Achieving a major quest usually means either that the adventure is over, or that the characters have successfully completed a major chapter in the unfolding plot.
Don’t be shy about letting the players know what their quests are. Give the players an obvious goal, possibly a known villain to go after, and a clear course to get to their destination. That avoids searching for the fun—aimless wandering, arguing about trivial choices, and staring across the table because the players don’t know what to do next. You can fiddle with using another secret villain or other less obvious courses, but one obvious path for adventure that is not wrong or fake should exist. You can count on the unpredictability of player actions to keep things interesting even in the simplest of adventure plots.
Thinking in terms of quests helps focus the adventure solidly where it belongs: on the player characters. An adventure isn’t something that can unfold without their involvement. A plot or an event can unfold without the characters’ involvement, but not an adventure. An adventure begins when the characters get involved, when they have a reason to participate and a goal to accomplish. Quests give them that.
Minor Quests
Minor quests are the subplots of an adventure, complications or wrinkles in the overall story. The characters might complete them along the way toward finishing a major quest, or they might tie up the loose ends of minor quests after they’ve finished the major quest.
Often, minor quests matter primarily to a particular character or perhaps a subset of the party. Such quests might be related to a character’s background, a player goal, or the ongoing events in the campaign relevant to one or more characters. These quests still matter to the party overall. This game is a cooperative game, and everyone shares the rewards for completing a quest. Just make sure that the whole group has fun completing minor quests tied to a single character.
Sometimes minor quests come up as sidelines to the main plot of the adventure. For example, say the characters learn in town that a prisoner has escaped from the local jail. That has nothing to do with the main quest. It pales in importance next to the hobgoblin raids that have been plundering caravans and seizing people for slaves. However, when the characters find and free some of the hobgoblins’ slaves, the escaped prisoner is among them. Do they make sure he gets back to the jail? Do they accept his promise to go straight—and his offer of a treasure map—and let him go free? Do they believe his protestations of innocence and try to help him find the real criminal? Any of these goals can launch a side quest, but clearly the characters can’t pursue all of them. This situation gives them the opportunity to roleplay and make interesting choices, adding richness and depth to the game.
Be sure to return Monday for a look at minions!
I haven't read em yet, but I'll make the super easy prediction of some people comparing what they see to video games/MOREPIGs/WoW (Golden Question Marks!), others will just hate it all, others will blindingly love it all, and a whole spectrum between.
Magic Items article:
Excerpts: You and Your Magic Items
4th Edition Player's Handbook
In today’s preview, we asked Andy Collins to reveal a bit more about the role your magic items play in 4th Edition. Then we present three such items for your characters to quest after!
We’ve been saying for a long time that we wanted magic items in 4th Edition to take up a smaller portion of a typical character’s array of options than in previous editions. The primary method used to accomplish this was to expand the average character’s class- and race-based power options. Even if a 4th Edition PC carried around the same array of gear as his 3rd Edition counterpart, you could still honestly say that those items were a smaller percentage of his options than before.
However, that semantic flourish wouldn’t really change the perception among many players that the average character simply had to carry around too many items to keep up with the foes he faced. Between six different stat-boosting items and at least three AC-boosting items (four counting shields), the typical player character faced an enormous drain on resources simply to stay competitive with the enemy. Something needed to change.
In 4th Edition, only three magic items are important for your attacks and defenses to keep up with the escalating power of the monsters you face. These are your weapon, your armor, and your amulet or cloak (also known as your neck-slot item). Together, they enhance your attack rolls, damage rolls, and all four of your defense scores.
The game assumes that the “plus” of each of these three items follows the normal enhancement curve of items in the game: +1 from 1st to 5th level, +2 from 6th to 10th, and on up to +6 from 26th to 30th. Many (perhaps even most) characters will have at least one item slightly ahead or behind this curve, but if you’re more than a couple of points ahead of or behind the expected progression, you may find your foes notably less (or more) challenging than normal.
Beyond those three key items, characters are free to accessorize in whatever manner they prefer. If you like to carry only the choicest items, picking and choosing the most powerful pieces of equipment that you can find or afford, that’s a reasonable plan. In fact, you could reasonably survive with just a good weapon, a good suit of armor, and a good neck-slot item.
On the other hand, if you prefer to wield a larger array of lower-powered magic items, that’s OK too… with some caveats. Most items are tied to body slots, so there’s a built-in limit to the sheer quantity of items most characters can easily tote around. In addition, each character can only activate a few different magic item powers in a given day, so the guy who brings a loaded pack full of flashy items doesn’t get as much bang for his buck. Again, your class powers should be the main focus of your character, not the precious little trinkets you swiped from cave-dwelling fiends.
--Andy Collins
As you gain levels, the mundane equipment you purchased as a starting character becomes less important; it’s overshadowed by the magic items you acquire on your adventures. Magic armor that can cloak you in shadow, magic weapons that burst into flame, magic rings that turn you invisible, or Ioun stones that orbit your head to grant you great capabilities—these items enhance and supplement the powers you gain from your class and enhance your attacks and defenses.
Magic items have levels, just as characters, powers, and monsters do. An item’s level is a general measure of its power and translates to the average level of character using that item. In practice, your character will end up with some items that are three or four levels above your level and others that are several levels below. There’s no restriction on using or acquiring items based on their level, except that you can’t use the Enchant Magic Item ritual (page 304 of the Player's Handbook) to create an item above your level. If, for some reason, your 10th-level character finds a 20th-level magic sword, you can use it to full effect.
You can sometimes buy magic items just as you can mundane equipment. It’s rare to find a shop or a bazaar that routinely sells magic items, except perhaps the lowest-level items. Some fantastic places, such as the legendary City of Brass in the heart of the Elemental Chaos, have such markets, but those are the exception rather than the rule. Your DM might say that you can track down a seller for the item you want to buy or that you might have to do some searching, but in general you can buy any item you can afford.
You can also use the Enchant Magic Item ritual to create an item of your level or lower. In terms of the economic transaction, creating an item is the same as buying it: You spend money equal to the market price of the item and acquire the item. Some DMs prefer to have characters enchant their own items rather than buy them, particularly for more powerful items.
As you adventure, you’ll come across magic items as part of the treasure you acquire. Often, these are magic items much higher than your level—items you can’t enchant and can’t easily afford to buy. Ideally, these are items that someone in your party can use effectively, which makes them very rewarding treasure.
If you find a magic item you don’t want to keep, or you find an item that replaces an item you already have, you might end up either selling the item or disenchanting it (with the Disenchant Magic Item ritual; see page 304 of the Player's Handbook). This isn’t a favorable transaction for you—the sale price of a magic item, or the value of residuum you get from disenchanting it, is only one-fifth the normal price of the item. That means selling an item gives you enough money or residuum to buy or enchant an item that’s five levels lower than the original item.
Identifying Magic Items
Most of the time, you can determine the properties and powers of a magic item during a short rest. In the course of handling the item for a few minutes, you discover what the item is and what it does. You can identify one magic item per short rest.
Some magic items might be a bit harder to identify, such as cursed or nonstandard items, or powerful magical artifacts. Your DM might ask for an Arcana check to determine their properties, or you might even need to go on a special quest to find a ritual to identify or to unlock the powers of a unique item.
Prices
The purchase price of a permanent magic item depends on its level, as shown on the table below. The purchase price of a consumable item (such as a potion or an elixir) is much lower than the price of a permanent item of the same level. The sale price of a magic item (the amount a PC gets from either selling or disenchanting an item) is one-fifth of the purchase price.
Prices shown are the base market price for the items. The actual cost to purchase a magic item depends on supply and demand and might be 10 to 40 percent more than the base market price.
Magic Item Prices (first 10 levels)
Item Level Purchase Price (gp) Sale Price (gp)*
1 360 72
2 520 104
3 680 136
4 840 168
5 1,000 200
6 1,800 360
7 2,600 520
8 3,400 680
9 4,200 840
10 5,000 1,000
* Or equivalent gold piece value of residuum acquired from disenchanting an item
Magic Item Categories
Magic items fall into seven broad categories: armor, weapons, implements, clothing, rings, wondrous items, and potions. Items in a particular category have similar effects—all magic weapons give you bonuses when you attack with them, and all magic boots have powers relating to movement. Aside from those broad generalities, though, magic items possess a wide variety of powers and properties.
Within the broad category of clothing, items are grouped by kind of clothing—whether you wear the item on your head or your feet, for example. These are called item slots, and they provide a practical limit to the number of magic items you can wear and use. You can benefit from only one magic item that you wear in your arms slot even if, practically speaking, you can wear bracers and carry a shield at the same time. You benefit from the item you put on first; any other item you put in the same item slot doesn’t function for you until you take off the first item. Sometimes there are physical limitations as well—you can’t wear two helms at the same time.
Wondrous items include a variety of useful tools, from a bag of holding to a flying carpet. Each item’s description indicates how a character accesses its effects.
All magic armor gives you an enhancement bonus to your Armor Class. All magic weapons and implements give you an enhancement bonus to your attack rolls and damage rolls when you use them to make an attack. All magic cloaks, amulets, and other neck slot items give you an enhancement bonus to your Fortitude, Reflex, and Will defenses. Other magic items don’t generally give you bonuses to these numerical statistics, though there are some exceptions.
Flaming Weapon
Level 5+
You can will this weapon to burst into flame.
Lvl 5 +1 1,000 gp Lvl 20 +4 125,000 gp
Lvl 10 +2 5,000 gp Lvl 25 +5 625,000 gp
Lvl 15 +3 25,000 gp Lvl 30 +6 3,125,000 gp
Weapon: Any
Enhancement: Attack rolls and damage rolls
Critical: +1d6 fire damage per plus
Power (At-Will Fire): Free Action. All damage dealt by this weapon is fire damage. Another free action returns the damage to normal.
Power (Daily Fire): Free Action. Use this power when you hit with the weapon. Deal an extra 1d6 fire damage, and the target takes ongoing 5 fire damage (save ends).
Level 15 or 20: 2d6 fire damage and ongoing 10 fire damage.
Level 25 or 30: 3d6 fire damage and ongoing 15 fire damage.
Phasing Weapon
Level 14+
This weapon’s projectiles phase in and out of reality when fired, slipping through cover as if it weren’t there.
Lvl 14 +3 21,000 gp Lvl 24 +5 525,000 gp
Lvl 19 +4 105,000 gp Lvl 29 +6 2,625,000 gp
Weapon: Any ranged
Enhancement: Attack rolls and damage rolls
Critical: +1d6 damage per plus
Property: Your ranged attacks with the weapon ignore the penalty to attack rolls for cover or superior cover.
Holy Avenger
Level 25+
The most prized weapon of any paladin.
Lvl 25 +5 625,000 gp Lvl 30 +6 3,125,000 gp
Weapon: Axe, Hammer, Heavy Blade
Enhancement: Attack rolls and damage rolls
Critical: +1d6 radiant damage per plus, and you can spend a healing surge
Property: A holy avenger deals an extra 1d10 radiant damage when the power you use to make the attack has the radiant keyword.
Power (Daily): Minor Action. You and each ally within 10 squares of you gain a +5 power bonus to Fortitude, Reflex, and Will defenses until the end of your next turn.
Special: A holy avenger can be used as a holy symbol. It adds its enhancement bonus to attack rolls and damage rolls and the extra damage granted by its property (if applicable) when used in this manner. You do not gain your weapon proficiency bonus to an attack roll when using a holy avenger as an implement.
Quest article:
Excerpts: The Quest’s the Thing
4th Edition Dungeon Master's Guide
Earlier, we looked at the quest rewards, but what of the quests themselves? In today’s preview, R&D’s Stephen Radney-MacFarland explains the philosophy behind Quest XP… and why every character will want to earn some!
Everyone knows that in Dungeons & Dragons you earn experience points to gain levels. Heck, even people who have never played D&D know this— it’s become so ingrained in the pop-culture idea of the game and its mechanic has replicated itself with great frequency into the realm of digital games. But just how you gain XP has evolved since the game’s inception, and with 4th Edition it’s continued to evolve. One of the biggest evolutions in 4th Edition D&D is the inclusion of quest XP rewards.
Now, I can hear the old timers quibble: “Come on, Stephen, quest XP is nothing new, I’ve been doing it for years.” And if you quibble thusly, you’d be right. Almost every D&D campaign out there grants a bit of bonus XP for completing story objectives, and this has been going since the first time a gamer lifted a d20 and stared at it in glossy-eyed wonder. The big difference between 4th Edition and older D&D editions is that we designed it into the game; it’s not just an afterthought, an ad hoc idea, or a suggested house rule. We actually took into account that people already do this, then gave better guidelines on how to do it well, and crafted the numbers behind character advancement with quests in mind.
Dungeons & Dragons is both a combat game and a storytelling game. Fighting foul beasts and despicable villains is fun. The grand majority of pages in our rulebooks give you the means and the toys you need to play that part of the game. Storytelling by its nature is more fluid, more natural; it has few (if any) hard and fast rules, but many guidelines and points of advice. While D&D abounds with levels, powers, shifts, opportunity attacks, effects that push, ongoing damage, and grabs, it also features heroes (or, soft-hearted scoundrels) who take chances to achieve goals that we can only dream of doing and in ways that are only as boundless as our imagination. It’s purely in the realm of action adventure. And when action and story fuse perfectly, it’s gaming ambrosia—the perfect way to spend an afternoon with friends.
Quest XP, and the idea of quests as benchmarks for rewards in a larger sense (the story chapter ends where characters gain a pile of rewards in the form of XP, treasure, favors, titles, castles, whatever) is a rare, evocative, satisfying, and natural way for those two aspects of the game to talk to one another directly.
Quests also serve as the DM’s dangling carrot. Not only do they say “fun lies this way,” now they also point to rewards with some amount of transparency. People like to have an idea of the rewards they will get for tasks… or at least the minimum rewards. Your players are no different. Quests are a way in which they’ll have a basic idea of the minimum rewards for what they do, and they’ll appreciate it. You’ll find this very handy if you create a more sandbox approach to quests. Throw a few of them out there, and see which ones they bite at. Using quests in this manner allows you to make your world seem larger than it really is, and let your players make more choices for their characters, encouraging them to invest themselves even further in your creation.
XP Evolutionary Dead Ends
Quest XP is one of the newest evolutions in how PCs gain experience in D&D, but it didn’t get to this point without some other experience point ideas dying off. Let’s take a quick look at three XP evolutionary dead ends that got us where we are today.
Treasure Worth = XP
Isn’t treasure supposed to be its own reward? The problem in early D&D is that it wasn’t. In fact you couldn’t do a whole lot with treasure except for accumulate it and gain XP from it. That’s right; you gained XP just for picking up a gold piece. To be fair, how much you gained was based on how much challenge the treasure’s guardian represented, but a simpler method is to place the challenge XP fully in the guardian (in 4th Edition, this means the monsters, traps, hazards, or skill challenge) and let wealth be the reward wealth is by its very nature—purchasing power.
The Teeny, Tiny, Micro Story Reward
Back in my early days of the RPGA (2nd Edition AD&D), we used to get “story rewards” for the craziest things. Did you talk to the mayor? Gain 10 XP! Did you pick the flower that the mayor told you not to pick? 15 XP! Did you buy a pickle from the vendor on the Avenue of Swords? 25 XP! These story rewards were so pointless, small, and absolutely endemic that you would spend large chunks of the adventure talking to everyone you could just so you would get them all. These ideas were prevalent in a period of time where writers wanted to write wacky guess-what-the-writer-is-thinking stories, not sword and sorcery action stories, and pulled the PCs along a long line of encounters as “helpful” benchmarks. The problem was that it didn’t feel like D&D. This was especially true when you played through adventures based on the lyrics of 70’s pop songs or adventure where you got to play characters that were magic items, children, or furniture (I’m not joking).
The Roleplaying Reward
I’ve seen a lot of games (both in early RPGA and home games) that gave XP for good roleplaying. By good roleplaying do I mean the quality of your character acting? The problem with the roleplaying reward is this: You’re almost always going to give out the maximum to everyone at the table. Why? Because telling someone that they didn’t do a good job of roleplaying in a game where everyone is there to have fun seems overly judgmental, can create hurt feelings, and is… well… just downright crappy. It’s also so very meta and arbitrary that it begs questions about other forms of bonus XP. Why not give similar bonus XP for rule knowledge? Playing well with others? Bringing the most snacks?
--Stephen Radney-MacFarland
Quests are the fundamental story framework of an adventure—the reason the characters want to participate in it. They’re the reason an adventure exists, and they indicate what the characters need to do to solve the situation the adventure presents.
The simplest adventures revolve around a single quest, usually one that gives everyone in the party a motivation to pursue it. More complex adventures involve multiple quests, including quests related to individual characters’ goals or quests that conflict with each other, presenting characters with interesting choices about which goals to pursue.
Using Basic Quest Seeds
When you’re devising a simple adventure, one to three basic seeds are enough to get you started. A classic dungeon adventure uses three: The characters set out to explore a dangerous place, defeat the monsters inside, and take the treasure they find. One simple quest can be enough, such as a quest to slay a dragon.
You can combine any number of basic seeds to create a more multifaceted adventure. The more seeds you throw in the mix, the more intricate your adventure will be. You might add timing elements to one or more of the seeds to create more depth in your adventure.
Once you have your seed or seeds, you can start getting specific. Go back and answer the questions in “Components of an Adventure” on page 100, keeping your quest seeds in mind. Again, you don’t need to follow any particular order. You might come up with a set of monsters you want to use first, you might invent a cool place or item, or you might choose a seed or three. You can then use Chapter 4 and the “Adventure Setting” section of this chapter to help flesh out your adventure.
Major Quests
Major quests define the fundamental reasons that characters are involved. They are the central goals of an adventure. A single major quest is enough to define an adventure, but a complex adventure might involve a number of different quests. A major quest should be important to every member of the party, and completing it should define success in the adventure. Achieving a major quest usually means either that the adventure is over, or that the characters have successfully completed a major chapter in the unfolding plot.
Don’t be shy about letting the players know what their quests are. Give the players an obvious goal, possibly a known villain to go after, and a clear course to get to their destination. That avoids searching for the fun—aimless wandering, arguing about trivial choices, and staring across the table because the players don’t know what to do next. You can fiddle with using another secret villain or other less obvious courses, but one obvious path for adventure that is not wrong or fake should exist. You can count on the unpredictability of player actions to keep things interesting even in the simplest of adventure plots.
Thinking in terms of quests helps focus the adventure solidly where it belongs: on the player characters. An adventure isn’t something that can unfold without their involvement. A plot or an event can unfold without the characters’ involvement, but not an adventure. An adventure begins when the characters get involved, when they have a reason to participate and a goal to accomplish. Quests give them that.
Minor Quests
Minor quests are the subplots of an adventure, complications or wrinkles in the overall story. The characters might complete them along the way toward finishing a major quest, or they might tie up the loose ends of minor quests after they’ve finished the major quest.
Often, minor quests matter primarily to a particular character or perhaps a subset of the party. Such quests might be related to a character’s background, a player goal, or the ongoing events in the campaign relevant to one or more characters. These quests still matter to the party overall. This game is a cooperative game, and everyone shares the rewards for completing a quest. Just make sure that the whole group has fun completing minor quests tied to a single character.
Sometimes minor quests come up as sidelines to the main plot of the adventure. For example, say the characters learn in town that a prisoner has escaped from the local jail. That has nothing to do with the main quest. It pales in importance next to the hobgoblin raids that have been plundering caravans and seizing people for slaves. However, when the characters find and free some of the hobgoblins’ slaves, the escaped prisoner is among them. Do they make sure he gets back to the jail? Do they accept his promise to go straight—and his offer of a treasure map—and let him go free? Do they believe his protestations of innocence and try to help him find the real criminal? Any of these goals can launch a side quest, but clearly the characters can’t pursue all of them. This situation gives them the opportunity to roleplay and make interesting choices, adding richness and depth to the game.
Be sure to return Monday for a look at minions!
I haven't read em yet, but I'll make the super easy prediction of some people comparing what they see to video games/MOREPIGs/WoW (Golden Question Marks!), others will just hate it all, others will blindingly love it all, and a whole spectrum between.