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What stops a player from using the daily power over and over until they get the 3 d20 results that they want stored and then just leave them there?

Essentially, a player could start off each game with the 3 best d20 rolls that they want stored in the item.  This becomes bad in combination with Lucky Shot (crit on a 19-20).

I am hoping that someone will come to their senses and depower this item before its inclusion in the final issue.

They become even more "broken" if one carries two or more of them....

Nov 11, 2009 -- 7:40AM, Dragon9 wrote:

Considering most adventures don't last more than a day or offer a chance to use an extended rest, the chance to use them again likely won't come up.  If you decide to use it over and over... you'll likely be left behind by the rest of the party who go on to play the mod or fail the mod because you took too much time.

That's not quite correct.  While many modules are of the "we need you to fix our problem by lunch" nature, there are a meaningful number of the "travel somewhere and solve our problem" variety.  Sure, most adventures don't allow the opportunity for an extended rest once the action actually starts, but there are a meaningful number where you have several days before the action starts.

Even leaving aside the "No, I don't care that your last adventure was in Waterdeep and now you're in Aglarond, you can't use that item's power each day during the journey between there and here.  Because I said so, that's why." issue, the opportunity to use the dice multiple times to increase the chance of good rolls will be occasionally available.

That's beside the point, however. The item, as written and using it in the most vanilla way possible, is ridiculously overpowered.  Coming up with ways to make it more powerful is unnecessary.  If a Dragon article puts out a "sword of killing all enemies within 500' of you if you roll a 20", the fact that the sword can be made a flaming weapon isn't really the problem, and fixing things so it can't be made flaming is kind of missing the point.

Besides, re-rolling for multiple days is just brute force.  An artificer or a divine PC with the Creation Secret feat can cheese this much more elegantly.

Fortunately, this is early enough in the month that it would surprise me if the item made it into the compiled issue.  I wouldn't even put odds on the article lasting out the week.

It's the end-of-the-month articles you have to fear.  Anything that shows up in the Sorcerer Essentials article is (given Thanksgiving) almost certainly going to end up in the final issue as-is, and the Invoker and Paladin articles are pretty unlikely to get changed.

Considering that this is the third Dragon article this month alone that needs to be pulled and redone, this bodes ill for the future of the magazine and particularly ill for a campaign that has no choice but to allow every last power, feat and item that gets vomited on to its pages.

Nov 11, 2009 -- 3:32PM, Dragon9 wrote:
> Wouldn't you say it's better that something get pulled and redone than have nothing done at all?

Yes, of course.  That's a bit of a false dichotomy, though, as it assumes that doing it right the first time isn't an option.

And, hey, everyone makes mistakes, so an occasional misstep is to be expected, but when it's not even halfway through the month and we're at three articles that are sufficiently screwed up that wholesale re-editing is the only option, I'll call that a sign that something is fundamentally amiss in the editing and approval process.

There are seven rules items on the page that contains the dice.  Three have meaningful problems: two with issues an editor should have caught (Prime Beast Strike has mutually exclusive prerequisites; Clan Guardian Beast allows a druid to do something they could already do); one, the magic item in question, is so fundamentally overpowered on its face that it would make me question the competence of whoever approved this.  That's not the type of success rate that fills me with confidence.

Of course, this is only a meaningful problem because disallowing Dragon Magazine content isn't an option.

The paradigm that WOTC R&D operates on is that the DM is completely in control of the game.  If you asked a designer how a DM was supposed to deal with a game in which every PC in the party had two of these dice, they'd look at you as if you were speaking gibberish, as the idea that PCs could have items (or gain feats or use powers) that a DM didn't want them to have would be an alien concept.

That's not the case in LFR, and as a consequence, Dragon Magazine is a ticking time bomb just waiting for the right article to blow up and create havoc in the campaign.

Nov 11, 2009 -- 7:40AM, Dragon9 wrote:

1) It's a daily power, you can only use it once/extended rest.  Considering most adventures don't last more than a day or offer a chance to use an extended rest, the chance to use them again likely won't come up.  If you decide to use it over and over... you'll likely be left behind by the rest of the party who go on to play the mod or fail the mod because you took too much time.

2) If you ever do get a chance to reroll them, your previous results are gone.  So you'd have to have incredible luck to get 3 really good rolls.

You can buy more than one of them - in high paragon, 9K is very easy to achieve. In most mods, you'll get the opportunity to use all of 'em, regardless of the wording. Even a stringent DM is only going to say something to the effect of that you're not allowed to use both of them at the same time. You'll get some milestones, and then things go crazy.

Also, you don't generally need really good rolls. You need to not get bad rolls. This item in many ways makes the Epic Destiny Deadly Trickster's 3 rerolls(which was considered one of the best in the game) look like a heroic tier power. Unlike Deadly Trickster, you know the rolls in advance. You can save a crit for when you need it. You can make sure you hit with that big power of yours(or know the dice won't save you if you miss)

The item is crazy broken.