D&D Rules Lawyer

D&D 4e Magic Items with Daily Powers

Who doesn’t love magic items?!!

I’m sure there are a good number who prefer a game that is light on the magic, but finding cool magic items is one of the reasons I love Dungeons and Dragons. And 4e had plenty to choose from.

I picked up Adventurer’s Vault 2 pretty early on in my D&D 4e days and enjoyed just paging through the different magic items and all the cool things you could do with them. As someone who preferred DMing from the beginning, I was always looking to see which cool items I could leave for my players as treasure.

Interestingly, it was not until years after I’d started playing D&D 4e that I realized I had been overlooking a rule that whole time.

I was usually playing games with family and we regularly had only a couple players at a time. As a result, I needed to ensure they had as many advantages as possible so that they did not get overwhelmed. Among other things, we would generally allow reuse of daily or encounter powers if the die roll failed. That is to say, I played fast and loose with the rules—still do.

And there was this section of the character sheet that looked like it had something to do with limited daily power usage so I always ignored it. It is on page two of the character sheet at the bottom of the Magic Item block.

While I never gave it any attention, it is actually a pretty interesting set of rules.

Naturally, one challenge with D&D 4e is that there are so many powers available, characters could get overpowered. This is especially true for those characters that like to collect as many magic items as possible. If they have a whole assortment of magic items with daily powers, then that could be a problem when it comes to game balance—if that sort of thing concerns you.

And this is where this part of the character sheet comes in. All these checkboxes are how you prevent a character in possession of a dozen magic items from taking over the game.

Here is how it works. This is from D&D 4e Player’s Handbook page 226.

In essence, a heroic tier character (levels 1-10) is only allowed to use a single magic item daily power per day. Once you use any magic item daily power, you check that box on the character sheet and you cannot use another Magic Item Daily Power until you complete an extended rest.

When you reach Paragon tier, you could use two Magic Item Daily Powers and at Epic Tier, you get to use three such powers.

So if your heroic tier character has a whole assortment of Magic Items with daily powers.

You can only use one such power each day. So choose wisely.

Keep in mind that this only applies to daily powers that come from magic items. You can still use all the Daily Powers from your class each day.

There are a couple more details surrounding this rule that we should talk about.

While at Paragon and Epic tiers you get to use more Magic Item Daily Powers each day, there is one critical restriction.

Even at Epic tier, once you have used the Boots of Spider Climbing Daily Power, you cannot use it again until you take an extended rest. The additional Magic Item Daily Powers that you use, must come from DIFFERENT magic items.

Note that this holds even if the magic item you are using has multiple daily powers. Once you use ANY Daily Power from a magic item, ALL daily powers for that magic item are off limits until you take an extended rest.

I tried to find an example of a Magic Item with multiple Daily Powers, but came up empty. If you know of one, please share it in the comments.

Finally, let’s talk about all those Milestone checkboxes.

The answer for this is also on page 226 of the Player’s Handbook.

You reach a milestone anytime you complete two encounters without taking an extended rest. reaching a milestone unlocks another magic item daily power. And while you still cannot reuse a daily power that was already used, this does allow you to use other daily powers on a magic item if it had more than one.

I think this is an interest rule and one that solves the problem of a player taking over the game by collecting a ton of magic items. But if you are in the same situation I was where you have a smaller party than it recommended, overlooking this rule might not be a bad idea.

Let me know your thoughts.

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