Smite -- since before 900 CE this word or some very similar Old or Middle English ancestor has meant, "That's going to leave a mark." In the first two editions of Dungeons & Dragons, smite was merely an interesting word used by folks laying down the smack. In my formative gaming years, a player of mine named Erol used to call his halfling paladin's reversed cure light wounds, smites. (Actually he was just a post-Unearthed Arcana fighter/cleric, but he called the character a paladin -- I was not farsighted enough just to let him play a paladin.) I think he just liked yelling "I smite the foul beast!" in that annoying high-pitched kid voice he used to play Sir Lore. (Yes, that's Erol's own name spelled backward in true high-Gygaxian fashion).

With the release of 3rd Edition, Erol's wildest dreams came true. Not only were halflings allowed to be true paladins, smite officially entered the paladin's toolbox. Sure, it was once a day. Sure, it wasn't nearly as good as you wanted it to be sometimes, but smites were promoted from verb to mechanic.

In 4th Edition, D&D smites really come into their own. Now a subset of the paladin's renewable (read, encounter-recharge) powers, smites allow a paladin to deliver a powerful blow with the character's weapon of choice, while layering on some divine effect (and I mean that in both meanings of the word) on allies or enemies. A divine defender, much of the paladin's smites are all about kicking the crap out of those they find anathema while ensuring that foes who want to hurt enemies have a harder time at it. Take, as exhibit one, safeguard smite:

Safeguard Smite
Paladin 1
Encounter • Weapon
Standard Action
Melee weapon
Target: One creature
Attack: Charisma vs. AC
Hit: 2x[W] + Cha.
Hit or Miss: An ally within 5 squares gains a bonus to AC equal to your Wisdom modifier until the end of your next turn.

This basic, entry-level smite has all the things a growing paladin needs to fulfill its role and lay down some hurt. A Charisma attack against the target's Armor Class, safeguard smite deals double her base weapon's damage plus her Charisma modifier in damage (paladins are a force of personality, after all), and grants a quick boost to an ally in trouble (including, in a pinch, the paladin herself). And there you have it. Your first smite -- simple, serviceable, and fun.

As your paladin progresses as a defender of the faith, smites, like all of your abilities, grow in power and utility. But unlike its defender cousin, the fighter, a paladin is more than just the guy who kicks butt and makes sure enemies focus (or want to focus) on him. Paladins have always been able to heal in some way and the 4th Edition variety is no different. Though this splash of leader flavor into the paladin's defender role comes in many forms, one of the more active and interesting ways that your paladin can come to the aid of a companion while fighting is our second example of a smite:

Renewing Smite
Paladin 13
Encounter • Healing, Weapon
Standard Action
Melee weapon
Target: One creature
Attack: Charisma vs. AC
Hit: 2x[W] + Cha damage and ally within 5 heals 10 + your Wisdom modifier damage.

You'll no doubt see the pattern between these two smites. They mix a fair portion of damage (scaled up by level, but not necessarily the amount of dice) while giving an ally a much needed boost of hit points at the most opportune moments. Selfish paladins (typically those who serve more self-centered gods or just the occasional egoist who venerates Pelor) can even heal themselves with the strike, as you're considered your own ally unless the effect of a power states otherwise.

Let's move on to smites that inhabit the levels over 20. Binding smite is another flavor of defender smite -- and as its high level demands, does the defender job more effectively, and thus more powerfully than the simple safeguard smite does.

Binding Smite
Paladin 27
Encounter • Weapon
Standard Action
Melee weapon
Target: One creature
Attack: Charisma vs. Will
Hit: 2x[W] + Wis damage and target cannot gain line of effect to anyone but you until the end of your next turn.

In binding smite you can see an example of how the effect of a smite goes up with level, while the numbers in their base form seem similar when not taking into account the accuracy and damage boosts that merely gaining levels (and having better weapons) affords. It just gets … well, better. Heck, it's epic, after all, so it has to be good, and you don't have to have 4th Edition books in front of you to realize line of effect denial is good. When you're fighting balor, ancient blue dragons, and sorrowsworn, it had better be good -- those critters don't fool around!

There you have it; just a small taste of what your paladin smites will look like in 4th Edition. While I have lost touch with Erol over the years, I hope that come this summer, somewhere out there, Sir Lore will return – a halfling with a high-pitched voice, yelling, "I smite thee, foul miscreant." I imagine his DM will just wince and sigh, just like I did all those years ago.

One of the most useful and popular additions to Dungeons & Dragons that appeared in 3rd Edition was the concept of feats: special bonuses, benefits, or actions that characters could acquire outside their normal class features.

Throughout the lifespan of the edition (and even between the covers of the Player’s Handbook), the potency, utility, effect, and coolness of feats have varied widely.

Some feats offer utilitarian but unexciting benefits, while others grant characters entire new options in combat. It’s hard to argue with the utility of Alertness, Improved Initiative, Weapon Focus, or even (for 1st-level wizards and sorcerers) Toughness, but that same feat slot could purchase Power Attack, Rapid Shot, Spring Attack, or Empower Spell.

When we started talking about feats for 4th Edition, we already knew that we wanted the bulk of a character’s powers—the exciting actions he performs in combat—to come from his class. Even character classes that hadn’t traditionally offered class-based power options (that is, non-spellcasters) would now acquire these special attacks, defenses, maneuvers, and so on directly from their class’s list of such abilities.

Once that decision was made, a lot of the most exciting feats suddenly looked more like class-based powers. Spring Attack, for example, now looked an awful lot like a power for the rogue or melee-based ranger, rather than a feat that just anybody could pick up. Manyshot, Whirlwind Attack, Two-Weapon Fighting, Shot on the Run—these were specialized powers appropriate for particular character archetypes.

So what design space did that leave for feats? After some discussion, we came to see feats as the “fine-tuning” that your character performed after defining his role (via your choice of class) and his build (via your power selections). Feats would let characters further specialize in their roles and builds, as well as to differentiate themselves from other characters with similar power selections.

They would accomplish these goals with simple, basic functionality, rather than complicated conditional benefits or entirely new powers that you’d have to track alongside those of your class.

Here are four examples of feats taken from the latest draft of the 4th Edition Player’s Handbook. The first two demonstrate the minor evolution of familiar favorites from 3rd Edition, while the other two show off some new tricks. As always, nothing’s final until you read it in the printed book, so take these with a grain of salt.

Toughness
Tier: Heroic
Benefit: When you take this feat, you gain additional hit points equal to your level + 3. You also gain 1 additional hit point every time you gain a level.

Alertness
Tier: Heroic
Benefit: You don’t grant enemies combat advantage in surprise rounds.
You also gain a +2 feat bonus to Perception checks.

First Reaction
Tier: Paragon
Benefit: If you are surprised, you may spend an action point to act during the surprise round.

Golden Wyvern Adept
Tier: Paragon
Benefit: You can omit a number of squares from the effects of any of your area or close wizard powers. This number can’t exceed your Wisdom modifier.

In D&D, the words "adventure" and "quest" are virtually synonymous. They both mean a journey, fraught with danger that you undertake for a specific purpose. We sometimes joke that the game is all about killing monsters and taking their stuff, but the reality is that the game is about adventures. You go into the dungeon and kill monsters with a larger purpose in mind: to stop their raids on caravans, to rescue the townsfolk they've captured, to retrieve the lost Scepter of the Adamantine Kings for the rightful descendant of those kings.

Quests are the story glue that binds encounters together into adventures. They turn what would otherwise be a disjointed series of combats and interactions into a narrative -- a story with a beginning, a middle, and a climactic ending. They give characters a reason for doing what they do, and a feeling of accomplishment when they achieve their goals.

Quests can be major or minor, they can involve the whole group or just a single character's personal goals, and they have levels just like encounters do. Completing a quest always brings a reward in experience points (equal to an encounter of its level for a major quest, or a monster of its level for a minor quest), and it often brings monetary rewards as well (on par with its XP reward, balanced with the rest of the treasure in the adventure). They can also bring other rewards, of course -- grants of land or title, the promise of a future favor, and so on.

The idea of quest rewards is nothing new to D&D. Second Edition, in particular, promoted the idea of giving story rewards of experience points when players completed adventures. The quest rules in 4th Edition are directly descended from that idea, integrated into the economy of rewards in the game. They're a rules wrapper around the story of the game, a way to keep players mindful of the purposes behind all their adventuring.

One of the suggestions in the 4th Edition Dungeon Master's Guide is to give players a visual, tactile representation of a quest as soon as they begin it. At the start of the adventure, after the baron has briefed the characters on their mission and been bullied into paying them more than he intended, you can hand the players an index card spelling out the details of the quest -- including the agreed-upon reward. In the middle of the adventure, when the characters find a key with a ruby set in its bow, you can hand them a card, telling them that finding the matching lock is a quest.

When the players have cards or some other visual representation of their quests, it's easy for them to remember what they're supposed to be doing -- and to sort out goals that might be contradictory. That's a really interesting ramification of the quest system: It's okay to give the players quests they don't complete, quests that conflict with each other, or quests that conflict with the characters' alignments and values.

For example, the mentor of the group's paladin might ask him to find and destroy the Ruby Tome of Savrith the Undying. At the same time, a shady character is offering the rogue a sizable sum in exchange for the same tome, and the wizard's research turns up a reference to a ritual contained in the Ruby Tome that the characters will need to use in order to complete another quest. Three quests stand at odds, and it's up to the players to decide what they want to do.

There's a story that's a lot richer and more interesting than simply going into the dungeon to see what treasure is there.

A proper command of terrain wins battles -- generals from Sun Tzu to Norman Schrwarzkopf have known this to be true. There's a similar relationship between encounter design and terrain -- a canny use of terrain can transform good encounters into great ones. One of the goals of the 4th Edition Dungeon Master's Guide is to help the Dungeon Master perform just such transformations, which includes providing a bunch of evocative terrain types and advice on their placement and use. Since the book doesn't come out for a while, let's illuminate some of the basics of terrain in 4th Edition Dungeons & Dragons.

While it might seem elementary, let's first examine what we mean by terrain. Terrain is not just what litters the field in an encounter; terrain also forms the dimensions and tactile experience of the encounter itself. Knowing that, there are some things about 4th Edition D&D design that you should keep in mind when building encounters.

First and foremost, not only does the standard 4th Edition encounter tend to have more combatants than in 3rd Edition, both PCs and monsters are more maneuverable as well. This means that the 10-foot by 10-foot rooms of yore have gone the way of the dinosaur (actually that happened in 3E, but that's not relevant to this discussion). Likewise have the 20 by 20 room and even the 30 by 30 room as the sole encounter areas. In fact, the minimum amount of space you typically want to have for a standard encounter is one of those large 10-square by 8-square dungeon tiles! That's 50-feet by 40-feet for all you still counting in feet. Just hold on before you start chucking all those 2-by-2 square dungeon tiles in the garbage -- you'll still need them!

Any DM worth her salt knows that dynamic and interactive stories are more satisfying than railroading narratives. The same is true for battle areas. Larger spaces with interesting terrain that both the PCs and their enemies can take advantage of -- or be foiled by -- is infinitely more fun than a small and relatively empty room that constrains combatant choice to a small set of dreary moves.

But here's the rub -- large areas of interconnecting chambers, complete with alcoves, galleries, and antechambers, are far more exciting than just plopping down a 10 by 8 tile and sprinkling it with rubble. Creating a network of interconnected areas creates numerous avenues of conflict and creates the possibilities for a series of evolving fronts that metamorphoses same-old encounters into tactical puzzles that'll sing like legend to a gaming group. See, you're going to need all those smaller pieces!

Then, once you have the main layout done, populate it with furniture, shrines, rubble, pillars, or maybe even the occasional lightning column or patch of doomspore where needed (and where appropriate), and you've got yourself a pretty vibrant encounter area for your combatants to interact with.

Oh, here's a bit of sound advice that'll keep you out of trouble. Be careful with pits and other steep inclines, and leave 100-foot (or endless) chasms for paragon- or epic-level play. Some of that increased maneuverability of the combatants in 4th Edition comes from attacks that can move foes against their will -- which is all fun and games until someone loses a character!

That aside, D&D is more than just a tactical skirmish game; it's also a game of storytelling and heroic adventure. When designing adventures, you're doing more than just placing interesting terrain pieces for the battle that (let's admit it) will most likely occur; you are also setting the stage of your story. A canny eye toward terrain set up can also help you communicate story elements to your players quickly and without the need to say a single word. Just put down some sarcophagi, and the players will know it's a crypt. Put down an altar, and you've just communicated that it's a temple. Put down piles and piles of bones in front of a yawning cavern, and the players will know their characters are likely in a world of trouble … or you've seen Monty Python and the Holy Grail one too many times.

Grab a d20. Roll high.

That’s the basic rule of 4th Edition just as it was in 3rd Edition, but the new edition puts that mechanic more solidly in the core of the game than ever.

Ever faced one of those life-or-death saving throws? Hours, weeks, or even years of play can hang in the balance. It all comes down to that one roll. There’s drama in that moment, but it’s drama you didn’t create, and you don’t want.

That’s gone in the new edition.

Have you played a spellcaster and been a little envious of the excitement of other players when they roll critical hits? Have you wished that you could do that for your spells?

You can in 4th.

Have you ever had some confusion or miscalculation about your normal AC versus your touch and flat-footed AC?

You won’t have to worry about it.

If you want to know whether or not you succeed in doing some action in 4th Edition, you grab a d20 and try to roll high. Just as in 3rd Edition, you add a modifier to that roll from your character sheet, and you check for any extra bonuses or penalties from the situation or from your allies. The key difference in the new edition is what you roll for and what you add.

The standard defenses remain (AC, Fortitude, Reflex, and Will) but now they all work more like AC. When a dragon breathes fire on you, it attacks your Reflex and deals half damage if it misses. The DM rolls a d20, adds the dragon’s modifiers, and asks you what your Reflex score is. The dragon might roll a 1 and automatically miss no matter how much tougher it is than you, but there’s also the frightening possibility that it will roll a 20 and deal double damage.

Folks familiar with the new Star Wars Saga system will recognize this concept, but it’s evolved a bit to better suit D&D. In 4th Edition, when a creature only needs to touch you to deliver an attack, it targets your Reflex. When you’re surprised, you grant combat advantage, but you don’t need to look at a special AC on your sheet -- the normal number works fine. When a pit suddenly opens up beneath your feet, you make a check to jump out of danger, but if a crossbow trap fires an arrow at you, it the bolt attacks your AC.

What we mean when we talk about streamlining the system is this: making design decisions that make learning and using the game less difficult, while keeping the system just as robust. And making it more fun as the result.

The family of gods for 4th Edition is a mix of old and new. You'll see familiar faces like Corellon, Moradin, and Pelor, and some new faces as well, like Zehir, Torog, and Bane.

Yes, Bane.

Before I explain what the Forgotten Realms' god of tyranny and war is doing rubbing shoulders with Pelor, let me say a bit about our thinking when we created a pantheon in the first place.

There was a time when the team working on "the world" of D&D thought we could get away with creating general rules useful to clerics regardless of which pantheon existed in the campaign, and then presenting a variety of fictional and historical pantheons for DMs to adopt or adapt as they saw fit. I believe it was Stacy Longstreet, the senior D&D art director, who pointed out that this solution would leave us in a bit of a bind.

When we wanted to put a temple in an adventure, what god would it be dedicated to? We could make Generic Evil Temples™, but that would sap a lot of the flavor out of our adventures, and rob us of specific plot hooks and story lines based on the portfolios and histories of these gods.

When we wanted to illustrate a cleric in one of our books, what holy symbol would the cleric hold? Again, we could rely on a stable of generic symbols (maybe the Zapf Dingbat font?), but at the cost of a lot of flavor.

We ended up creating a new pantheon. At first, we used some of the gods from 3rd Edition as placeholder names -- we thought we'd come up with new names for [Pelor] the sun god and [Moradin] the god of the forge. Ultimately we decided that using some familiar faces was preferable to giving our players a whole new set of names to learn. Besides, if a god looks like an elf and took out the orc-god's eye like a certain well-known elf god, why not call him Corellon?

Corellon: The elf god is a good example of a god who kept his well-earned place in the D&D pantheon. But "the elf god" shouldn't be taken to literally. Sure, he's often depicted as an elf or an eladrin, and many eladrin in particular revere him. But he's equally popular among human wizards, and even dwarves who practice the finer arts are prone to offering him prayers. One of our goals with the new pantheon was to loosen the tight associations between gods and races that has in the past led to the creation of whole pantheons full of elf, dwarf, orc, and goblin deities. Corellon is still associated with elfy things like arcane magic and the Feywild, and he still hates Lolth and the drow. But his appeal is a little broader now.

Bahamut: Here's another example of a familiar, draconic face showing up in a somewhat new light. Maybe it was the Platinum Knight prestige class in Draconomicon that did it, but something convinced me a long time ago that Bahamut was a much cooler god of paladins than Heironeous ever was. Like Corellon, Bahamut's not just for dragons any more. He's the god of justice, protection, and honor, and many paladins of all races worship him. Many metallic dragons revere him as well, thinking of him as the first of their kind. Some legends about Bahamut describe him as literally a shining platinum dragon, while others describe him as a more anthropomorphic deity, who's called the Platinum Dragon as a title of respect. Exhorting his followers to protect the weak, liberate the oppressed, and defend just order, Bahamut stands as the exemplar of the paladin's ideal.

Bane: Here's another god whose placeholder name just stuck, despite some reservations. We wanted an evil war god in the pantheon, and without Heironeous, Hextor didn't make a lot of sense. We wanted the kind of heavily militaristic god whose temples you might find among non-evil societies who have spent long years at war, as well as among hobgoblins. We wanted a god who embodied just the sort of tyrannical dictatorship that Bane stands for in the Forgotten Realms. We started calling him Bane as a placeholder. He went through a number of different, unsatisfying names. Finally, someone said we should just call him Bane. So Bane he remained.

Like chocolate and peanut butter, we think Bane and Bahamut are two great tastes that taste great together. Does that mean you have to use them in your 4th Edition game? Of course not. But we think that, when you see these gods in action in our core books and adventures, you'll agree that they belong in their new places of honor in the pantheon of the D&D game.

Shambling, mindless corpses are getting all gussied up for 4E Although it might be hard to believe that something as simple as an animated carcass needed an overhaul, with ample influences in movies and video games, the designers knew the zombie was an ideal guinea pig for applying the new monster philosophy. So they set about keeping the zombie simple to run, but they gave it a clear role and made it feel more like the zombies from the big screen.

Every 3rd Edition D&D player thinks of a zombie, at best, as a tough bag of hit points that can take a beating. At worst, the zombie is seen as a really slow fighter or grist for the turn undead mill. Unfortunately, a Large or smaller 3E zombie really required a weapon to be scary on the damage-dealing side, and they were a lot easier to take out than any movie zombie.

Rethinking the zombie required harkening to the zombie in popular culture while maintaining the D&D elements that make undead cool. Zombies move slowly, dragging their lifeless feet, and it takes a heck of a blow to kill one, so tough is right. But zombies don’t pick up weapons, even convenient ones. They tear you apart with their bare dead hands. They overwhelm you with numbers, drag you down, and eat you.

The new zombie is a brute with just enough reasoning power to know who to kill. It’s easy to hit—zombies don’t dodge—but it’s rotten body just soaks up blows that would kill a living creature. You had better be hitting the zombie hard every time, or it’ll just keep coming. If you manage to hit it really hard, say with a critical hit or a power that deals hefty damage, you might just take the creep out in one fell swing.

That’s right. I did say, “critical hit.” The zombie is vulnerable to that now, which is sweeter than a head shot in any zombie flick.

If you’re a player, take a moment right now to thank the merciful designers that turn undead is still in the game. That power doesn’t send the zombies running off to gods knows where, but if it doesn’t turn them to putrid dust, it does hold them at bay. Believe me—you don’t want zombies close to you. Even though they won’t come wielding greataxes, zombies can take your head off with their vicious slams. The bigger the zombie, the uglier the thump. And when zombies swarm you, some of them are going to grab you, maybe even pulling you to the ground. That’s not the place to be when the dead come knocking.

As a DM, you don’t have to worry about creating the gnoll zombie or the orc zombie. The one set of Medium zombie statistics should do you fine. The players won’t know the difference, except by virtue of your descriptive talents. They should be most worried about the pummeling their characters are taking anyway.

At appropriate levels, a fight against zombies should look more like a horror movie scene. Protagonists have to maneuver to keep away from the possibility of devastating damage while trying to cut their way through a relentless wall of dead flesh. The players get a thrill when a zombie goes down to massive damage, and the DM gets the satisfaction of using a monster that lives up to popular expectations.

It’s a whole new game, even from the very bottom of the undead barrel. Now if we only had a few zombies that added some spice to the basic shambling corpse recipe. Perhaps I’ll go dig a few up for our next look at zombies....

The simplest monsters are cooler in the new edition of the D&D game, and zombies are no exception. But even though they're soulless animated corpses, zombies don't have to be dead simple. The 4th Edition designers threw the new zombie a bone, coming up with a few ways that everyone's favorite corpse creatures can function in the game to give more chills and kills.

To this end, in the Monster Manual, three exotic zombies appear. The first is the chillborn zombie, the coldness of the grave given just enough volition to be bent on murder. The corruption zombie is a paragon of rot with a great throwing arm. The final new zombie is the gravehound zombie.

That list might spark some preconceived notions about what these undead do. All three possess the implacable resilience of regular zombies, but each comes with an added spin. You might expect easy clichйs and predictable performances, but the ideas behind these new breeds of zombie aren't dead on arrival.

A chillborn is cold, but it's not merely an icy zombie. Whatever accursed rites or foul maledictions gave a semblance of life to the chillborn made it even tougher than normal, its body and mind hardened by the freezing hand of death. Life-sapping cold streams from the creature, and the more chillborn zombies in a group, the deeper the freeze. As might be expected, the remorseless fists of the chillborn deal some cold damage, but when a chillborn strikes you, you just might freeze in place, still able to fight back but unable to flee the biting aura the zombie exudes. All chillborn deal more damage to immobilized victims, and your inability to maneuver certainly benefits anyone relying on the chillborn to provide a defensive front line.

One creature that requires such a line of defenders, although probably provided by allies other than the chillborn, is the corruption zombie. This creature is so tainted that its body constantly exudes putrid flesh. It tears off chunks of its own rotting body to hurl at its foes, but leaving itself unharmed due to the supernatural nature of its tissues. If one of its thrown motes of corruption strikes you, however, you're in trouble -- not only does the gobbet hurt, but the unclean flesh also weakens you. Your instincts might dictate charging the zombie to stop its ranged attacks. But the stink of death is so strong near the creature, so sickening, that it can overwhelm the fortitude of the hardiest warrior, slowing his movement and enfeebling his attacks. Even so, if you can stand the smell, pressing the corruption zombie into melee might be an effective way to put an end to the creature.

This isn't true of a gravehound zombie. So named because it's usually created from the corpse of a sizeable dog, a gravehound zombie is a melee monster like many other zombies. It's much faster than normal zombies, and its bite makes up in damage what it lacks in accuracy. The real problem with gravehounds is that their bite causes continuing decomposition around the wound. That trouble can persist even after the gravehound is destroyed. When the gravehound goes down, it lashes out one final time. If it hits you, its jaws lock. Until you can use brute force to open the death grip, you have to drag the hound around and deal with the decay its teeth cause. Being hindered like that during a battle can be more than just a minor nuisance.

When you're playing D&D, you want exciting entertainment. Defeating these exotic zombies is all the more satisfying, the possibility of horrible death all the more threatening, given their terrifying abilities. They set a great precedent for the zombie category's future expansion, and the prospect of even more terrifying fun.

The Magic Item Compendium introduced the concept of levels for magic items. This primarily served to help DMs determine what magic items to place in a treasure hoard (or to give to his NPCs). Since we built that level system around the existing magic item prices, it was an imperfect solution (for instance, a few non-epic magic items exceeded the pricing scheme for level 1-20 items).

Fourth Edition D&D improves that useful tool by explicitly linking a magic item's level to its price. For example, all 9th-level magic items now cost the same number of gp to craft or to purchase. This makes it even easier to gauge a magic item's appropriateness for your game at a glance. Don't know if it's OK to drop a flying carpet into the hands of your 9th-level PCs? Well, the fact that the carpet's listed as an 18th-level item should clue you in that it'd have an enormous impact on your 9th-level game.

Does that mean that all magic items of the same level will be equal in power? Well, yes and no.

It's true that the designer of two different 9th-level magic items imagines that they'd have a roughly equivalent impact on gameplay. A +2 thundering mace and a +2 staff of the war mage, if designed and developed properly, should be equally useful in combat. That comparison generally isn't too hard, since the basic functions and utility of combat-based effects remain relative regardless of the weapon or implement. How much extra damage does the mace deal compared to the staff? If damage isn't involved, how useful and potent are the items' effects against foes? And so on.

However, that comparison quickly becomes more art than science when comparing magic items of different purposes. (This, by the way, is why relying on hard-and-fast pricing rules for magic items is troublesome at best, and actively bad for your game at worst.) After all, most magic items only "compete" with other items in a narrow category for a character's attention, so comparing their values can be quite tricky.

For example, if a rope of climbing and a +2 flaming longsword are both 10th-level magic items (and thus both cost the same number of gold pieces), that's not quite the same thing as saying that a rope of climbing is as powerful as that weapon. After all, it's unlikely that a character has to decide between those two items -- they serve fundamentally different purposes.

It's much more likely that a character interested in a rope of climbing will compare its price to other items that let him overcome similar obstacles (such as the 7th-level slippers of spider climbing or the 13th-level boots of levitation).

Alternatively, if he's in the market for a new weapon, he would compare the value of that +2 flaming sword with the more expensive +3 vicious sword (12th level), or the slightly cheaper +2 lightning sword (9th level).

What the designer is saying, rather, is that he imagines that the effect of both the rope of climbing and the +2 flaming sword are appropriate for characters around 10th level. A few levels before that, either item would have a much more significant impact on gameplay (possibly by making certain spells or powers of the characters obsolete). More than a few levels after that, either item will have lost a lot of its luster -- maybe because more characters have easy access to levitation, flight, or even short-range teleportation effects, in the case of the rope of climbing, or because they're all toting around +3 or better weapons, making the flaming sword seem underpowered.

Ultimately, assigning levels to magic items sends a message to players and DMs: Here's when this item is most appropriate for your game. Once that information is in your hands, of course, it's up to you to use it as best befits your game!