The scrying magic absolutely SUCKS. A 24th-level ritual that takes you an hour to cast and burns 21,000gp seriously only gets you a MAXIMUM of 5 rounds' observation of the subject, AND the subject can make a standard-action opposed Wisdom check to destroy the sensor.
Let's say that again: one hour casting, five rounds' observation.
Twenty-one THOUSAND pieces of gold.
For thirty seconds' scrying.
"
You spy on a creature - whether friend, rival or enemy - through the power of your scrying magic" Bollocks you do. If I were masochistic enough to run a 4e game, and had people masochistic and retarded enough to be playing and to use this ritual, I'd probably feel obliged to do something like this:
"The swirling mists in the crystal ball suddenly become transparent to your gaze, revealing the evil king in a tiny chamber with a curtain at the front. He is sitting down with his robes hoicked up over his knees. As you watch, he picks a book up from the floor, opens it and begins to read. It's one of those trashy sagas where the hero goes to crazy town on a bunch of monsters who never did him any harm in order to get some daft princess back from the Underworld. You hear a faint grunt followed by a splattering sound and the king turns the page. The image fades just as the story gets to the good bit with the naked succubi in it. You suck."
As for the magic circle, it's not like you
can "max out" your Arcana skill, but MartinHarper's point is well made.
Assuming the dude casting the ritual is indeed 5th level and has a maxed-out Int stat, his check is going to be 2 (half level) + 5 (skill training) + 5 (ability bonus) + d20.
This means he could - by himself - block creatures of a particular type in a level range
anywhere from 3 to 22, which is... more stupid than I can stand.
If he gets the maximum four allies to assist with the check (and assuming they all succeed on the DC10 Arcana check, which they probably will), he has drawn a circle that will block out a given type of creature of anywhere from 11th level to 30th level. Even selecting "all" creature types in this situation gives him a permanent, no-save lock-out of
every creature from maybe up to 1 level higher than him to
20 levels higher than him.
Of course, he's totally gefucken if it rains
There has to be some way to utterly abuse this, because affected creatures
can't affect the boundary in any way. That's pretty all-encompassing, and puts us straight into 2nd-Edition-type adjudication craziness. It actually raises the spectre of a mid-level character creating an area that absolutely
nothing can get into or out of, short of some sort of natural phenomenon breaching the boundaries.
Well done WoTC for doing this slap-bang in the middle of the core book; I mean, creating an effect that's batshit-crazy yet *still* completely uninteresting requires a rare skill.
