So, it’s not the local strength of the gravitational field, but the overall mass that matters? How does that work? I mean, if distance/ intensity doesn’t matter, than distance is irrelevant? That seems extremely counterintuitive.

I thought that since you could get into areas where the field was arbitrarily intense, that it would be able to provoke significant relativistic effects.

I had assumed that the small mass would make tidal forces more problematic than with a larger one, but if the distance/intensity of the field isn’t a factor, but only the overall mass… wouldn’t that mean that we could utilize black holes at arbitrarily long distance to provoke those effects, so it would just be a universal constant based on the mass of the universe, and there would be no relativistic effects on a relative basis?

What am I missing here?