[Forked from the Escapist Magazine Interview Thread] What implications does E...

[Lalato]

Oooh. This gives me a great idea for an NPC Eladrin curtain maker.

 

[WayneLigon]

Yeah, but you have to give them food and so on. Sometimes you might even want to get somebody out of the prison as well. Looking at how hard it is to run a high security prison in real life, think how hard it would do if the prisoners could teleport 30'? They might resort to a blinding ritual or something.

Actually, the only reason it's hard to run a maximum security prison is that we consider prisons places to rehabilitate people, and we're also concerned about undue cruelty. Their are several ways to make prisons inescapable if you throw both of those considerations out the window. Elves, being mostly Good, probably won't go to the more barbaric extremes, but could resort to something as a simple as a leather-and-padding blindfold that locks. I'm sure a little judicious searching will turn up, um, products that serve a similar function today.

 

[WayneLigon]

If adolescents could get 30' off the ground with no effort, and then be stuck there for five minutes, bad things would happen. And that's if we assume it holds off until adolescence.

In most pre-industrial societies that's called a 'self correcting problem'. People who misuse their powers die or are horribly injured, and serve as an example to others.

 

[Ruzak]

....and Arthropods 50 - 100 times the size of a chicken...

I'm just curious here, but why do you measure arthropods in terms of chickens?

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

I'm just curious here, but why do you measure arthropods in terms of chickens?

Because tumors are measured in terms of fruit.

 

[Ruzak]

Because tumors are measured in terms of fruit.

I didn't know that. There are multiple pregnancy apps that tell the size of the baby in terms of fruit each week. I guess it's fruit for inside the body, chickens for outside.

 

[Manbearcat]

I'm just curious here, but why do you measure arthropods in terms of chickens?

Because the largest terrestrial arthropod understood to be possible in an earth environment (atmosphere and gravity) is roughly the size of a chicken (Coconut Crab) due to the evolutionary constraints of exoskeleton, respiration, and molting.

Gigantic scorpions, spiders, umber hulks (I think they have exoskeletons), the Tarrasque, etc are miles and miles from the realm of possible given the physical constraints on terrestrial organisms in anything remotely resembling an earth-like environment. They would die of suffocation, they would be incapable of movement and would immediately collapse (I mean smooshed flat) under the weight requirements of their own exoskeleton, and the molting process would be so long and involved that their vulnerability to other predators would win them a Guiness Book Darwin Award.

Given all the other inherent absurdities in D&D, the idea that something like limited-use Feystep (especially given that we have Drow societies with at-will levitation that don't illicit the same incredulity) strains fantasy world credulity is absurd. Like I said, when I read it in the other thread it just came off as another case of edition war curve fitting against 4e.

 

[Hussar]

The usual problem with walls in war is that they are manned, and as you climb it, they drop rocks, boiling water, melted led or pitch on you and set you on fire. If you instead could just teleport up and start a fair fight the defenders advantage is reduced significantly.

You are of course right about the curtains. I bet Eladrin cities had the best curtains ever!

Kinda sorta though. For one, again, it's a maximum of 25 feet. That's a pretty low wall. Certainly not a castle wall. And, since we're still requiring LOS, the best you can do is teleport pretty precariously on the top of the crenulations. Easy pickings for defenders who just need to give you a bit of a push and splat you go. Remember, a 25 foot teleport is less than three stories. We're talking a second story window at best.

If we actually are talking about 10-15 foot walls, by the rules, anyone can climb that in one round (climb is half speed). Granted, more difficult, as the climb DC's would be tricky, but, again, anyone who brings a ladder is doing the same thing as the Eladrin, with the added bonus that he can bring that ladder up and climb down the other side as well.

Where I would really see the impact actually would be on the battlefield. Being able to move an entire unit laterally 25 feet is a huge advantage. Imagine how easy it would be to avoid a charging cavalry line. Teleport over the line and hit them from behind while they try to turn around. That would make cavalry very difficult to use against Eladrin.

As far as teleporting babies go, well, for one, small babies couldn't teleport much at all, since they cannot see far enough. But even somewhat older children would likely have enough sense of self preservation not to get killed. After all, our own children manage to survive into adulthood despite all sorts of dangers. I'm not sure that Eladrin children would be that different.

 

[Jester David]

I love looking at race abilities like that and looking at the Worldbuilding implications. Such as the eladrin (and elf) ability to trance instead of sleep. Without sleep, large beds would be unecassary, as would large rooms to contain them. There might be more simple meditation chambers, and personal room might be more rare. House might have storage closets rather than rooms.

Burglary, home invasions, and theft would inform eladrin design. I can see curtains and one-way glass being used. The rarity wouldn't matter. No one has ever tried to just walk into my house but I still have locks on the doors.
It'd be fun to describe rich eladrin homes as being mirrored on the outside to make spotting the windows harder but allowing views from the interior.
Houses might be built farther apart to prevent people just teleporting from roof to roof. (This might be a fun justification for the slender spires you often see, so someone teleporting atop just slides off.

Wagons and carriages might always be covered to avoid people just sneaking a ride.

I can can see ladders being less common, replaced with poles for sliding down.

 

[DDNFan]

.

Thieves can get into any location they can see within 30'? Any wall less than 30' high is near useless? If you take any prisoners, you basically have to poke their eyes out to stop them from teleporting?

All of these occurred to my party's eladrin blink-charging thief within two minutes of entry. No keyholes. No gates. No walls less than 40 feet high. No arrow slits at any height. And then our DM realized the whole town was designed for a non-teleporting race.

That's more or less when we quit playing entirely. This is what you get when you design your adventures in a vaccuum. So before people jump on my comment as edition warring (it is not), or out of the blue, think of it more like poor adventure design, by adventure designers who think of everything in terms of combat stat blocks and not on a holistic level.

All of these interviews with people from Kobold press and Mike Mearls and so on, bring home the fact that adventure design is more organic and free-flow, involving more than just the combat pillar of the game. When you take the blinkers off, you're forced to confront the story implausibilities of having races that value shiny objects with poorly thought out, poorly designed defenses. It was a matter of minutes that we deconstructed that entire setting as being basically a lazy hack.