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

[Hussar]

Again this has to be harped upon. Fey step is a shorter distance than a character can move in a single round.

Assassins get a very short head start running away, but Very short. Eladrin assassin kills target with surprise then wins initiative. Teleports out of the scrum, then moves. Guards move then charge and kill assassin.

Seems like a bad plan to me.

Twenty five feet is all you get. Stand up. Take eight or nine steps. That's how far you teleport.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

If we're following the rules, I think we need to ... follow the rules. Fey Step seems risk-free when teleporting to something you can see. You cannot teleport to something you can't see (either due to blindness, or because there's a barrier between you and it). Otherwise the way PCs use the ability is completely different from other the ability works in the fiction.



I'd like the fiction to be close to how players play. In most games, you can count out precisely (or just guess really well) how far you can teleport, and take no time guessing. (Unless that's why it takes a move action and not a minor action. Maybe most of that time is just taken up doing calculations.)



I'm not too sure about this. Fey Step does nothing for Stealth by itself. If you Fey Step more than 2 squares, you're still taking a penalty to Stealth. So I think if you're about to teleport next to a creature they get some warning. (That explains why you don't get combat advantage out of using Fey Step. The teleport isn't really surprising. Teleporting out of a bush to gank someone is just as stealthy as rushing out of the bush to gank them.)



I think all of these are valid, and things that could come up in a game within the rules. Not 100% sure about the partially mirrored window, but all the other ones.



Pickpockets get an advantage, but I don't think they get much of one. Fey Step isn't stealthy, so they're not likely to teleport next to their victim and then run away. Rather, they might steal and then (non-stealthily) vanish. Of course, they can only teleport a distance they could have run faster than, and it's not stealthy. The eladrin thief would need to plan carefully. You can be easily robbed around a low wall (since an eladrin could grab your belongings and then teleport over the wall, while the victim needs to climb said wall, which is going to be pretty slow). That's not terribly different from wanting to avoid bushes along roadsides due to fear of banditry, you just have one more thing to fear.

Suicide bombers would have a field day, but long-lived eladrin aren't very likely to do that. Also, no need. Slip beside the victim in a thick crowd. Drop the bomb. Bamf! You aren't moving fast, but you can easily teleport past the crowd (or part of the crowd). Instead of a really explosive bomb, though, I think an eladrin would use a powerful single-target attack, such as attaching a nasty venomous monster to the victim instead. (Also, does D&D have bombs?)

An eladrin assassin would be pretty terrifying. They can only do it once, but they could stab you with a poisoned weapon and then teleport away. Again, the ability is not insurmountable, since it's not stealthy and it's not fast. It is pretty damn good when there's difficult terrain, hedges, low walls, crowds, or anything else that might stop the bodyguards from taking revenge.

Eladrin archers... ow. Every archer might pick another safe position to teleport too, so when enemies get in their faces they can teleport away. Admittedly human archers would try to do the same thing (depending on training, circumstances, etc) but eladrin can reliably pull this off once each (between short rests). Eladrin archers are elusive. A minor advantage on a flat featureless plain (your opponent can charge as fast or faster than you can teleport), a bigger advantage in difficult terrain, and an even bigger advantage if you can teleport to a room with a small window across the street.



It's a half barrier. You can teleport one way and get trapped. That happened in a game of mine, twice. (I was a player.) We had a very unwise eladrin wizard. One time he teleported across a stream to use Burning Hands on some orcs hiding in bushes, and then (predictably) screamed for help as orcs came from behind other bushes and tried to kill him. Worse, he was on that side of the stream by himself and out of my PC cleric's healing range. *Sigh* In another battle, he teleported into a prison call and burned up some bad guys there, but couldn't get out until he took a short rest.

Presuming an army of eladrin, yes a lot of natural barriers can be bypassed, but you can stop them by using two layers of barriers, or laying some sort of trap, so their inability to get back across the barrier really hurts them. I guess I'm saying that Fey Step is an advantage, and a potent one, but pretty soon everyone else learns about the benefits and weaknesses.

I think in general what you have to say is "the rules are just guidelines". Nobody faults AD&D for its many weird rules interactions because no AD&D DM would let a rule be misapplied to the narrative, and any gaps aren't commented on as they are just considered "things for the DM to deal with". 4e is no different.

A partially silvered mirror is just a question for the DM. Likewise its a question for the DM just how much advantage in terms of stealthy sneaking around Fey Step is to an eladrin thief (here I would note that the 4e stealth rules are quite open-ended and rely a lot on DM judgement OUTSIDE OF COMBAT). I'd be perfectly willing to let such a thief teleport BEHIND his victim and get a stealth check even though in combat he'd be in the open, and then try to sneak away without even being noticed. I agree, a human rogue could try the same sort of trick without teleporting, but he might not get the same opportunities since he'd have to make sure to work his way around out of the target's line of sight first, and the eladrin could bamf from any direction (albeit from close by).

There are definitely advantages to being able to teleport, and some interesting social conventions that might arise, but I just don't see it as all that big a deal. If we can swallow that flying, healing, raising, curing, and all sorts of augury and divination have left society recognizably similar to historical equivalents then its not really a big pill to swallow to say that 25' range LOS teleportation once every 5 minutes won't shatter it either. Frankly very few of us are imaginative enough and have enough energy to dream up a completely alien society anyway. If its that huge an issue then just banish eladrin from the game, make them some sort of distant NPC race, non-existent, too rare to build cities, etc. Heck, you can still have one be a PC, the character is just unique. Maybe he's Corum, the very last of an ancient and decadent race! Or just take away Fey Step and give them some other thing instead if you really really want to, though honestly bamf! is kind of a unique shtick...

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

If we can swallow that flying, healing, raising, curing, and all sorts of augury and divination have left society recognizably similar to historical equivalents then its not really a big pill to swallow to say that 25' range LOS teleportation once every 5 minutes won't shatter it either.

As I've stated elsewhere (and I'm sure the person quoted in the original post would agree) prior to this thread, if you have all of those things, you probably WOULDN'T have societies- or at least the architecture & battle tactics- that resemble the types of societies typically found in fantasy campaigns.

 

[Chris_Nightwing]

Depending on how organised they were feeling.. Eladrin could position themselves every 25ft between two cities.. and ready actions to teleport.. then in a single 'round' of action, a messenger could teleport (move), drop a message bag into the hands of the next waiting Eladrin (free), who teleports and repeats, and the message bag is in the next city within a single round. Fun!

Or if you want to think about physics, then you could have a 25' water wheel, and enough Eladrin to teleport up into a ferris-wheel-like carriage, use their potential energy (plus that of their maximum weight allowance) to pull it downwards, and then jump out at the bottom and rejoin the queue. I'd probably have to rule something about how much more exhausting it is to carry stuff/bamf up rather than across.

I also think Eladrin would be better suited to living on coasts. Fishing would be trivial, simply construct a spherical net and teleport into a school of fish, then swim out. Diving would be easy - you would have the extra 25ft depth you could just teleport back up through without worrying about the time taken to swim back up. You could construct your dwellings well above ground level on sturdy piles so that floods just go underneath.

The pike square example was funny, because obviously any sensible Eladrin would carry a tower shield as a surf board, they stand on it to crush/knockdown those beneath their bamf point.

I think it's fun to think about these things. The same is true for all D&D magic. I'm a big fan of limiting magical resources though, else it can be easy to get carried away.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Depending on how organised they were feeling.. Eladrin could position themselves every 25ft between two cities.. and ready actions to teleport.. then in a single 'round' of action, a messenger could teleport (move), drop a message bag into the hands of the next waiting Eladrin (free), who teleports and repeats, and the message bag is in the next city within a single round. Fun!

Or if you want to think about physics, then you could have a 25' water wheel, and enough Eladrin to teleport up into a ferris-wheel-like carriage, use their potential energy (plus that of their maximum weight allowance) to pull it downwards, and then jump out at the bottom and rejoin the queue. I'd probably have to rule something about how much more exhausting it is to carry stuff/bamf up rather than across.

I also think Eladrin would be better suited to living on coasts. Fishing would be trivial, simply construct a spherical net and teleport into a school of fish, then swim out. Diving would be easy - you would have the extra 25ft depth you could just teleport back up through without worrying about the time taken to swim back up. You could construct your dwellings well above ground level on sturdy piles so that floods just go underneath.

The pike square example was funny, because obviously any sensible Eladrin would carry a tower shield as a surf board, they stand on it to crush/knockdown those beneath their bamf point.

I think it's fun to think about these things. The same is true for all D&D magic. I'm a big fan of limiting magical resources though, else it can be easy to get carried away.

It is amusing to think about. As a DM of course you'd never allow any of the various 'supersonic' action hacks that 4e allows, but certainly some of the other things would be interesting, like the houses on 20' stilts.

I always liked a fairly low magic world where the PCs are pretty unusual by having a bunch of magical powers. Most NPCs are awed by that, though you will of course run into a few here and there that are perhaps not quite as well endowed, but have some interesting powers. I'd always imagined that things like Raise Dead aren't just something that could be done on ANYONE or even done at all except in exceptional situations or for exceptional people (like adventurers). I think the phraseology in the 4e Raise Dead ritual actually hints at that "the target is not ready to pass on to the next world yet.." or some such thing. Well, chances are most people ARE ready, their fate is sealed when they die, things like that. Gods may well not grant ordinary non-adventuring priests power to cure just every hangnail or feed every starving child either. Especially in 4e where its not assumed that NPCs have classes its not necessary to assume that they have specific powers either. In fact there's nothing that unequivocally states that every Tom, Dick, and Harry eladrin can Fey Step either. Their leveled NPC soldiers and other figures can, but that doesn't mean some eladrin minion type townsperson can do that.

 

[Hussar]

Note that the message idea works in other ways too. The peasant rail gun (from the thread I linked) uses a large number of peasants and a long pole from a ladder. Each peasant readies a pass action and passes the pole from hand to hand, accelerating to super sonic speeds.

Funny.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Note that the message idea works in other ways too. The peasant rail gun (from the thread I linked) uses a large number of peasants and a long pole from a ladder. Each peasant readies a pass action and passes the pole from hand to hand, accelerating to super sonic speeds.

Funny.

Sure, but there aren't any rules for hypervelocity projectiles, or in fact any rule that says the last peasant can do anything in particular with the pole, he's just left standing there holding it in his hands until his next turn, when he can drop it. As a message transport it at least works in the sense that the rules 'allow' it and there's some concrete effect.

Note that you don't even need a physical message. One character can simply wait for another one to talk and then use a Free Action to pass the message on, giving you an UNLIMITED BANDWIDTH instantaneous 'chinese telephone' (the DM is free at this point to mutate the message as he sees fit). In this case the 'peasants' don't need to stand next to each other either, only within earshot (which is ill-defined, presumably if you stand too far apart then a Perception check is required, but the rules are actually pretty vague and a bit contradictory on exactly how to set that up). If you go with something more like the rail gun with readied actions then you could use flags visible at a long distance. So in theory a king could set up a semaphore network across his land where he could get instant warnings or other simple messages (one semaphore per combat round, a bit slow but not too bad). Its a half-duplex channel, but if you had 2 people in each semaphore station you could have full duplex.

 

[I'm A Banana]

Any second story tower is inaccessible because of lack of LOS.

25 ft. is enough to teleport to the roof of a 20-ft. tower. If you can see the little space above the corner of the roof, you can teleport there and you'd be standing on the tower.

Unless the room beyond is lit, you cannot teleport through a keyhole

A bit of moonlight slanting in through the window or roof is enough. Of course, if the room is pitch black, sure, that'd be a place you can't blink to.

which at best saves you having to pick the lock

Which is not insignificant when any toddler can do it. Lock-picking is a specialized and limited skill in world-building terms, but eladrin teleportation is not -- any of them can do it, as much as they want (as long as they wait 5 minutes between them)

Hopefully there is no one in the next room because now he's locked in by himself and can't teleport out.

'course he can. Wait five minutes, and blink back onto the street.

And yeah, if you're trying to get into a room to do something sneaky, it makes sense to wait for that room to be empty first. Derp.

And who cares about ground floor windows? If you are close enough to see in and teleport, you are close enough to climb in.

2nd floor windows are vulnerable, too. If you can make out something on your neighbor's wall through the second story window, you can be in that room.

It sounds a lot more like a poor understanding of the mechanics to me.

Since there's not One True Answer here, I don't think a lack of understanding is in play. A different understanding, perhaps, but not a greater or lesser one.

 

[Hussar]

On the Keyhole thing.

You are looking through at best a 1 cm square aperture into a room at night which has to have a window AND the shutters open/ no curtains and you need a bright night.

That's pretty corner case. But, at any rate, how many doors like this are we talking about? Exterior doors would not be locked like this. Heck, doors with Victorian style keyholes are far more anachronistic than anything. And, even then, we're only talking interior doors.

 

[I'm A Banana]

On the Keyhole thing.

You are looking through at best a 1 cm square aperture into a room at night which has to have a window AND the shutters open/ no curtains and you need a bright night.

Natural light on the ground floor is absolutely reasonable.

You could blink into this.

Or this

Or this.

Definitely not every house. And yeah, you could break the window on any of those and get the same effect. But hell, a ground floor window is basically asking to be robbed by an eladrin. Only thing stoppin' 'em is the honor system.

That's pretty corner case. But, at any rate, how many doors like this are we talking about? Exterior doors would not be locked like this. Heck, doors with Victorian style keyholes are far more anachronistic than anything. And, even then, we're only talking interior doors.

You're talkin' anachronistic in a world of teleporting elves and fire-breathing dragons, mang. It doesn't defy the fantasy genre to have keyholes or ground-floor windows. And if you have a world where folks can use a window as a means of keyless entry, you're possibly having to re-think those things. And not everyone wants to.