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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7849153" data-attributes="member: 4937">It's always been a thing and I'm Ok with high level characters resolving issues in that fashion, but it used to drop you in a random place within a couple days travel of where you wanted to go and not right at the edge of the dungeon map. Losing the travel is an issue in scenario design, because previously when travelling in the wilderness was no longer a challenge, you could ramp up to travel in Pandemonium, Limbo, the Abyss, etc. But losing travel is not nearly as big of an issue as the loss of the investigation pillar here, since the strict wording of the 5e spell allows you to planeshift to location you can't clearly conceive. All you have to do is name it, and you'll at least get close enough to see it.The more I look around 5e the more obviously incoherent that is. Take for example the changes to the 'Find the Path' spell. Previously you could name an unknown location and use 'Find the Path' to locate it. But in 5e they took that option out completely. One of the material components of the spell is you now have to have something from the location you are trying to find - compare Teleport and Teleportation Circle with the same (new) basic design. So once again, everywhere else in the edition we see safeguards trying to prevent PC's from easily bypassing GM created scenarios and which force the PC's to investigate and explore. And yet here Planeshift bypasses all the safeguards on the other spells. And critically, it does so very shortly after or concurrently with the arrival of instantaneous travel and travel to other planes as ideas, so it's not like this is the higher level version that shortcuts scenarios that by this point in the game will have become stale. It would be one thing to suggest after a certain level wilderness exploration ought to be something that is skipped - that would be predictable and expected. This skips pillars of gameplay exactly when it first introduces the planes as player accessible things.And if that isn't enough, it seems to be more powerful in many ways than it's higher level version Gate. Gate explicitly calls out failure conditions. Gate requires precise knowledge of the intended destination. This has neither and only the limitation that your arrival is near to but not exactly at where you intend to go.</blockquote>

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