Questions about Teleporting and fire damage

[lectric]

I'm looking at the WotBS 4e Campaign Guide section about fire damage during teleporting and planar shifts (p. 20). Unless I'm missing something, it never specifies damage for short-range teleporting. I see specific damage for everything else.

Two questions to clear up my confusion:

1. What is the damage for teleporting under 100 feet? Is it tiered (like damage per square) or fixed? Is this listed somewhere, or missing from the Campaign Guide?
2. Why in the world would damage be different depending on whether the teleporter (or planar shifter) is in or out of combat?

Thanks!

 

[nanmaniac]

In combat descriptions, you can say that it's 1 point of damage per square moved.

 

[merchantsteve]

Answer to #1

In the Player's Guide - Page 15:
All powers with the Teleportation keyword deal 1 point of fire damage to the creature teleported for each square teleported, and the creature arrives ablaze. Arcane scholars suggest various methods for avoiding this damage, including transforming into a creature immune to fire or using a spell to grant fire resistance.
After you teleport, and until the start of your next turn, your melee weapon gains a +5 fire damage bonus.

In combat, we wanted to make the teleport effect have both a damage effect a bonus effect to offset the penalty. Teleportation is common in 4e encounters, so this balances out things and adds new tactical options for anyone teleporting. A +5 fire damage bonus is applicable even if you teleport just 1 square. I think that is a reasonable tradeoff for a 1 hit point loss.

Answer to #2

At larger distances, micromanaging the 1 hit point per square becomes unmanagable. We went with an overall base damage to simplify things. It becomes very costly in lives to teleport an army a long distance, and Leska is not happy about that. She really wants to hop around the world and destroy the infrastructure (similar to Viet Nam's Tet Offensive).

 

[Morrus]

Yeah, it's basically 1 point per square as outlined in the Player's Guide.

Out of combat, we didn't figure people wanted to work out how many squares 1248 miles was, so you have that table instead. But if you prefer to keep it in squares and work out the exact figure it won't break anything.

 

[lectric]

Thanks for the replies, guys, and for clarifying the rule.

Suggestion for future editions: It would be great to repeat that little sentence in the Campaign Guide, just to make things super clear. ("All powers with the Teleportation keyword deal 1 point of fire damage to the creature teleported for each square teleported, and the creature arrives ablaze.")