D&D 4E Rich Baker: Teleport Rituals, Gates, & Teleport at will in 4E!

[the Jester]

Word of recall would be great in a teleportation-limited world because once you use it, you have to go "on foot" all the way back, so it's not something you'd do lightly. When teleportation is easy, word of recall is less relevant, IMO.

Absolutely. I think (hope) word of recall will stay in.

 

[Lord Zardoz]

I'm glad the 4e designers are going in this direction with teleportation. Games that use similar houserules in 3.5 don't seem to suffer from the same scry-n-fry tactics at high levels that 3.5 RAW can encourage. Good job WotC! You made rituals cool and also suddenly made quests for planar gates and such relevant again.

For myself, I didn't need a new edition to make this change, but it's nice to know that 4e will handle teleportation in a manner more consistent with my own vision. And much more importantly than my own little world, a lack of omnipotent teleportation will make adventure designers' jobs much easier in some ways (not having to account for scry-n-fry can create much more interesting dungeon ecologies and set battles).

Lets try two possible modifications on a thought exercise. In one, Teleport is say, a 3 hour ritual, but otherwise identical to the 3rd edition spell.

Having Teleport as a ritual that takes a few hours does not quite erase scry and fry, especially if the spell is identical to 3rd edition aside form the casting time. What it may do is make the tactic a bit harder to pull off at the most optimal time. Unless your villain is backed up something fierce, i do not think a 3 hour ritual to teleport will catch him on his porcelan throne having a grunt. But it could catch him when he is in bed for the night.

What would likely happen if this is the case is your villain still gets slaughtered most of the time. However, escape after the deed is much more dangerous. If you scry and fry the king, you get to deal with the newly promoted prince and whatever other soldiers are on hand to exact revenge. Not optimal, but better than the original scry and fry.

The other scenario has Teleport act as a 3 hour ritual that creates a noise like a jet plane landing on the far end for about, say 10 minutes before the players appear, and renders the people teleported for a further 10 minutes. In this case, by the time the would be "scry and fry" warriors show up, the villain will have had ample time to ready his defenses and summon his minions. The players will be the ones that get fried instead of the villain.

The tactic is now useless in its original form. But it is still viable for appearing somewhere near the villains fortress. You still get to cut down on the travel time to get to the bad guy, and skip all sorts of nastiness in the Evil Wasteland of Player Doom, but you still have to deal with the villains defenses.

I am very curious to see exactly how Teleport has been modified.

END COMMUNICATION

 

[kigmatzomat]

In Earthdawn there was a portal spell that I used as a ritual. Normally, it would be something that could be cast in a round or two but it was a higher level spell so I had to use a grimoire to cast it, usually taking about 5 minutes to get everything to work.

It had a useful, if limited duration, and our few sneak attacks using it had to be something we could accomplish while I kept the door open. Of course, in ED, holding a portal open often meant something horrible might notice the doorway and hitch hike. It was a great strategic asset, but it's tactical uses were more limited.

I'm pretty sure if teleport had a cost similar to teleport circle, my party would use it far less often. In my homebrew, which seems very much like proto-4e (rather that 4e looks like my homebrew) I do similar things with raise dead and other "miraculous" magics.

 

[Dausuul]

While there are many things I don't like about D&D magic, easy teleportation is my single top complaint, so I'm glad to see they're limiting it. My only worry is that they seem to be using material component costs as the main limiting factor. In 3E, at least, the scaling of wealth by level meant that material components could not be relied upon to act as a "brake" on problem spells; a component that was prohibitively expensive at 10th level was manageable at 15th and trivial at 20th.

I hope they take this into account... perhaps long-range teleportation will only show up at the mid-to-high epic levels (I note the reference to demon princes and archdevils being the ones to use teleport rituals), in which case WBL inflation would not have time to trivialize the material components. Or perhaps WBL will not scale as rapidly in 4E.

My preference would be to ban long-range teleportation altogether. I may house-rule that depending on what I think of the end result, although I'm trying to minimize my use of house rules in my first 4E campaign. We shall see.