Teleport Circle - Destroyer of Worlds

[BenBrown]

Actually, the requirements are trivial for a wizard of that level. The xp cost is tiny and you can recoup the fairly measly gp cost by renting the teleporter to a merchant house that needs to transport goods to that location anyway.

The wizard can recoup his losses in gp and make a fortune in the long term with tolls for the telporter's use and it is cheaper and safer for the merchant to pay the toll and send his goods this way rather than risk overland or oversea trave. You just set up at least one more of these to return and you are in business.

Tzarevitch

This assumes a rather mercenary wizard. Wizards who get to that high level (at least NPCs) tend to be odd ducks and rather guarded about their power. Can't answer for PCs, but that kind of thinking is definitely modern.

Okay, so D&D doesn't even come close to actual medieval economics, but at 17th level, the wizard is probably going to be thinking about carving out a kingdom for himself, not treating with mere merchants. Plus, all it takes is one disaster before the whole damned teleport network is shunned and there are cries to tear it down.

 

[Humanophile]

Uhm... I can't see a 17th level wizard tossing away 4500 XP for money. I can hardly imagine one willing to do that multiple times. Very unlikely.

That said... if I owned a travel company and someone came to me with this idea I would ROTFLMAO and then tell them to go to all my concurrents and try to sell it to them.
That way, I can pay a 5th level wizard to go to their circle by night and cast a dozen Dispel Magic.It takes an 18 on the roll for the 5th level wizard to take down the Teleportation Circle... 15% chance. Tell him to go there invisible every night until he gets it right. Buy scrolls, or a higher-level wizard if you are impatient.

It cannot work. 90% of the magical civil engineering tricks cannot work. First of all, Dispel Magic tears them down easily, and you can even cast it while invisible. Secondly, many of them require XP, and XP don't grow on trees (unless you like shooting elves, that is).

So... if you have a player who is attempting to get rich this way, have him make his teleport circle spending 28000+ GP, run it for two days - the time for the other merchants to agree on what to do - and then dispel it.

You picture everyone as far too mercenary, when there are much better ways to discourage this kind of thinking. And that's ignoring the fact that anyone willing to pay this kind of money would be a fool not to have capable guards. But things in D&D invariably get capatalistic and quasimodern when players get involved. (I do have to wonder if that's a primary product of how we think, though. Can anyone who plays who was raised in a nonwestern culture comment here?) What I'd worry about far more with teleport circles (even under the assumption that one can find 17+ level casters fairly easily, and that they'll be happy to cast their spells for the agreed upon PHB price) is that you're either giving anyone who gets to it an invitation to your back yard (if you put it somewhere close to your base of operations), or you're letting them know where you'll regularly pop out of (if it's some distance from there). With the additional risk of spells made to divert your teleport/interefere en route, I could see them only used for fairly important but cheap commodities, like food to a mining/logging town.

Of course, you did just give me a cool idea for a campaign setting/history (The magitopia many players claim would be so easy to create, and it's fall at the hands of revolutionaries/hypocritical luddites), but that's a tangent.

 

[clockworkjoe]

Why Teleport Circles are NOT Destroyers of Worlds:

1. Logistics make it unlikely for it to be widely used (i.e. reasons mentioned above)

2. Yes, Teleport circles are a far superior choice to conventional travel methods. But, only if you want to go to point A to point B.

Can't hit a bunch of places on the way like trade caravans do. Can't change your destination either. Once you commit to a teleport circle from A to B, that's it. If point B becomes a lousy trade partner (by say, realizing that you spent too much making the teleport circle and can't back out of the deal and so decides to 'renegotiate') you're screwed. Also, if your partner wants to ambush you, you can't do a whole to stop him. You can only send a circle's worth of guys to attack while he can souround you.

3. They are easy to destroy, unlike say a ship or caravan.

4. Should a merchant company or government exploit a teleport circle for all its worth, I say let them. Enemies should find it relatively easy to dispel a single spell as opposed to destroying ships and caravans. While all forms of travel can be disrupted or stopped, Circles are more vulnerable than a caravan or ship, as attacking them requires a massive military effort, not just a single spell to dispel. Besides, investing in teleport circles would require a MASSIVE amount of resources.

5. Finally, I think teleport magic should be allowed as a normal travel choice for large orginizations. They are superior but limited and fragile choices. A group using them will gain a huge advantage at the cost of possibly losing all travel/logisitics. Any company or army that uses them will probably grow to depend on them with no thought of a backup plan. And thus should the circles fall, the army or company falls with them.

thems my thoughts on the matter

 

[Henry@home]

OK -- A 17th level wizard needs 17,000 xp to advance to 18th level. If he needs to spend 4,500 xp to creat that permanent teleport circle, he has just spent 25% of the XP needed to reach the next level. How many times is that wizard GOING TO SURVIVE getting that much experience??? You are asking a wizard, for money, to risk his life for 25% more time to gain the experience necessary to get back to square one.

For 4500 xp, that wizard could make a staff of frost, or a headband of intellect +6, or be halfway to making a staff of power. And he's going to spend that on (let's say) 100,000 gp given to him to permanence a teleport circle???

I just don't see it.

P.S. Excuse me - I meant a staff of frost AND a headband of intellect +6

 

[Oni]

Just a couple of things that I would like to point out. First of all 4500 is more than 1/4 of the xp that is required to go from 17th to 18th level. When you look at it that way you cannot tell me it is not a lot of xp, especially if your going to set up one on both ends. Also in dnd the way one gains xp is combat, so if he wants to keep making these things he's going to have to risk his neck a lot, that +5 ring of protection's looking better than ever isn't it. Ask some people that play wizards if they would do that, I bet most will say that the cost is too great. Then there is the issue of just how many 17th level mages are running around in your campaign world, and then how many of them are willing to pay the above cost to involve themselves in the mundane process of money earning when they could be pursuing more arcane pursuits. Finally if the people started becoming dependent on these teleportation circles then they would be in for a lot of trouble, it is infinately easier to destroy them than make them, one well placed dispel magic could totally destroy trade in an area that has come to depend on one of these circles.

 

[MythandLore]

Uhm... I can't see a 17th level wizard tossing away 4500 XP for money. I can hardly imagine one willing to do that multiple times. Very unlikely.

A Holy Avernger takes 4,800xp +60,315gp to make.

A Wish spell cost the caster 5,000xp.

4500xp at higher levels is a lot yes, but, I could see alot of casters willing to do it for the right price.

 

[Lord Pendragon]

I don't have so much of a problem with PCs using Teleport Circle, but in a world where you can build a chain of Teleporters, what happens to all the stock situations that we put our PCs through? The caravan that needs to be guarded, the pirates plundering ships laden with riches from distant continents, assassins who attack the King while he's en route to a peace summit, all the stuff that makes for good adventures? I guess some things wouldn't be worth it to set up Teleporters for... I can always have my PCs gaurd caravans of goats or ships laden with shrimp or something... it's just not the same.

If this is the case, I'd just cut the spell from my game. I wouldn't cut the possibility of the spell from my world, just the spell itself. This means that when a PC wizard in the campaign reaches 17th-level, he can opt to take Teleport Circle as one of his spells. (After all, these represent independent research on the part of the wizard.) Should he do so, he'll be the very first wizard in the world with access to that spell.

You remove the spell from the NPCs, but still allow access to the PCs.

 

[EOL]

Someone talked about rather than shipping your precious Mithral through Orc-infested territory why not build a teleport circle at the mining site... Well if the area is orc infested to begin with what happens when they take one end of the teleport tunnel and use it to start ferrying troops into the middle of the prosperous city, bypassing the walls. Sure you may argue the mage could easily get rid of the one end, but what mage would so casually toss away 4500 xp and what happens until the wizard figures out that an army of orcs is pouring into the city, and what happens with the city rulers find out that you've built a backdoor through their walls...

Okay so all of this does not address the point directly, but it points out that sometimes the problems that teleport come with are almost as inconvient as the solution it provides, but IMHO if 4500 xp is not enough to limit the number of teleport circles raise it to 10000 xp, personally I balk at 4500 xp, but at some point you have to hit the point where the cost justifys the utility.

 

[Oni]

On the other hand if it really bothers you that much and all the arguments you have been presented with fail to convince you, then you could just remove teleportation circle from the list of spells that permanency works with. You get to keep both spells with only the most minor of tweaks.

 

[Mishihari Lord]

Something that's being missed here is that they are permenant. How many wizards have there been in the history of your world who have been able and willing to cast the spell? There could easily be hundreds of the things out there.