D&D 5E Teleport /fly /misty step the bane of cool dungeon design is RAW in 5E

[Wiseblood]

I feel like I'm in the minority when I think things like....
There are some things that magic should not be able to do.

 

[Ovinomancer]

I feel like I'm in the minority when I think things like....
There are some things that magic should not be able to do.

That's vague enough I think you'd have a hard time finding people that didn't agree with that.

 

[Caliban]

I feel like I'm in the minority when I think things like....
There are some things that magic should not be able to do.

Nah. That's why it's called "magic". It can literally do anything. It's just a matter of determining what type of magic is required, and what is required to do that magic (i.e. what level, what class, what component, Ritual only, Magic item only, artifact only, NPC only, etc.).

But teleportation and flying? Those have been staples of fantasy in general, and D&D in particular, for decades. What's changed is how early those abilities are available and how often they are available.

When designing a dungeon, you need to consider the commonly available capabilities - even if the creators and denizens of the dungeon don't have them (such as a "Thieve's Guild dungeon").

If you as a DM don't want the PC's to have easy access to certain abilities that the games allows by default, then you need to house rule it and let the players know up front. Either change the level of the spells, or make them only available via quest instead of automatically available.

 

[MichaelSomething]

Just do what every high dugeon does and say that whatever spell you don't like doesn't work?

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[Mort]

Just do what every high dugeon does and say that whatever spell you don't like doesn't work?

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That's always an option, but it gets old, and should be used very sparingly. Plus it really gets players rolling their eyes "oh look, another teleport proof dungeon."

I think the better solution is to have situations where the high level abilities are required to overcome the challenges. Have Dungeons where fly and teleport are required to solve various problems.



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[Ancalagon]

Interestingly, while Dragon Warriors was not a low magic system (a bit lower magic than 5e, but not by a ton) per se, the designers considered certain utility spells to be far more powerful than they are considered to be in D&D. Invisibility? Level 9 spell. Short range teleport (dimention door basically)? Level 9. Long range but slow to set up astral gate (portal that teleport up to 150 km)? Level 8.

Mobility is *really good*.

 

[Hussar]

Well, I'm not sure if mobility is "really good" but, what it is, IMO, is campaign changing.

I know in our 4e Dark Sun campaign, the addition of the Phantom Steed ritual completely changed the game. We were high enough level to get phantom steeds that could either travel over any terrain or even fly, depending on the die roll. Which meant that suddenly we went from slogging through the desert and taking weeks or even months to travel from A to B, we could now do in days with pretty much zero chance of encountering anything - we were traveling so fast that we could simply outrun virtually anything that could want to eat us. It completely changed the nature of the game.

 

[Saeviomagy]

The monk had actually spent character resources to be able to do the wire-fu thing. Very cool. Very in character. Rule of cool and all that.

Jumping now qualifies for the rule of cool? Well... whatever. He spent resources on the ability to jump whenever, wherever and however he wanted. He lost nothing by making the jump.

Then the paladin says, "hold my beer" and teleports to the top of the roof, no checks, no chance of failure, no drama and about as interesting as soda crackers. I mean, do you really picture, in your head, when thinking about paladins, Portapaladins bouncing around the scene? I know in our group, we had a fighter and a paladin, and the pally almost always got into a fight before the fighter. Bonus action teleport, poof, he's in the thick of things. Gee, the fighter can burn his Action Surge for extra movement, but, he's only got that once per short rest. That 8th level paladin has what, 3?, second level spells.

First up - yes, I can picture in my mind a holy warrior disintegrating into a thousand shards of light and flashing towards his foe in a flaring blast of righteous fury. Just because you lack imagination, or are willfully not exercising it because you have some sort of grudge doesn't make it any less exciting than some guy jumping a bit.

Secondly if your group is only ever having 3 fights a day, then obviously people on a resources-per-day scheme will be worse off. That's on your DM.

2. On your second point about running out of resources, well, there's a couple of things there. Firstly, the casters get SO MANY resources. Sure, Teleport might be a bit of a bit resource wise, but, the lower level stuff? Not so much. And, secondly, it starts the whole 15 MAD cycle off with a bang. The party is all (or mostly all) casters. It's in all their interests to stop for long rests and get spells back. IME, it's not unusual for 3/4 of the party to be long rest based, which means that 3/4 of the party wants to stop at the same time.

And it's up to the DM to have a world where taking the rest of the day off because you're a little tie-tie is a drawback.

Or will they go "lol, this , I cast fly!"

First up: If they're of a level where making the entire party fly is a trivial cost, and you aren't planning for that, then guess what, you done screwed up your dungeon design!

Ok, so they fly across and somehow the resource expenditure is trivial. What now?

Well - either they're fighting a god of death on a tiny platform and are unable to get out of melee range, OR they're flying above the mist with a diminished combat capability (the fly spell requires concentration, which is a combat resource PLUS a risk, wildshaping has obvious drawbacks, riding anything to fly has risks) and no way to take cover.

To me, those both sound like bad options unless my DM's idea of a challenging encounter is a melee bruiser who deliberately attacks the most durable party member every round. In your scenario I'd just be solving the cultist's ritual so that I've got more tactical options for the upcoming encounter.

In practice, I've never seen a session go badly because the players sidestepped a challenge via flight or teleportation. Never. Not even once.

I sort of have. The game was darksun, and we were playing the adventures that followed the prism pentad. My character was a half-giant psion with high enough stats that he could reliably use a discipline called 'wormhole' (I think?). It allowed me to instantly teleport the entire party anywhere. In retrospect, I would not have done so had I known exactly how thoroughly the modules depended on the party facing complications during overland travel, or being corralled in various city-states and having to work to escape. Towards the end of the campaign, my DM pointed out that we were several levels below the recommendations for the modules we were playing, since we'd totally skipped one entire module with two wormholes.

That said... the session still didn't go badly, because the DM just winged it.

 

[Mephista]

Here's something to consider, really. Mechanics inform the style of game that you can play. Its true. If you have a game that focuses on different ways to handle exploration and combat, that the game tends to focus on those aspects (and, as an extension, the really light rules on social interaction tend to have an effect on social scenes as well).

So, in D&D with so much channeled towards exploring, well, dungeons, and different ways to get around it? Its intent is to have new challenges that take these abilities in mind. Dungeons aren't all same-y, while monsters scale up. Dungeons are meant to scale in difficulty and complexity along with the player's abilities to challenge the dungeons.

Perhaps the problem is that we don't have a Dungeon Guide. There's two monster books, there's the DMG, but there's no real break down of how to make dungeons, what's appropriate CR, etc. Perhaps that's an issue?

 

[Hussar]

Jumping now qualifies for the rule of cool? Well... whatever. He spent resources on the ability to jump whenever, wherever and however he wanted. He lost nothing by making the jump.

First up - yes, I can picture in my mind a holy warrior disintegrating into a thousand shards of light and flashing towards his foe in a flaring blast of righteous fury. Just because you lack imagination, or are willfully not exercising it because you have some sort of grudge doesn't make it any less exciting than some guy jumping a bit.

/snip.

Well, sure. That's a cool image. Neato. Not sure I'm picturing a paladin though. Never really had Nightcrawler in mind whenever I pictured a paladin. While I'm not exactly a big fan of sacred cows, Portapaladins aren't really something that ever occured to me in the past. Ninja? Sure. Superhero? No problem. Holy warrior devoted to this or that god and defender of the faithful? Not so much.

You really don't think it's out of place at all that a paladin teleports? An ability that had never, ever been attached to the class previously? Fair enough. For me, I'm having a bit of trouble reconciling images of holy warriors bamfing around the battlefield. Just jarring as heck to me.

I didn't have my books with me, but, I'd point out that a 9th level paladin can (although probably won't) do this 5 times a day. AFAIC, being able to do it once per day is too many for this class.