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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Eldritch_Lord" data-source="post: 5981008" data-attributes="member: 52073">It doesn't even have to be 5 miles--3e teleport's off-target distance is [1d10*1d10]% of the distance traveled in a random direction, so if you roll badly you could end up going several hundred miles in the wrong direction.The problem with scry-and-fry isn't the teleport accuracy, really, it's the fact that scrying a place for a while counts as "studying it carefully."  If you change it to make all divination count as "seen once" regardless of repeated viewings, that gives you a 25% chance to be off-target or damaged, up from 5%, and that's just making a single tweak to the 3e rules.  For a more significant change you could, for instance, change the on-target chance to 100% for going to your home base or somewhere within line of sight, 70% for somewhere you've carefully studied in person, 40% for something seen casually once or twice in person, 10% for something viewed through divination, and 0% for somewhere you've just heard of, and scry-and-fry suddenly isn't really a dominant strategy anymore.Not if you want to visit a city you haven't been to before, travel somewhere in the wilderness to meet in a neutral location, show up outside of a city instead of in a designated portal area, or more.  I realize you're really set on linked portals as a solution, but there are many things you just can't do if you're restricted to specific locations.It's a matter of individual group playstyle, not edition.  I just finished up a game last semester with my college group, who learned D&D with 3e, where our party was trying to overthrow an archmage who'd conquered two continents; we started off as conscripted mercenaries in one of the two remaining free cities and ended up in control of a continent after <s>ruthlessly overthrowing the archmage's puppet governments</s> politely asking the other cities to join us.  We controlled a local capitol, two port cities, a mining city, a handful of smaller towns with good agricultural resources, a mage tower, and more.  I was actually the only combat-capable party member, as everyone else was a utility build of one variety or another, and we played Logistics & Dragons for a good 7 levels or so, one important facet of which was that we were able to coordinate our towns against a three-pronged attack by the enemy precisely because we were able to do things like move resources and people between cities and 'port into our enemies paths in the forests, up in the sky, and under the sea to delay and harass them.Not everyone likes that degree of strategic play, nor do I expect them to, but it's a playstyle that's just as viable in 3e as it was in AD&D.  I would posit that the playstyle of high levels being just another dungeon crawl where the DM has to fiat in "solutions" to a bunch of "problems" because they let the PCs do things besides 'port between pre-established adventure sites or affect the world on a large scale is just as unviable in 3e as it was in AD&D, but if you want to tweak the game to make that work you're welcome to do so, it's just not my cup of tea.Each of those options also doesn't fulfill the same function teleport does.  I'm not arguing that teleport is a low-level ability at all, I'm arguing that there's an obvious progression from walking around cliffs to throwing ropes over cliffs to levitating up cliffs to flying over cliffs to teleporting past them.  Teleportation isn't this sudden problem spell that invalidates challenges, it's the continuation of a trend of "zooming out" as you level; you go from worrying about avoiding that pile of rubble as you charge an orc, to avoiding that stone wall as you charge a group of orcs, to avoiding that rocky cliff as you flyby attack that warband of orcs, to avoiding that mountain as you launch an attack on that orc army, to avoiding that mountain range as you stave off the attacks of the Avatar of Gruumsh.  Teleport is no more game- or story-breaking than any other magical mobility, it's just a question of which sorts of stories they mess with and what context they fit into.Are swords overpowered because a DM needs plate armor to protect enemies from them?  Is fire damage overpowered to the point that lots of creatures have fire resistance or immunity?Two points.  First, spells tend to be at the same levels as their counters plus or minus a level for a reason (charm person and protection from evil, fireball and protection from energy, and so on, all the way up to imprisonment and freedom).  D&D is a game of counters, between needing certain weapons to bypass certain DR to needing certain spells to remove certain conditions and on.  You (and your enemies) need counters for common abilities, counters for counters, and so on, and determining what resources to use is part of the game.  Teleport shouldn't be a one-size-fits-all solution any more than sneak attack or fireball.  Yes, if your DM puts all of Mordor under a dimensional lock he's being a bit of a jerk, but expecting NPCs not to use commonly-available countermeasures to commonly-available and relatively widely-known abilities isn't really fair.Secondly, NPCs aren't all-knowing and all-wealthy (or at least shouldn't be, or your DM is, again, not being fair).  Warding against teleportation costs money, or minions, or time, or some other resource, and if a villain is paranoid enough to forbiddance all of Mordor it probably means he doesn't have the time or cash to churn out all his +1 hobbit-bane short swords or equip a few bazillion hobgoblins to siege Minas Tirith.  Anti-teleportation spells are either finite in direction or extremely expensive per unit volume, like many other wards, and if an enemy devotes all of his resources to defense his offense will suffer.That wasn't a shot at your beloved linked portals, it was a counterpoint to those who think LotR and Conan should be playable as-is at high levels.</blockquote>

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