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Message: <blockquote data-quote="John Morrow" data-source="post: 2091469" data-attributes="member: 27012">Part of my point is that if the GM tries to protect the opponent's lair using the rules, what you'll often get are selected critical areas of the dungeon being protected by Private Sanctum spells or such rather than, "You can't teleport anywhere in the whole N mile radius region."  And those different forms of protection (which I mentioned earlier) each have distinctive characteristics that can complicate the milieu.  It provides a much more interesting landscape then simply saying, "Scratch those spells off of your list for this adventure because they are 100% useless."  Instead, it creates a situation where they are useless only in some areas of the dungeon but can be quite useful in others.If you want a quick and dirty way of simulating that, identify the handful of spells that either thwart or mislead spells that involve teleporting and scrying.  Take a look at roughly what their area of effect normally is.  Assume that protected areas might be covered by multiple copies of the same spell to increase the area but doing so is expensive and time consuming so that the opponent will normally only protect those areas critical to their safety and not, say, where their guards live, their petting zoo, their hated mother-in-law's living quarters, etc.  Give the PCs some places where they can use those spells and some places where they can't rather than just telling them to forget about using those spells anywhere during the adventure.  Just as people normally only put walls and a roof around their bedroom, living room, kitchen, bathroom, and garage and not their yard, driveway, swimming pool, etc. the bad guys will only pay to limit teleportation where they think it matters.In many ways, that's like running them through a dungeon where all the inhabitants are small and the ceilings are all only 4 feet high so you can apply negative situational modifiers to almost everything the characters do simply to cut down their attack modifiers, skill rolls, and require Concentration rolls for spells with somatic components.  As a part of a large dungeon, that could be interesting.  As a single entire dungeon that happens once in a campaign, it could even be interesting.  When it happens frequently to entire dungeons, it's pretty clear that the DM is saying, "I really want to apply these limits all the time."There is a way to walk around or cut through a real wall.  There is no way to teleport around a no-teleport zone.  It's more like filling a dungeon with water and saying, "You have to swim rather than walking because I don't want you to be able to move around so quickly and run away from my monsters."  And as I pointed out above, if you really want tactics, then mix it up and give the players places to use teleportation and places where they can't.  In other words, "If you want to teleport in or out, you better find the places you can do it," rather than, "Don't even try to teleport because it won't work."  To say that they can't use teleportation at all simply eliminates a tactical option entirely by taking if off of the table.  It's "heavy handed" in the sense that it's sweeping and absolute.  There are no nuances to it.  The goal is not to push the players toward using their high level movement spells creatively nor is it something that they can avoided.  It's often all about limiting the ways the player can approach the dungeon so they can't bypass the sequence of encounters that a GM has carefully crafted which is, ultimately, about limiting the control the players have over the scenario.No, it's not as heavy handed or overt as a lot of other things that a GM can do and players can most certainly have fun in a game like that but I think its a bit disingenuous to argue that the objective isn't simply to reduce and eliminate player options to make it easier to the GM to manage the situation.That's an false dilemma argument.I submit that the only two alternatives are not (A) turning entire dungeons into teleport-free zones or (B) playing powerful villain NPCs as if they were simpletons.  Nor does it require years of careful research for the GM to carefully calculate every cost or area of effect to create a dungeon that at least seems like it was created within the rules.  And remember that the bad guys can also use spells to limit the ability of the PCs to teleport away, too.Note that I'm personally not arguing that no part of a dungeon should ever be protected against teleportation or scrying.  Of course areas of a powerful dungeon should be.  That's why there are spells to do it.  What I'm arguing is that simply declaring an entire dungeon a teleport and scrying-free zone is an unnecessarily sweeping and flavorless way to deal with the issue.</blockquote>

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