Why is flight considered a game breaker?

[Dausuul]

It really is sad that people like you got flight removed from the rules set because they could not figure this out.

It is also too bad that you cannot figure out that when your party flys over the chasm, then deliberately walks into a cave to whack a dragon, one of these situations is desired, and the other isnt. I will give you a hint:They probably want to kill things.

They fly across the chasm because that's the most expedient way to get across. If they can't fly, they do it some other way.

They walk into the cave to whack the dragon because that's the most expedient way of killing it. If I gave them a wand of instant dragon slaying, they'd use that instead.

When presented with a problem, players look for the best available solution and use it. That's human nature. I don't give them cheap flight spells for the same reason I don't give them wands of instant dragon slaying: Because if they have ways to instantly bypass all obstacles, there's no game.

 

[Votan]

They are interesting rules. If I might make a suggestion, in my game I also have the teleports are limited to 1 mile per caster level rule (though not the other interesting stuff that I have to think about). But, I also have 'Ley Lines', and when travelling along a Ley Line, you can travel from node to node at a range of up to 100 miles per caster level.

In my game, the locations of these nodes, and even to a certain extent the existance of the ley line network, is a closely gaurded secret of the highest level mages. They fear, given the general antipathy to magic users, that should the ley lines become widely known that steps will be take to make travel on the lines difficult or impossible. Of course, if you want to go with a more high magic Eberron style feel, you could go the opposite direction and make major cities built around ley lines and teleport circle networks.

What this lets me do is 'best of both worlds', so to speak. Teleport can be used as an emergency button to get out of a bad situation, but it can also be used as a mode of long range travel where I can a somewhat selective control over where you can go. It also adds IMO to the depth of the magicalness of the world to have all this arcane lore hidden underneath the surface.

This is a good compromise. It gives player's a chance to get additional rewards (knowledge of the lines) or (in your high magic example) it means high level parties can easily hop between cities. Both are improvements in game flavor.

The reason I like some means of detecting teleport in advance is I like it as an escape or transport spell -- not the ultimate ambush spell. Adding in methods of detection (spot makes rangers and rogues more able to contribute at high level, noise makes it much harder to pull off as a stealth attack) brings the spotlight away from the wizard for sneak attacks and puts them back into characters who can do stealth (even if you are invisible, move silently is needed). Or it at least means you can't prepare one spell for escape, stealth attack and transport.

 

[Votan]

Those are pretty good rules. My hang up about them is that he put in nothing to make an exception for (comparatively) short ranged "combat" teleporting. Whether it's the core Dimension Door spell to get out of a grapple or the splat book Benign Transposition to swap two allies' positions, I don't think such spells should be affected by those rules, as they were written to prevent scry-buff-teleport, which the short ranged teleports can't be used for anyway. Well...maybe in very specific cases...

I think given the "one round per mile" travel time, I'd allow the travel time to be part of the spell casting and/or over too quickly to matter. Dimension door, for example, already ends your turns.

In a similar sense, given the turn ending effects and the range, I am not overly worried about Dimension Door as an ambush spell. It takes hard work and planning to make work (i.e. it creates fun challenges).

 

[billd91]

They are interesting rules. If I might make a suggestion, in my game I also have the teleports are limited to 1 mile per caster level rule (though not the other interesting stuff that I have to think about). But, I also have 'Ley Lines', and when travelling along a Ley Line, you can travel from node to node at a range of up to 100 miles per caster level.

I'm doing a variation on that to explain why teleporting doesn't work very well in the D1-3 modules. The curvature of the ley lines, that work to allow long teleports on the surface, are severely tightened in adventuring area. Short scope teleports like dimension door are unaffected but the effect is noticeable to the caster and provides a clue to the effect of the full teleport.

 

[StreamOfTheSky]

I think given the "one round per mile" travel time, I'd allow the travel time to be part of the spell casting and/or over too quickly to matter. Dimension door, for example, already ends your turns.

In a similar sense, given the turn ending effects and the range, I am not overly worried about Dimension Door as an ambush spell. It takes hard work and planning to make work (i.e. it creates fun challenges).

Yes, definitely. But as written, the rules linked to explicitly put a mimimum of 1 round travel time on all Conjuration (Teleportation) and similar effects. I'm just saying I don't like that part, there's too many interesting tactical teleportation spells that such a rulee messes up that weren't part of the scry and die problem anyway, and I don't want to see them become useless as a result. All I'm saying is... change it to something like "no travel time is added to spells granting less than a mile's travel" or "this rule does not apply to effects and spells that measure their maximum ranges in feet, or have short, medium, or long range." Something.

I also have to say, I think mile/CL is a little short for my tastes, but Celebrium's leylines idea is good for allowing longer ranged travel. To me, the most important parts of those houserules were that those about to be teleported on got advance notice of it, and the ability to follow where someone teleports, so if things go wrong and the teleporters try and hastily retreat, the defenders can truly make them pay for their overly ambitious assault. Those were the kinds of rules I had long been thinking of adding to my games for a long time. I just haven't DMed a high enough level game yet that the party ever wanted to try scry-buff-teleport, so it hadn't been a major issue for me thus far.

 

[Doug McCrae]

Another problem is that if you have a absolute immunity like the immunity to fire damage which is so common with creatures with fire subtype is that this absolute immunity doesn't always seem to be so absolute after all when you think about it. Sure, a fire elemental ought to be immune to fire, but is a fire elemental immune to being burned up by a fire deity or the wellspring of utter fire itself? That is, when you think about it, most immunities of this sort actually only mean 'immunity to normal stuff of this type'. Is it really the intention of the Freedom of Action spell to give you immunity to the God of Wrestling?

The most obvious solution seems to be tiers of power. For D&D I would propose mundane, magical and divine. So one could be immune to mundane fire only for example, or magical (which would include mundane) or divine (which includes the other two tiers).

The other solution is to dispense with immunities and give everything a number. Anything can be overcome with a big enough number. This how the HERO system does it. This can result in confusion as to how much one needs to be 'immune'. Immunity isn't a thing in itself, it's dependent on the rest of the world. Everything is relative. So to properly build a PC, a player actually needs to have a good understanding of the whole world.

 

[Derren]

I cannot fathom how people have difficulties with flying, unless for some reason the GM only uses ground-bound melee-only brutes with the mental capacity of an angry chihuahua in wide open featureless planes.

Thats what most DMs do. And because of all their complaining flight got restricted.
Thats the same reason teleportation go axed except for a few circumstances. Those DMs do not take the abilities of the PCs into account when writing adventures and then complain when the PCs use their abilities to bypass their railroad.
But the customer is always right and thus the abilities got removed.

 

[Votan]

Thats what most DMs do. And because of all their complaining flight got restricted.
Thats the same reason teleportation go axed except for a few circumstances. Those DMs do not take the abilities of the PCs into account when writing adventures and then complain when the PCs use their abilities to bypass their railroad.
But the customer is always right and thus the abilities got removed.

I think one can have legitimate concerns about the balance of easy/safe flight and teleportation in standard fantasy campaigns even in a sandbox campaign. Sure, one could design adventures that take these abilities into account. But then many types of creatures that one might want to have in such a campaign will be strictly limited to things that are capable of co-evolving.

You also have issues when things like scry/buff/teleport are too effective -- sooner or later it will be used against the party and the result is often anti-climatic.

I'm not saying that you can't create games that work with these features. Certainly you can. But flight gets so easy by level 10 or so that the entire game will have everyone flying, pretty much all of the time.

 

[thecasualoblivion]

Thats what most DMs do. And because of all their complaining flight got restricted.
Thats the same reason teleportation go axed except for a few circumstances. Those DMs do not take the abilities of the PCs into account when writing adventures and then complain when the PCs use their abilities to bypass their railroad.
But the customer is always right and thus the abilities got removed.

Yes, but there is the Superman effect:

Superman is all powerful, but gets his ass kicked by kryptonite. When every enemy the PCs face has to have krypotnite to provide any sort of challenge, the game becomes lame, and flight/teleport/whatever becomes boring instead of amazing.

Its the issue with giving players trump cards. Everything that is trumped by a trump card turns into a non-encounter, and the game loses a lot of its flavor.

 

[The Human Target]

Yes, but there is the Superman effect:

Superman is all powerful, but gets his ass kicked by kryptonite. When every enemy the PCs face has to have krypotnite to provide any sort of challenge, the game becomes lame, and flight/teleport/whatever becomes boring instead of amazing.

Its the issue with giving players trump cards. Everything that is trumped by a trump card turns into a non-encounter, and the game loses a lot of its flavor.

Agreed.

I play to have fun, and playing "Gotcha" isn't that fun to me.