Troubles with Teleportation
When it comes to magic, there’s a spell for everything. What isn’t covered in the gulf between ablative barrier and zone of truth falls neatly within the purview of wish, meaning that magic is capable of anything you’d care to imagine. However, we must not make the same mistakes that so many wizards have made before us. Rather than asking what magic can do, we must first ask what it should do.
What I’m really talking about can be summed up by the disclaimer at the beginning of the Jade Regent Adventure Path. If you’re unfamiliar, suffice it to say that it’s a Pathfinder adventure structured as a Marco Polo style “grand caravan to the Far East.” The disclaimer comes in the form of a little text box in the player’s guide titled “Troubles with Teleportation.” Here it is in full:
One of the key themes of the Jade Regent Adventure Path is the concept of the mythic, heroic journey. Numerous classic stories have covered this topic—the Lord of the Rings, The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath, and The Odyssey all spring to mind. In all of these stories, the journey itself was as important as the events that play out at the conclusion—had the protagonists skipped the journey, not only would they have missed out on a lot of the best parts of the story, but they would have found themselves ill-prepared to deal with what waited for them at the story’s climax.
Jade Regent fits right in among these storylines, with the overland journey aspect playing a key role in the campaign’s development. As a result, don’t expect to be able to skip past the significant long overland journey sections with spells like teleport, wind walk, or shadow walk. You can certainly still use these spells when you become powerful enough to use them for other purposes, but don’t plan on using these powerful effects to “fast forward” through adventures to get to the end!
I was impressed by this passage for two reasons. Firstly, that a designer could knowingly allow himself to write a sprawling narrative that could be undone by a single spell. Secondly, that the fix lay in respecting players enough to say, “Please don’t do that thing.” It was a revelatory moment. I realized that as a GM I shouldn’t allow myself to be handcuffed by all the ways in which players might causally dismantle a world. Magic, after all, isn’t the only force capable of doing anything. Players can ruin the cosmos just as surely as a mad god or a planar rift. But if there’s a level of trust between the two ends of the table (lawful railroading GM and chaotic campaign-breaking players) then perhaps all that can be avoided. Perhaps the game can simply exist comfortably…unlike Fighter in that corset.
ARE YOU AN IMPATIENT GAMER? If so, you should check out the “Henchman” reward level over on The Handbook of Heroes Patreon. For just one buck a month, you can get each and every Handbook of Heroes comic a day earlier than the rest of your party members. That’s bragging rights right there!
Hmm. That looks like a tough predicament. But I think I’ve figured a way out of it. Since the door now has Thief’s tail, it’s possible to argue that the door is now an infernal creature and can be subject to banishing effects. I suppose it might take a Heal spell for Fighter. And maybe a Wish for Wizard’s pride. =P
My players were down in Hell once, on a rescue mission to this huge Infernal city. The stealth operation did not go well, and they were caught by this giant brute of demon prince. Their only hope was to banish him. Since they were already in his home plane, however, I gave it a 50/50 of actually working. The dice were rolled, and the numbers came up in favor of the players. We all had a good chuckle imagining this demon appearing in his apartment, swearing under his breath while he rides the subway back across town to the scene of the combat.
Teleportation has long been the undoing of late-game journeys, and unfortunately the “just don’t do it, OK?” excuse wouldn’t wash with many players I know.
But more than that I recently realised, when building a new fantasy setting from the ground up, something that should have been shockingly obvious to me: that DnD-style long distance teleportation would render mercantile freight practically obsolete. Why spend three weeks shipping your goods across the sea, at great cost and risk, when you could have a couple of flunkies do it in a day just carrying the goods on their shoulders back and forth through a teleportation circle?
And if that permanent teleportation circle doesn’t exist, when the two countries in question have had amicable trading relations for centuries, then why doesn’t it? It’s hardly plausible that no one thought of teleporting fro A to B before some wiseguy Wizard in 3rd Era 478. Did magic simply not exist until 10 years ago? What if you want to write in an extensive history replete with magic?
And not just trade – what about Diplomacy? Scholarship? War? Teleportation represents am even better communication and transport system than exists in the modern world.
One route to take would be to imagine what such a world would look like, and build from there. But I wanted to run in a more recognisably pre-modern setting.
The obvious solution to me wad to write out the unlimited-distance teleportation spells. A bit prescriptive, perhaps, but I feel my players can wear that small burden for the sake of a more interesting and plausible world.
And lets be honest:Teleport is mostly just for lazy chumps, anyway. 😉
Are you familiar with the Tippyverse?
https://forums.giantitp.com/showthread.php?222007-The-Definitive-Guide-to-the-Tippyverse-By-Emperor-Tippy
Why ship goods when they can be teleported? Well, why ship goods when you can fly them?
Two reasons. One, many goods will be as valuable if they get to the destination next month as they will if it only takes five minutes (give or take future market forces, which could push either way). Two, teleportation is expensive.
As of 5e, you need a ninth-level or higher wizard to cast teleportation circle every day for a year, with material components costing 18,250 gp, plus labor—and since wizards are rare and in demand, the labor cost is far more expensive. The formula suggested for spellcasting services pegs the cost for one casting of teleportation circle at 350 gp; this brings the total cost to nearly 130,000 gold! That’s something you only have a few pairs of in the whole world. And even if the spell worked like it did in 5e, you’re limited by how quickly your laborers can pick up, move, and store/deliver stuff without getting in each other’s way.
Teleportation is only economically viable for small, high-value cargo. Magic items, VIPs, dyes/spices/etc (until the market reaches equilibrium), maybe gems and art objects… definitely not bulk goods.
Unfortunately, then we run into the problem of macroeconomics. If taxes are pulled as a simple percent of GDP, and we assume the average contribution to GDP is 2 silver per day, then for a city like Neverwinter with 20,000 we get an annual income of 1.4 million gold, about 4,000 per day. Granted that this is in Faerun, where the worldbuilding has always been pretty terrible, but even a more realistic medieval setting could easily have cities of a thousand or so generating more in the range of a few hundred thousand gp per year.
Back in pre-industrial times, one couldn’t reasonable levy a tax rate of more than 30%, but back in feudal times whoever represented the state would typically want as big a share as they could get. 30% Is about reasonable, and if we assume that about a third of this goes to the main city planner and not to merchant guilds or neighborhood organizations or on up to the fed/sovereign, that still leaves Neverwinter generating about 500,000 gp in tax revenue.
That’s not to say that every small town could have one, but it would be a reasonable investment most likely for any settlement of more than 5,000 people who did a lot of trade. That is of course assuming a generous reading of the spell which gives them a permanently open teleportation circle after a year of casting. Personally, I prefer for a ‘permanent’ circle to open for 6 seconds at the time of day that it was cast (with a little leeway/averaging for recasters who don’t own a digital watch, but not too much! You’re a wizard. Figure it out!) but are able to ‘hold’ a (no material components) recasting for a full 24 hour period. That way anyone who wants a full MMO style teleportation gate needs to keep a wizard on staff, which restricts at least those gates to cities which don’t mind a recurring expense. Six seconds of gate per day to a major city, with a high level wizard asked to gate in once a week or so to rotate the destinations, seems like a good balance to me and allows the city’s planners to have a big effect on how much the gates mean overall.
Or you can be a wizard yourself, and have permanent gates be effectively always open for you under either ruleset.