Teleporting

By syrath, in Realms of Terrinoth

I'm about to embark on a new campaign set in Terribly and have an arcane mage who is looking for teleportation To be honest bone of the magic disciplines suit for me. I'm also wary that I don't want the player able to kite the enemy by moving to extreme range each time they get close.

Do my ideas so far are this

1/ Have it work very much like Force leap in star wars RPG, IE you can use your action to cast a spell that lets you move a maneuver worth of range during your action. This won't be expandable by range. the problem is the magic discipline to use .The obvious to me would be augment, but this isn't available to arcana. My player wants to use conjure, however I actually feel it's not a fit because of the way it's described. So my own thought was to use Barrier , the reason being that he could have barrier thematically cause an upgrade because of small teleportation movements, then allow the same effect for manipulative (found under attack, allows you to move a target a range band with the attack, which could well be narrated as teleporting). So the effect would be Barrier upgrade manipulative, +1 P spend an advantage on a barrier check to move yourself one range band in any direction. So short to medium, medium to long or long to extreme but like Force leap bottom let you engage or disengage.

2. The other option would be , and this is the one I prefer,is to make heroic ability that is identical to the teleportation rune's activation effect, the improved version would let you teleport a target in extreme range to the same locations possible with the basic power, with the supreme version being able to teleport either multiple people or everything in a 10' radius

What are you guys thoughts

Personally I prefer Conjure, although I’m biased since it’s what I based Gateways on for the Wheel Of Time. But this is how I describe it:

To teleport you need to Conjure a doorway engaged with you, and a second doorway that’s your destination. This requires a minimum difficulty (without Implements) of Daunting (DDDD);

Basic (D)

+ (D) Additional Summon for the second door

+ (D) Medium Summon because doors have moving parts (if you’re a kind gm then this is the effect you can remove)

+ (D) Range (because you don’t want to move from engaged to engaged...)

This all means that with a Wand or Staff or Musical Instrument you can teleport to Short for a Hard Difficulty check, and with a Teleport Rune you can get to Long with that Difficulty, and with a Ring you lower the difficulty to Easy (D) for short range

Edit:

The Medium Summon was my desire to make it as difficult as possible, because I have talents that reduce the difficulty in my setting. You can easily remove those to make it an Average Difficulty with a Staff to get to Short, or Hard to get to Medium.

Keeping the spell maintained using Concentrate also then allows you to keep the door open for others to use.

Triggering Additional Summon also allows you to open a second door to the same destination

The thing I like about this system is that you still need to take a Manoeuvre to get through the door, you cannot just teleport a target straight up and drop them. If the player wanted to open a door under a targets feet then I’m going to declare it an Attack Spell Action anyway, with the required addition of Deadly to represent the effect of falling.

Edited by Richardbuxton

Your Heroic Ability idea is cool, and I could definitely get behind that.

You could also make it a Talent

Personally, I would treat "Teleport Self" and "Open Gateway" as Narrative Utility Spells, while "Teleport Other" would be a Narrative Attack Spell. In any-case the check should generally be harder than climbing the same distance (because per RAW Magic isn't supposed to be easier than doing the thing mundanely, such is the price you pay for infinite cosmic power).

So Open Gateway should likely have a base Difficulty of at least Hard (♦♦♦); with the option to increase the difficulty once to attempt to cast the spell as a Maneuver rather than as an Action. This is assuming it mimics the alternative portion of the Teleportation Rune's activation effect, because it should be more difficult than simply activating a Teleportation Shard. Holding the Gate open would require Concentration, otherwise it closes at the end of your next turn.

I would hesitate to make Teleportation Range an additional effect for Teleport Self/Other (as @Richardbuxton suggests above), precisely because that would allow the caster to reduce the difficulty too easily (as compared to using Athletics to climb the same distance). However it does make sense for these spells to be comperable in difficulty to conjuring a thing at that distance.