New Movement Speed Type - Teleport Speed

[Greywander]

I think most of us can agree that Nightcrawler from X-Men is pretty cool, and some of us might have thought about rolling up a similar kind of character, but one of his defining characteristics, teleportation, is kind of hard to pull off. Or maybe you're more of an anime fan and want a character who can flash step everywhere. Anyway, I had this on my mind and thought it would be interesting if teleportation were to be implemented as a type of movement speed.

Teleportation is generally seen as being pretty strong; Misty Step is a 2nd level spell, rather than a 1st or cantrip, for a reason. However, I think turning it into another type of movement speed would solve most of the issues that would arise from at-will teleportation. It would still be pretty strong, but maybe not as much as a fly speed.

The defining trait of teleportation is that it allows you to move from one point to another without passing through the space in between. If we start with just this as the basis for our new movement type, then some interesting rules interactions arise:

• Because of the way having multiple movement speeds work, if your teleport speed is less than your walking speed, you have to teleport first or not at all. An example of this can be seen with the aarakocra: an aarakocra can walk 25 feet then fly 25 feet, but can't fly 25 feet then walk 25 feet. Movement speeds are more like movement limits, and any kind of movement counts toward that limit. If a character has, say, a walk speed of 30 and a teleport speed of 10, if they walk 10 feet then they can't teleport during that turn.
• Teleporting out of a creature's reach still provokes an opportunity attack. If that creature has Sentinel, then your speed could be reduced to 0, preventing you from teleporting away.
• Likewise, a condition that reduces your speed to 0, such as being grappled or restrained, prevents you from teleporting.
• Taking the Dash action doubles your teleport distance, but you still have to do it at the beginning of your movement. E.g. you can't teleport 10 feet, move 20 feet, Dash, and teleport 10 more feet. You've already moved 30 feet at that point, so doubling your teleport speed from 10 to 20 has no benefit.

This does leave us with a few questions which should probably be address. Do you need to see where you're teleporting to? Can you teleport through solid objects? Do we need any special rules that modify the above?

Here's a few proposals for modifications:

• Teleporation is linked to walking speed. Your teleport speed is only "spent" when actually teleporting, but teleporting also requires walk speed. If you have a walk speed of 30 and a teleport speed of 10, that means you can teleport up to a total of 10 feet as any part of that 30 feet of walking. If you also have, say, a fly speed of 60, then flying for 30 feet means you can't teleport, as you have no walk speed left, even though you still have fly and teleport speed left.
• You can't teleport into or out of liquids unless you have a swim speed. You can't teleport into or out of dirt/stone unless you have a burrow speed. You can't teleport onto a climbable surface unless you have a climb speed (you will fall instead). You can teleport into the air without a fly speed, but without some way to float you will fall.
• Teleportation can be rather disorienting. You can safely teleport to spaces you can see. You can attempt to teleport to an unseen location, in which case there's a 50/50 chance of ending up where you intended vs. ending up in a random spot within range. If you teleport into a solid object, you take 1d10 force damage and get shunted back to your original location.

I mean, yeah, we could just make it a racial or class feature with a description. I'm just thinking if we can figure out what we want teleportation to be like most of the time, we could codify that into "teleport speed rules" for quick and easy understanding, and then a creature with more specialized teleportation can have it written up as a feature that explains it. Or they could have both a teleport speed and a feature that modifies how it works.

Anyway, what are people's thoughts on this? I think a lot will depend on just how much teleport speed a creature has. I see a speed of 10 as being about ideal for a PC character; not too weak, not too strong. Boosting it to 20 with the Mobile feat also seems fair, especially as teleportation circumvents the need for some of Mobile's other benefits (meaning it is less useful to you). Monks, though...