Do caster out of combat options matter?

[Silly Name]

If the party wants to visit a plane, but doesn't have access to planeshift, then the DM is not *obliged to give them other means.
If the party wants to visit a plane, has access to planeshift but not the right tuning fork, they may **ask to craft or buy one, it's a much smaller ask from the DM than to put a whole archmage or portal.

One of the baseline assumptions of the game is that other planes of existence exist and that there are ways to travel between them, with many of those methods already outlined in the PHB and DMG.

So, sure the DM doesn't have to literally hand the players a Planar Travel Device, but it should be possible to find a way to travel to another plane even if none of the PCs knows Planeshift. How hard or easy it's going to be is a DM call, but there are other methods for planar travel (including "find an NPC mage who can cast it for you" as the simplest one).

If the DM wants to "ban" those options, it's fine, but I expect them to communicate it as part of the pitch. I once made a setting where travel to the Upper and Lower planes was barred, and this was explicitly stated.

The worldbuilding implications of "there are mages capable of casting Planeshift", "there are planar portals" and "it's possible to buy or craft a tuning fork for Planeshift" are all pretty much the same: planar travel is possible.

[JackPhoenix]

Which divination spells are you saying will help with that task?

Locate Object doesn't have that big a range, and that's the only relevant spell I can think of.

Divination or Contact Other Plane to ask someone who should know where to find the thing.

As a dungeon master, it's just a silly way to run games. Stop making fragile, linear plots. Start making robust, non-linear ones. Somebody up thread, claimed it takes 10 times more prep than what sees play, as if that's a hard barrier to clear. Anybody who thinks that, cannot count. Look: if I design four encounters and then demand that players go trough them in exact sequence, I've prepared one possibility. If I design four encounters and then let players go through them in any order, I've now prepared 4! = 24 possibilities. Of those, the players will experience one - 1/24 of the overall game space. Some of those may end up in players losing. That is fine. It is completely normal for a game.

That assumes there's any significant difference depending on the order you run the encounters. The encouters themselves are still the same. That doesn't sound like 24 possibilities to me.

The worldbuilding implications of "there are mages capable of casting Planeshift", "there are planar portals" and "it's possible to buy or craft a tuning fork for Planeshift" are all pretty much the same: planar travel is possible.

Not necessarily. Just because the same (general) end result is possible doesn't mean the implications are all the same in all cases. If you need a (fairly powerful) mage to cast the spell, the impact on the world is rather different from having portal(s) anyone from either side can use up. If the forks are easily available to each of those mages, the result is again rather different than if only a single archmage in the entire world knows how to access a certain plane.

[LudicSavant]

My take:

I have to say that a lot of people tend to overestimate the actual power of those out-of-combat options, when they talk about them.

Take the spell Teleport, for example.

Teleport has a 100% chances of success if and only if you have the code for a permanent circle or a tiny chunk of the place where you want to go.

This function alone is already sufficient to make Teleport extremely powerful. Well worth the higher slot level than stuff like Word of Recall.

I dunno about you, but to me that makes clear teleportation via the Teleport spell is a *very* unreliable transportation method, unless you have a token of the place or the number for the right circle.

Unreliable, perhaps, but I wouldn't say very. A failure to arrive with your initial teleport is not the same thing as a failure to arrive. Indeed, even in the face of mishaps you're likely to arrive much more swiftly than someone without access to such tools.

[Unoriginal]

Divination or Contact Other Plane to ask someone who should know where to find the thing.

Divination can only be cast by a Cleric, but you're correct, it could answer the question (maybe cryptically, but always truthfully).

Contact Other Plane, assuming success when casting, gets you 5 questions, but most of the answers will be "yes", "no", "maybe", "never", "irrelevant" or "unclear", so not that useful to narrow down where the fork is in an efficient manner. However, since it is a ritual, I suppose a Wizard has the luxury to not be efficient and just keep asking "is there a tuning fork of X plane at Y place", waiting for a "yes", then narrow it down.

In any case, thank you for reminding me of those two spells.

This function alone is already sufficient to make Teleport extremely powerful. Well worth the higher slot level than stuff like Word of Recall.

There is no denying that it is powerful (and it is equally undeniably more powerful than Word of Recall), but unreliable power is less power, and so is "reliable but only under those conditions" power.

My point is that travel through teleportation is significantly more messier and bumpier than how it's generally talked about in internet debates.

Unreliable, perhaps, but I wouldn't say very. A failure to arrive with your initial teleport is not the same thing as a failure to arrive. Indeed, even in the face of mishaps you're likely to arrive much more swiftly than someone without access to such tools.

If speed is the one criteria that matters, true.

But I don't think it's the only criteria that should be mentioned.

[LudicSavant]

Time converts into many other resources. If you're saving a month off a trip, you can generally take one of those days (or less) to handle almost any inconvenience of teleportation mishap, and still come out far ahead.

For the example of traveling between major cities like Waterdeep or Baldur's Gate though, you would just use an associated object (simple enough for any destination that trades with the place you're at).

[Skrum]

I kinda feel like this whole discussion is just about
1) is DnD about the destination, or
2) is DnD about the journey

If it's (1), then I'd so no, out of combat things don't matter a ton. Or at all. Unless the game is a true sandbox (which are rare by my estimation), then regardless of what classes the players are playing, regardless of what abilities they have, they're gonna end up at the [top of the tower, in the lowest dungeon, in the 7th circle of circle of Bataar, etc], fighting the BBEG. Or what have you. There's absolutely some truth to the DM will make sure you end up in where you need to be, implying that out of combat stuff doesn't matter-matter.

But if it's (2), and I think it is, than out of combat stuff matters a lot. At the absolute minimum, what characters are doing out of combat changes the flavor of how the game is experienced. Maybe the warlock took Mask of Many Faces and likes to spend their time in town running small-time cons on unsuspecting merchants. Maybe the rune knight took fire rune for the crafting bonus and owns a prosperous basket weaving business. Maybe the wizard always keeps an unseen servant around as a first line of defense against traps. And if the DM is even half way decent, these kind of abilities will shape and influence how the story unfolds. It might not change the climactic battle, but how the players got there is likely to look very different.

(martial classes' lack of out of combat stuff can definitely contribute to them feeling pretty flat. Kick in the door style play, they're pretty fun. Lots of intrigue and rp and investigation? Kinda don't have a class at that point, it's just theater of the mind)

[NichG]

Not sure why there's all this disbelief that people would run games without having a destination in mind... It doesn't have to be some kind of radical sandbox for the players to be party to the decision of where things end up.

Do people really not know how to run games like that so much that it's unbelievable that someone could without an impossible amount of effort?

I mean, maybe this is my counter-bias, but I would say well over half of what I play and 100% of what I run, the players (and their characters, and everything about their characters) are party to determining the destination. It's not just the GM. Like, I have no idea how my campaigns are going to end when I start them. I haven't generated the NPCs who are likely to be relevant in the last session by the start of the game in the first. Everything the players do, even if its not intentional on their part, contributes to determining 'what does an ending look like for these people?'.

[Dr.Samurai]

@Skrum: I think it's both; the journey and the destination.

And I think there's merit in both journeys that make use of magic and those that don't.

And honestly I think that a lot of this just has to do with expectations. Like all the things you listed can be done without magic, but I suspect a lot of games/players/DMs don't have the patience for that, so magic as a quicker version of mundane tasks becomes the standard for doing mundane things.

Old school D&D had a lot of out of combat stuff, without nearly as many out-of-combat-buttons to press (as I understand it, casters were much more restricted back then).

Same with this notion that the DM's world has to be organic, completely divorced from player character choices. Meanwhile, back in the day a module straight up told you "it would be very helpful if you had an elf and a cleric in the party; don't try this adventure if you don't have a cleric of x level".

All to say that... this seems like a matter of taste or preference. I don't particularly care if a DM puts something in the game or not specifically because of party composition. I can't imagine playing at a game once a week for months on end only to find out we never stood a chance because no one in the party chose to play a Super Mage-Master Caster from the very beginning. It would feel like a bad joke that only the DM was in on.

[Rukelnikov]

All to say that... this seems like a matter of taste or preference. I don't particularly care if a DM puts something in the game or not specifically because of party composition. I can't imagine playing at a game once a week for months on end only to find out we never stood a chance because no one in the party chose to play a Super Mage-Master Caster from the very beginning. It would feel like a bad joke that only the DM was in on.

This is the line of thought that I think misses the point a bit. Never stood a chance of what? If the DM is forcing an encounter on the players, then usually that should be a encounter that PCs can walk away alive from*, and if the DM is not forcing an encounter and its the players that are looking for it, whether they stand a chance or not should depend on what the encounter is in the first place, if a 5th level party decides to go to an evil great wyrm's lair to slay the dragon, the players won't stand much of a chance, and that's fine it was their decision to do so.

*Not always, but usually, and if they regularly can't their feeling of agency will dissipate really fast.

[Skrum]

Not sure why there's all this disbelief that people would run games without having a destination in mind... It doesn't have to be some kind of radical sandbox for the players to be party to the decision of where things end up.

Do people really not know how to run games like that so much that it's unbelievable that someone could without an impossible amount of effort?

I mean, maybe this is my counter-bias, but I would say well over half of what I play and 100% of what I run, the players (and their characters, and everything about their characters) are party to determining the destination. It's not just the GM. Like, I have no idea how my campaigns are going to end when I start them. I haven't generated the NPCs who are likely to be relevant in the last session by the start of the game in the first. Everything the players do, even if its not intentional on their part, contributes to determining 'what does an ending look like for these people?'.

My assumption is that most games are roughly like Balder's Gate 3 in terms of structure. There's lots of ways to get there, but every playthrough is gonna end in a big fight with

Spoiler

Show

the elder brain

. There is some sense in saying that out of combat abilities don't "matter" because you'll end up fighting the same boss or bosses no matter what.

Could also think of it this way: even in a sandbox game, I (the DM) am not going to spend a ton of time developing content the players can't access. I'm not going to write up a location filled with NPC's, quest hooks, a mini BBEG, what have you, in a place the PC's have no chance of getting to. Or if I did, I'd make sure there's a way for the PC's to get there regardless of what their character sheet had written on it.

In a strictly destinational way, out of combat abilities don't "matter" because the players get to where they need to go, one way or another. But that to me is missing the point: DND is about the journey, not the destination. What the players do with their time is literally is the game, and that means out of combat abilities matter very much.

[NichG]

My assumption is that most games are roughly like Balder's Gate 3 in terms of structure. There's lots of ways to get there, but every playthrough is gonna end in a big fight with

Spoiler

Show

the elder brain

. There is some sense in saying that out of combat abilities don't "matter" because you'll end up fighting the same boss or bosses no matter what.

Could also think of it this way: even in a sandbox game, I (the DM) am not going to spend a ton of time developing content the players can't access. I'm not going to write up a location filled with NPC's, quest hooks, a mini BBEG, what have you, in a place the PC's have no chance of getting to. Or if I did, I'd make sure there's a way for the PC's to get there regardless of what their character sheet had written on it.

In a strictly destinational way, out of combat abilities don't "matter" because the players get to where they need to go, one way or another. But that to me is missing the point: DND is about the journey, not the destination. What the players do with their time is literally is the game, and that means out of combat abilities matter very much.

If I or others say that's not how our games work, do you believe us? That's what I'm finding odd - plenty of people have said in this thread that they don't see games as being structured this way, but that seems to just be rejected?

Like, in the (non-D&D) campaign I was running that just finished up, the premise was 'you're supervillains, set four goals for yourselves of exponentially increasing magnitude - you gain power when you hold progress in your goal, otherwise do as you want'. I didn't prepare an endboss or lots of locations or things like that before the campaign began. I prepared the broad strokes of the setting, enough of the thematics and metaphysics so that I knew how I would add things when I needed to add things, and then basically followed the players' leads.

The campaign before that (which was D&D-based) had a bit more structure but not all that much - characters were each candidates for becoming the avatar of their own myth (or being subsumed by an existing myth if they failed to distinguish themselves), with a bunch of empires each up to their own bit of aggrandizement in various places in the world and a bit of secret lore behind why this stuff about becoming myths was a thing. While the 'mythic ascension is a thing you're involved in' bit was a (wide) bottleneck that would be relevant over the course of the campaign, characters could ascend their myths by doing any number of impactful things or they could go and find the keys to break the whole system - something I dropped a few vague hints about without actually knowing how it would all fit together at the time. In the end, the PCs did pull at those hints, and that *made* me detail those things (as opposed to 'I had detailed those things in advance, and they uncovered them') and as a result the campaign became about fixing the mistakes of the past. I didn't think 'ah, their BBEG fight is going to be against Apophis' when I came up with the campaign, but effectively that sort of was what happened.

The *most* structured campaign I've ever run was a group of circus performers in Planescape climbing the Infinite Stair and going to a different plane every game. I maybe planned 3 sessions in advance at most at any point in that campaign. Around the halfway point of the campaign the players had figured out enough stuff to be dangerous, and all planning basically stopped - it was their decision that the 'destination' there, suggested to them by what they learned on their journey, was to try to directly manipulate belief by going to Pandemonium and using a magical location there to whisper a message to everyone on the planes at once. The BBEG I had originally planned ended up being their ally in distracting and holding off the particular gods who objected to the party's spontaneous 'lets alter reality with subliminal messaging' idea.

Are people not having these kinds of experiences? It seems surreal to me that there's this idea that the DM truly knows anything whatsoever about the last session before the game even starts, and that somehow that's the default expectation.

[Telok]

Old school D&D had a lot of out of combat stuff, without nearly as many out-of-combat-buttons to press (as I understand it, casters were much more restricted back then).

Casters were on a tighter leash. Harder to cast, fewer spells, more risk, etc. But its interesting to note that practically all of the out of combat utility spells are the exact same spells of 40 years ago. In fact, we've lost some of the (admittedly more specialized and corner case) noncombat spells. Most of the spell bloat in 5e seems to be just variations on combat damage spells. All the "issues" in this thread were solved long ago by various other people or games.

I like world building that doesn't turn out totally incoherent and need constant fig leaf excuses. I also like fantastic stuff like flying castles, portals to demon realms, worlds inside magic bottles, and other stuff. If my players choose characters that can't deal with some aspect of the world then that's fine. I let them know they've chosen to play hardcore mode and keep going. I'm not breaking my setting rules about stuff like teleportation, interfering godlings, or economics to accommodate a party that can't deal.

If they want to go plane hopping, there's no convenient planar portals, and they don't have the magic to go... well they find some way that's already in the setting or they don't get to go. I put effort into a setting that has the level of internal consistency I want. I'm not intervening to give them extra freebie abilities just because they picked a noncaster class. That sounds harsh, but if the classes are balanced well enough then it isn't an issue. 5e classes probably aren't balanced enough, but that's not my problem since I don't run D&D and don't play noncasters in 5e.

[Rynjin]

My my, how the tables have turned, Judge Mastikator.

Haven't played in a campaign yet that has required Teleport, a 7th level spell. I'll let my DM and the WotC devs know how poorly written their mods are...

Nobody said Teleport was required. People said that if it doesn't matter, your campaign sucks.

If it takes the party a week to arrive at a location, but they can arrive instantly with Teleport and it doesn't help them at all, your campaign has zero sense of timing or urgency. It provides no chance for the party to prepare the battlefield or amass resources.

If additional time does not matter, nothing matters.

[Vahnavoi]

That assumes there's any significant difference depending on the order you run the encounters. The encouters themselves are still the same. That doesn't sound like 24 possibilities to me.

You think it's safe to assume there will not be a difference? The point of advice to the dungeon master was to stop making sure everything goes the same no matter what.

Furthermore, while a simple mathematical example omits details, adding in those details typically creates more possibilities, not less. Consider resource management loops typical to games like D&D: if a party chooses encounter A first, they will have different resources to use for it than if they picked encounter A second, third, or last. This can additionally be influenced by which encounter(s) precede(s) it - it's not safe to assume going from B to A is the same as going from C to A or D to A. So on and so forth.

This feeds to player strategy. Consider a simpler version of D&D with only four classes. With four players, that means 4 x 4 x 4 x 4 = 256 different party compositions to consider for completing the set of encounters. This then combines with the amount of possible paths to create 6,144 scenarios. Maybe you can find some underlying symmetries to eliminate some of them - for example, maybe your players are boring and each player plays each class the same way, meaning every party of three wizards and one fighter is the same as any other. You will still end up with hundreds of possibilities.

What psychic ability do you command to confidently proclaim no "significant" differences occur between these?

[JackPhoenix]

You think it's safe to assume there will not be a difference? The point of advice to the dungeon master was to stop making sure everything goes the same no matter what.

And you don't do that merely by switching the order of encounters. Any differences there are only superficial.

Furthermore, while a simple mathematical example omits details, adding in those details typically creates more possibilities, not less. Consider resource management loops typical to games like D&D: if a party chooses encounter A first, they will have different resources to use for it than if they picked encounter A second, third, or last. This can additionally be influenced by which encounter(s) precede(s) it - it's not safe to assume going from B to A is the same as going from C to A or D to A. So on and so forth.

This feeds to player strategy. Consider a simpler version of D&D with only four classes. With four players, that means 4 x 4 x 4 x 4 = 256 different party compositions to consider for completing the set of encounters. This then combines with the amount of possible paths to create 6,144 scenarios. Maybe you can find some underlying symmetries to eliminate some of them - for example, maybe your players are boring and each player plays each class the same way, meaning every party of three wizards and one fighter is the same as any other. You will still end up with hundreds of possibilities.

Irrelevant to how the encouters themselves are set up. If encounter A is a 30'x30' room with 10 orcs, it's a 30'x30' room with 10 orcs regardless of if you go there before or after you go in an encounter B, which is a room with 3 ogres. Whether the party wizard is able (and willing) to cast a Fireball doesn't make it a different scenario any more than the fighter missing 5 times in a row instead of getting 5 crits in a row during the encounter. It doesn't matter.

[LudicSavant]

Noncombat abilities are top tier in BG3, and that's *with* a more fixed destination than many tabletop campaigns have (since unlike a videogame, they don't need to program everything beforehand).

[Skrum]

If I or others say that's not how our games work, do you believe us? That's what I'm finding odd - plenty of people have said in this thread that they don't see games as being structured this way, but that seems to just be rejected?

Like, in the (non-D&D) campaign I was running that just finished up, the premise was 'you're supervillains, set four goals for yourselves of exponentially increasing magnitude - you gain power when you hold progress in your goal, otherwise do as you want'. I didn't prepare an endboss or lots of locations or things like that before the campaign began. I prepared the broad strokes of the setting, enough of the thematics and metaphysics so that I knew how I would add things when I needed to add things, and then basically followed the players' leads.

The campaign before that (which was D&D-based) had a bit more structure but not all that much - characters were each candidates for becoming the avatar of their own myth (or being subsumed by an existing myth if they failed to distinguish themselves), with a bunch of empires each up to their own bit of aggrandizement in various places in the world and a bit of secret lore behind why this stuff about becoming myths was a thing. While the 'mythic ascension is a thing you're involved in' bit was a (wide) bottleneck that would be relevant over the course of the campaign, characters could ascend their myths by doing any number of impactful things or they could go and find the keys to break the whole system - something I dropped a few vague hints about without actually knowing how it would all fit together at the time. In the end, the PCs did pull at those hints, and that *made* me detail those things (as opposed to 'I had detailed those things in advance, and they uncovered them') and as a result the campaign became about fixing the mistakes of the past. I didn't think 'ah, their BBEG fight is going to be against Apophis' when I came up with the campaign, but effectively that sort of was what happened.

The *most* structured campaign I've ever run was a group of circus performers in Planescape climbing the Infinite Stair and going to a different plane every game. I maybe planned 3 sessions in advance at most at any point in that campaign. Around the halfway point of the campaign the players had figured out enough stuff to be dangerous, and all planning basically stopped - it was their decision that the 'destination' there, suggested to them by what they learned on their journey, was to try to directly manipulate belief by going to Pandemonium and using a magical location there to whisper a message to everyone on the planes at once. The BBEG I had originally planned ended up being their ally in distracting and holding off the particular gods who objected to the party's spontaneous 'lets alter reality with subliminal messaging' idea.

Are people not having these kinds of experiences? It seems surreal to me that there's this idea that the DM truly knows anything whatsoever about the last session before the game even starts, and that somehow that's the default expectation.

OK so you're playing a sandbox, the concept of which I literally addressed. Directly. The Dm is coloring in the road the players are on just ahead of them...and that is exactly what I said. The DM isn't going to spend a ton of time rendering places in the world the players couldn't possibly reach, because that would be a huge waste.

I personally run a more world-forward game. Like, before the first game begins I come up with a couple different locations, make up the relationship between them, and then introduce some kind of event, NPC or NPC's acting upon the area, what have you. The idea being that this world existed before the players showed up, will continue to exist after they leave, and the NPC's have an agenda of their own. I'll probably have something like a Main Antagonist that's got some plan, and they'll make moves to carry out that plan, and the players can figure out how they want to interact with that. I.e., if I read my players and their characters correctly, they're probably gonna be fighting Vladdic VonVillainGuy at some point.

Also, modules. A lot of DM's use modules for their games. That's a great example of "can take lots of paths, but the paths end up in certain place."

[JellyPooga]

Magic (whether they're spells or otherwise) falls into two categories;
1) Normal things done differently
2) Things that can't be done normally

The former covers a vast majority of spells. Any effect that only deals damage, lifts or moves things, transports items or creatures, heats, heals or any other process that can be done manually or by natural means. Yes, this even includes travelling to other planes in settings where portals and astral pools exist. Mage Hand or Telekinesis, for example, can be replicated by walking over to the thing and lifting or moving the thing. Likewise, Conjure Bonfire or Flame Sphere can be replicated by making fire the regular old "sticks and tinderbox" way. Just because the spell did it quicker, bigger, with different damage types or whatever, the effect can have happened whether the magic existed or not.

The latter covers those effects that no amount of regular action could have achieved. The truly impossible. Speak with Plants is one such spell. Without it or its effect, nothing can speak to the roadside shrubbery. Period. Animate Dead, Polymorph, Resurrection and Magic Jarwould also be examples of such effects. Even if one went on a quest to visit the underworld to retrieve the spirit of a dead loved one and implored their deity to return them from death, that deity is still using Resurrection (or similar magic) to restore their life. Similarly, without Animate Dead or a similar spell to create an undead creature, nothing is animating that pile of bones as an undead abomination (one might be able to create an automaton or machine out of them, but not an undead).

Category (1) magic doesn't matter and in sufficient abundance is just background noise; a setting detail as notable as the sand in a desert or trees in the forest. You could remove it from the game and nothing would really change. Eldritch Blast is just a magic arrow. Teleport is just a really fast travel montage.

Category (2) magic does matter, because it changes the possibilities of what can be true. Without magic that raises the dead, there is no quest to restore the queens life after her assassination, because such things are not possible, not even by gods. Without magic that creates undead, the Lich with his undead horde is just a creepy necromancer talking to corpses, slowly going mad with delusions of eternal life. Cat-2 magic changes the assumptions of a setting, not just what it looks like.

[Dr.Samurai]

This is the line of thought that I think misses the point a bit. Never stood a chance of what?

The idea being put forth is that the DM has created this world and the world is unaffected by character creation. Meaning, the DM doesn't make any changes to the world based on what the players decide to play.

Well, then it turns out that in order to save the world or beat the bad guy or whatever, the players will have needed a specific high level spell that they do not have access to and cannot gain access to because the DM has already decided on their world building in advance and has a principle that they will not make changes on account of the players.

So the party has lost since session 0 of the campaign, but still went through the motions to get there.

That sounds harsh, but...

I don't think it matters if it sounds harsh or not. I'll just repeat myself from my original post on the topic, it matters if it matters, and it doesn't if it doesn't.

In your case, it would matter greatly if no one had access to certain spells. But the point is, that's not "the game". That's you, and your particular world building and your approach to the matter and what you want to add, include, etc.

It matters because you have decided it matters.

Nobody said Teleport was required. People said that if it doesn't matter, your campaign sucks.

Yeah, it's the same argument, just veiled.

Obviously you can't say it's required because that would mean every party needs a caster that grabs Teleport and every DM needs to run a game that makes Teleport necessary. That's unreasonable of course.

Instead you say "well, it's not required, but if it wouldn't make a difference your game sucks". Not very compelling.

Just going by my current games, only two are high enough level for some poor sap to feel the incredible pressure or learning Teleport. One takes place in Avernus, and I don't even think teleport works well there. In the other game, teleport might be useful for "refueling", but the module already gives you a way to travel to each location (a magical "chain" that teleports you). Also, our level 13 caster there is a druid, so doesn't have access to it anyways (oopsy, session 0 failure I guess).

The other three games we're level 10, 6, and 4 respectively. The level 10 one is in Castle Ravenloft, so takes place in Barovia. Not sure how useful Teleport would be. The other two are actual hex crawls, so I bet Teleport would be rather useful. One will end at around level 9 as per the DM so no luck there. The other has been ongoing for years and the party is level 6 so... looking forward to someone learning Teleport in the next decade or so...


Anyways, not every campaign is going to be a race against the clock in this way. And for those that are, not all of them will have a wizard or sorcerer with Teleport. Doesn't mean they suck, and the DM sucks, and the players suck, etc etc.

[NichG]

OK so you're playing a sandbox, the concept of which I literally addressed. Directly. The Dm is coloring in the road the players are on just ahead of them...and that is exactly what I said. The DM isn't going to spend a ton of time rendering places in the world the players couldn't possibly reach, because that would be a huge waste.

I personally run a more world-forward game. Like, before the first game begins I come up with a couple different locations, make up the relationship between them, and then introduce some kind of event, NPC or NPC's acting upon the area, what have you. The idea being that this world existed before the players showed up, will continue to exist after they leave, and the NPC's have an agenda of their own. I'll probably have something like a Main Antagonist that's got some plan, and they'll make moves to carry out that plan, and the players can figure out how they want to interact with that. I.e., if I read my players and their characters correctly, they're probably gonna be fighting Vladdic VonVillainGuy at some point.

Also, modules. A lot of DM's use modules for their games. That's a great example of "can take lots of paths, but the paths end up in certain place."

Sure, and if someone said 'I run modules and I don't find out of combat abilities to matter' I wouldn't blink. But somehow this became something like 'of course everyone only runs modules, so how can out of combat abilities matter?'

Like people stopped believing in games that aren't modules being a thing. That's weird to me.

I mean heck, out of the three campaigns I described I'd only call the first an actual sandbox. The other two are just 'campaigns'. There's stuff that's going to matter no matter what, but there's lots more stuff that comes about because of what characters do rather than because of planning in advance. I guess you could call that a sandbox but it doesn't seem very far on the sandbox spectrum to me - like, 'it's not a railroad therefore it's a sandbox'?

Like, the infinite stair campaign was very much 'serial TV series' for the first half in structure, with almost no agency about where the next week's episode was going to take place. But if the characters wanted to do their act and get out, investigate the strange reluctance of people to look at the night sky, or steal everything and flee, or recruit talented people into their troupe, it's up to them. Even when it's something like walking into a Harmonium military occupation, do you perform for the troops or do you spread the ideals of the resistance or do you spy on the Harmonium commander or do you say 'skip this one, we stay on the stair'?

[Vahnavoi]

And you don't do that merely by switching the order of encounters. Any differences there are only superficial.

The space for encounter design is vast, possibly uncountably so. It isn't hard to pick encounters that play differently based on the order they're played. As noted, a lot of common game mechanics already drive the game in that direction. There is no reason for the differences to be superficial.

Irrelevant to how the encouters themselves are set up. If encounter A is a 30'x30' room with 10 orcs, it's a 30'x30' room with 10 orcs regardless of if you go there before or after you go in an encounter B, which is a room with 3 ogres. Whether the party wizard is able (and willing) to cast a Fireball doesn't make it a different scenario any more than the fighter missing 5 times in a row instead of getting 5 crits in a row during the encounter. It doesn't matter.

I can tell you've never done any real analysis on such scenarios.

Meeting the orcs first, with every resource intact, plays differently than meeting them second, after expending, say, all Fireball spells on the ogres. It may be a Fireball would've allowed the party get rid of all the orcs in one go, now they have to be fought one by one at a chokepoint. On the other hand, maybe the party would not have been able to win against the ogres without Fireballs, so meeting the orcs first and ogres second would've meant either fleeing or having to negotiate terms of surrender with the ogres.

Likewise, a Fighter who misses 5 times a row may experience several more counter-attacks than they otherwise would've, leaving them worse for the wear for next encounter - or dead. A Fighter who makes five critical hits, on the other hand, might down as many opponents, thus preventing them from attacking him - leaving him at significantly better position. The difference between this and a Fireball is that using a spell slot is a true choice, while missing and hitting are chance. The comparable choice for a Fighter is who to attack, since it isn't all the same which order he does it in. For example, if there are two foes, one that can be downed with a 80% chance and another that can be downed with 20% chance, attacking the first is a better choice, since that leaves smaller chance of both surviving for another round.

If you say these things don't matter, your idea of "superficial differences" that "don't matter" covers vast majority of tactical decisions and their consequences in a D&D-like game.

[Telok]

In your case, it would matter greatly if no one had access to certain spells. But the point is, that's not "the game". That's you, and your particular world building and your approach to the matter and what you want to add, include, etc.

It matters because you have decided it matters.

That raises an interesting question: Did I decide to make it matter that some classes have out of combat magic and others don't?

Because I wrote a relatively mainstream setting with flying castles, underwater civilizations, pocket dimensions, planes, and a limited number of links between them. Some of the world building and adventure potential that arose from that is predicated on things like there not being convenient planar portals, commercial teleport services, easily acessible flying critters to carry armored riders, or common herbs to allow people the breath underwater. I didn't do that to screw over noncasters or make having noncombat spells matter, I just didn't consider it because the game already gives the options to do all the stuff right in the PH.

So did I choose to make noncombat spells matter by not thinking about adding stuff inconsistent with my setting to enable a party of guy-at-the-gym characters to go everywhere and do everything? Or does the base default settings of the game make it matter by giving the standard and assumed fighter-mage-priest-thief party the noncombat abilities to do that stuff?

I think that the game is designed to give characters everything they need to go on all the adventures within the default PH rules. The game design makes the noncombat spells matter because they're the usual way to do stuff like access the planes and explore underwater dungeons. Adding handicap access for parties without noncombat spells is the optional extra stuff in the DMG that the GM can choose to use or not, as it fits their campaign and setting.

Aside: as time goes on I'm getting more interested in if the game can be played past lower-middle levels without the assumed tank & healer stuff, or how much bending and alteration to published campaigns has to be done to enable that sort of play.

[Darth Credence]

Aside: as time goes on I'm getting more interested in if the game can be played past lower-middle levels without the assumed tank & healer stuff, or how much bending and alteration to published campaigns has to be done to enable that sort of play.

It absolutely can. Recently had a group at level 15 with two wizards and a drakewarden ranger. Some things were easy, some were hard, but the game functioned just fine. Not a published campaign.

[JackPhoenix]

I can tell you've never done any real analysis on such scenarios.

Why would I? I set up a scenario, it's up to players to decide how they'll deal with it. Wasting time trying to account for every possible player decision and outcome of every possible roll is beyond pointless.

If you say these things don't matter, your idea of "superficial differences" that "don't matter" covers vast majority of tactical decisions and their consequences in a D&D-like game.

That is correct. The tactical decisions the players make and the random outcome of the rolls in combat are irrelevant to how the encounter itself is set up.

[Silly Name]

Aside: as time goes on I'm getting more interested in if the game can be played past lower-middle levels without the assumed tank & healer stuff, or how much bending and alteration to published campaigns has to be done to enable that sort of play.

I would argue that, since higher-level characters have more "staying power", it's actually easier to forgo healers and tanks at higher level than at lower ones. Most casters also get the option to just summon tanks at higher levels, and other classes obtain various forms of limited self-healing, damage avoidance and reduction.

[Dr.Samurai]

That raises an interesting question: Did I decide to make it matter that some classes have out of combat magic and others don't?

Well, it's probably more accurate to say that you made some decisions that resulted in non-combat magic mattering a lot.

Because I wrote a relatively mainstream setting with flying castles, underwater civilizations, pocket dimensions, planes, and a limited number of links between them. Some of the world building and adventure potential that arose from that is predicated on things like there not being convenient planar portals, commercial teleport services, easily acessible flying critters to carry armored riders, or common herbs to allow people the breath underwater. I didn't do that to screw over noncasters or make having noncombat spells matter, I just didn't consider it because the game already gives the options to do all the stuff right in the PH.

To clarify, I don't think this requires any malice for it to be "on you", so to speak.

There are flying mounts in the game. There's a ranger subclass that gets the ability to locate portals at 3rd level. There are portals to all the planes from Sigil, the City of Doors, the Astral Plane, and Infinite Staircase, etc. So the default settings like Greyhawk and Forgotten Realms assume portals to the Material Plane. Eberron has Manifest Zones that can let you travel to other planes under the right conditions.

I appreciate that people make settings without these trappings. That's fine, I'm not knocking that in any way. But it's a choice. These are not "handicap" choices; these are fantasy elements.

Alice didn't need 7th level spells to get to Wonderland, nor did the children need Plane Shift to get to Narnia. Nor did Frodo need Teleport to get to Mordor, despite the urgency of growing evil and coming war.

We can't project the settings/choices some DMs make, onto the game as a whole.

Aside: as time goes on I'm getting more interested in if the game can be played past lower-middle levels without the assumed tank & healer stuff, or how much bending and alteration to published campaigns has to be done to enable that sort of play.

This is another thing that will matter depending on the nature of the game being run.

[Mastikator]

Yeah, it's the same argument, just veiled.

Obviously you can't say it's required because that would mean every party needs a caster that grabs Teleport and every DM needs to run a game that makes Teleport necessary. That's unreasonable of course.

Instead you say "well, it's not required, but if it wouldn't make a difference your game sucks". Not very compelling.

Just going by my current games, only two are high enough level for some poor sap to feel the incredible pressure or learning Teleport. One takes place in Avernus, and I don't even think teleport works well there. In the other game, teleport might be useful for "refueling", but the module already gives you a way to travel to each location (a magical "chain" that teleports you). Also, our level 13 caster there is a druid, so doesn't have access to it anyways (oopsy, session 0 failure I guess).

The other three games we're level 10, 6, and 4 respectively. The level 10 one is in Castle Ravenloft, so takes place in Barovia. Not sure how useful Teleport would be. The other two are actual hex crawls, so I bet Teleport would be rather useful. One will end at around level 9 as per the DM so no luck there. The other has been ongoing for years and the party is level 6 so... looking forward to someone learning Teleport in the next decade or so...


Anyways, not every campaign is going to be a race against the clock in this way. And for those that are, not all of them will have a wizard or sorcerer with Teleport. Doesn't mean they suck, and the DM sucks, and the players suck, etc etc.

Teleport and plane shift are not the only high impact out of combat spells.

Speak with animals is available to druids from level 1 and is extremely powerful for information gathering. Animals can serve as witnesses and can be bribed into short recon missions. Feather fall is available from level 1 and lets you defeat fall damage. Invisibility is available at level 3. Revivify is available at level 5. Speak with dead is available at level 5.

If the adventure is a murder mystery then a party of barbarians will have to work real hard, they may as well be commoners. A single 5th cleric can cast one spell and solve it as an action.

I'm willing to bet revivify, speak with dead, feather fall, invisibility, speak with animals are extremely useful in Curse of Strahd.

[Psyren]

That raises an interesting question: Did I decide to make it matter that some classes have out of combat magic and others don't?

Because I wrote a relatively mainstream setting with flying castles, underwater civilizations, pocket dimensions, planes, and a limited number of links between them. Some of the world building and adventure potential that arose from that is predicated on things like there not being convenient planar portals, commercial teleport services, easily acessible flying critters to carry armored riders, or common herbs to allow people the breath underwater. I didn't do that to screw over noncasters or make having noncombat spells matter, I just didn't consider it because the game already gives the options to do all the stuff right in the PH.

I appreciate that people make settings without these trappings. That's fine, I'm not knocking that in any way. But it's a choice. These are not "handicap" choices; these are fantasy elements.

Alice didn't need 7th level spells to get to Wonderland, nor did the children need Plane Shift to get to Narnia. Nor did Frodo need Teleport to get to Mordor, despite the urgency of growing evil and coming war.

We can't project the settings/choices some DMs make, onto the game as a whole.

^ What Samurai said but I'll add - nobody said alternate routes to spellcasting have to be "convenient." Just attainable. Finding a portal or scroll or a magical creature willing to serve as a mount or a capable NPC could in fact be a huge pain in the donkey relative to having someone who can plane shift on staff. Or they might be equally difficult in entirely different ways. Neither approach locks you into a specific permutation of worldbuilding, especially not one you don't want to be.

[Vahnavoi]

Why would I? I set up a scenario, it's up to players to decide how they'll deal with it. Wasting time trying to account for every possible player decision and outcome of every possible roll is beyond pointless.

Why would you? To answer questions such as "do these options matter?". If you never do that, you end up arguing from ignorance.

Exhaustive analysis is not necessary to set up a game, though. If I set up four encounters that the players can tackle in any order, I can be confident there are at least 4! paths through the game even if I never explicitly list them. That's part of the appeal of setting up processes to create content, rather than creating content: I don't have to think up what happens next beforehand, because play will produce the answer.

Players deciding how to deal with a given situation is part and parcel with that, as already explained. I'm simply telling you why it matters which path players decide to follow.

That is correct. The tactical decisions the players make and the random outcome of the rolls in combat are irrelevant to how the encounter itself is set up.

They are very much relevant when tactical decisions and chance events from earlier encounters have effect on the current one. Facing ten orcs in a square room becomes different situation based on whether a Wizard is willing and able to use that Fireball, etc.. By failing to understand that, you fail to understand the advice given.

[JackPhoenix]

Players deciding how to deal with a given situation is part and parcel with that, as already explained. I'm simply telling you why it matters which path players decide to follow.

It doesn't. No matter what path they take, they will always face the same 4 encounters.

They are very much relevant when tactical decisions and chance events from earlier encounters have effect on the current one. Facing ten orcs in a square room becomes different situation based on whether a Wizard is willing and able to use that Fireball, etc.. By failing to understand that, you fail to understand the advice given.

No, it doesn't. You're still facing ten orcs in a square room. The situation is exactly the same, your approach does not change that. The advice you're giving is simply wrong.