Constructing D&D's Default World

Kaelik · Post by **Kaelik** » Tue Mar 31, 2015 10:14 pm

Dean wrote:Anyway what I want to talk about now is Demons and Devils and greater teleport.

...

This would also change architecture unrecognizably since most defensive structures, even walls, no longer make sense.

Unless 40ft of contiguous material blocked teleport or something.

RadiantPhoenix · Post by **RadiantPhoenix** » Tue Mar 31, 2015 10:56 pm

Kaelik wrote:
Dean wrote:Anyway what I want to talk about now is Demons and Devils and greater teleport.

...

This would also change architecture unrecognizably since most defensive structures, even walls, no longer make sense.
Unless 40ft of contiguous material blocked teleport or something.

That still doesn't explain open-top fortresses, just dungeons and roofed castles.

hyzmarca · Post by **hyzmarca** » Tue Mar 31, 2015 11:12 pm

FrankTrollman wrote:
Grek wrote:I get that. What I don't get is why we want Asmodeus to be a planetary ruler. Why do we want Baator to be the one you reach by space ship? Why do we want devils to come through using stargates? Surely, that should be the role of the Ithillids and the Xill?
It's a leveled game. There are evil counts, evil kings, evil emperors, and evil gods. And you're supposed to be able to fight them in that order. I take it as given that the evil god-emperor of an evil planet is better final boss material than the evil emperor of an evil continent spanning empire, just as the hypothetical evil emperor would be a better final boss than the evil king of an evil kingdom or the evil count of an evil county. And if D&D is to have a final boss, it's going to be Demogorgon or Asmodeus (or both).

I would argue that there comes a point where you want to fight villains that are weaker than you are, if for no other reason than making a stronger villain strains credulity.

There is a limit to the number of villains that you can pull out of your ass as a campaign progresses. Ideally, you'll want your villains to instead flow logically from the player's choices.

Once you beat the God-Emperor of Evil-land, your enemy shouldn't be the Space Pope, it would be Space Al-Quaeda, rushing in to fill the power vacuum and declare holy war on you. And even though they're individually weaker than you by far, they collectively have large numbers of suicide bombers willing to set off enter encyclopedia sets full of explosive runes in your face so they're still a threat, just one that you can't handle using the same strategies that defeated the God-Emperor.

Omegonthesane · Post by **Omegonthesane** » Tue Mar 31, 2015 11:28 pm

hyzmarca wrote:
FrankTrollman wrote:
Grek wrote:I get that. What I don't get is why we want Asmodeus to be a planetary ruler. Why do we want Baator to be the one you reach by space ship? Why do we want devils to come through using stargates? Surely, that should be the role of the Ithillids and the Xill?
It's a leveled game. There are evil counts, evil kings, evil emperors, and evil gods. And you're supposed to be able to fight them in that order. I take it as given that the evil god-emperor of an evil planet is better final boss material than the evil emperor of an evil continent spanning empire, just as the hypothetical evil emperor would be a better final boss than the evil king of an evil kingdom or the evil count of an evil county. And if D&D is to have a final boss, it's going to be Demogorgon or Asmodeus (or both).
I would argue that there comes a point where you want to fight villains that are weaker than you are, if for no other reason than making a stronger villain strains credulity.

There is a limit to the number of villains that you can pull out of your ass as a campaign progresses. Ideally, you'll want your villains to instead flow logically from the player's choices.

Once you beat the God-Emperor of Evil-land, your enemy shouldn't be the Space Pope, it would be Space Al-Quaeda, rushing in to fill the power vacuum and declare holy war on you. And even though they're individually weaker than you by far, they collectively have large numbers of suicide bombers willing to set off enter encyclopedia sets full of explosive runes in your face so they're still a threat, just one that you can't handle using the same strategies that defeated the God-Emperor.

The occasional breather encounter against large numbers of weak people who are splatted by your overpoweredness might be a good idea for reminding players that they are among the most badass badass things that were ever badass in the game's setting, but the D&D model does not lend itself to personally repelling Space Al-Qaeda.

Alternately, there can be a number of similar magnitude endgame threats, and the absolute final battle is a wolf pack of "all the evil space god emperors you haven't killed yet in a desperate alliance against their common enemy". Like how the proposed Defeat the Deathlords campaign in Exalted should have been "sessions 1-6 kill Mask of Winters, sessions 7-12 kill First and Forsaken Lion, sessions 13-18 kill all the other Deathlords in no particular order and possibly in multiples at a time because you've taken out the strongest one, sessions 19-24 denouement that includes stealing back all the Abyssal shards and working out how to make the Neverborn stay dead".

(Should have been, because it is a matter of public record that Mask of Winters, despite being the weakest of the climax bosses for an anti-Neverborn campaign, was ratcheted up to 'requires a heavily minmaxed apex level player party to stand a chance' when White Wolf realised he wasn't there already.)

Dean · Post by **Dean** » Wed Apr 01, 2015 12:11 am

Kaelik wrote:Unless 40ft of contiguous material blocked teleport or something.

As pithy as that is Hell's encounters tend to be less dungeons and more assaults. I don't really know why that is but it is. Adventures on the prime have lots of people going into pits filled with treasure and mysteries but Hell's adventures are traditionally much more of a war campaign. Smashing shit in peoples castles and so on and the Tome teleport rules were created specifically to make reasons that people made dungeons instead of castles.

It would be nice if there was an easy way to make it so that Dis can exist and all the other fortresses in Hell can too, as well as providing a reason that they even have cities and towns in the sense that you and I think of them which makes no sense for beings for whom distance or protection basically don't exist as concepts. I think the easiest way to do that is to make the meatgrinder troops have to walk in file like they're supposed to while still accepting that Vrocks can totally just teleport on top of your fort and start killing you at any moment.

Wiseman · Post by **Wiseman** » Wed Apr 01, 2015 4:27 am

Dis, the Bronze Fortress, Malsheem and ect. are under a permanant Dimensional Anchor effect. Maybe higher ranking fiends can get clearance that allows them to use their teleportation abilities in populated areas.

Also, there's this clause from the spell.

SRD wrote:Areas of strong physical or magical energy may make teleportation more hazardous or even impossible.

So all those big fortresses are actually so high in magic that teleportation is impossible.

Dean · Post by **Dean** » Wed Apr 01, 2015 5:42 am

This is a sincere question: Does that seem less hamhanded to you? It feels more so to me but I'm willing to be convinced. I feel the cleaner solution is to just say that the bulk of traditional hell forces can't teleport. An anti teleport spell that functioned properly rather than any of the SRD ones could be created if that's the solution you wanted to go for but that's more than just a handwave task. I guess you could use Forbiddance if you posit that Hell has huge amounts of gold to throw at the task and sticks to using it on small buildings or just important parts of the larger ones.

You could even mix the two. Cut off peon teleports and cite that Hell makes widespread use of Forbiddance.

Shady314 · Post by **Shady314** » Wed Apr 01, 2015 5:59 am

Magical counters never strike me as ham handed as long as there are rules for them and players can gain access to the same. Of course wizards come up with magical means of countering magic. People do that kind of thing.
If the DM says no you can't teleport there because um you just can't that's ham handed. If he says you can't teleport closer than X miles because the fiends maintain a dimensional anchor, here's how it works and yes you can ward your stronghold the same way then it's fine with me. Oh also you have to be allowed to try and suffer the consequences.

For me it's like saying no you can't really fly into that city because there are anti-air defenses and your private unarmed Cessna has no chance of overcoming them but feel free to try.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Wed Apr 01, 2015 6:21 am

Dean wrote:This is a sincere question: Does that seem less hamhanded to you? It feels more so to me but I'm willing to be convinced. I feel the cleaner solution is to just say that the bulk of traditional hell forces can't teleport. An anti teleport spell that functioned properly rather than any of the SRD ones could be created if that's the solution you wanted to go for but that's more than just a handwave task. I guess you could use Forbiddance if you posit that Hell has huge amounts of gold to throw at the task and sticks to using it on small buildings or just important parts of the larger ones.

You could even mix the two. Cut off peon teleports and cite that Hell makes widespread use of Forbiddance.

First of all, if you were making a new edition, in addition to cutting out all the bullshit infinities, you'd also cut out all the at-will long distance teleport and planar travel. Demons should be in some sense trapped in Hell. At least some of them should be, at least some of the time. It's a lot harder to tell stories about demons when they can all hold their breath and go thousands of miles away in six seconds. And then do it again six seconds later if they change their mind.

But whether you're making a new edition or not, any fortress that isn't protected from Teleportation is not actually a Fortress if it is populated by high enough level people that the enemies they care about can teleport. The idea that Dispater's Iron Fortress isn't protected from Teleport Ambushes is so absurd that it doesn't even deserve serious consideration. Of course Tcian Sumere is protected from Teleport Ambushes. What the hell good would it be if it wasn't? Maybe there's a place you can teleport to that is technically "in" Tu'narath, but you can be damn certain that there are defenses pointed towards that location and it might actually be harder to get to the Queen from there than by teleporting all the way outside and trying to get in from there.

-Username17

DSMatticus · Post by **DSMatticus** » Wed Apr 01, 2015 6:26 am

D&D's "every outsider who matters can teleport" is... kind of interesting, but also kind of stupid, and I suspect even the reasons I find it interesting are because of how stupidly it changes a bunch of basic setting assumptions.

But it doesn't really matter. Demogorgon has a throne room, and he doesn't want teleporting hitsquads dropping into it. That's true if Demogorgon has teleport himself and it's doubly true if he doesn't. The teleportation issue is only more keenly felt in planar adventures because 1) they are higher level and supposed to be taken more seriously than King-of-the-Week George, and 2) all the things have teleport. But the actual principle is that thing Frank ninja'd me to saying, where people whose enemies can teleport are only going to settle down in places where they don't have to worry about teleporting hitsquads.

tussock · Post by **tussock** » Wed Apr 01, 2015 8:09 am

The little guys already can't teleport, by the way. That's just the normal rules.

3.x scales too fast for the little guys to actually matter, no number of Dretch can defeat any of the big guys, but they can't teleport and so walls keep out the riff-raff.

Maybe Asmodeus just rearranges his furniture a lot and lets very few creatures see his sanctum anyway, so there's no real way to have a description of it to Greater Teleport to.

I think the solution is just to accept that Hell and The Abyss are all really, really small. Like hell has two layers that are really big cities, but the other layers aren't any bigger, and all the Demons that matter in the whole world is just a few thousand. There really are 18 Balors, and they have their little baronies a couple miles across, and that's it.

Teleport at-will and trivial reforming after destruction is then the only thing keeping them going, the ability to perfectly dog-pile any assault makes in-fighting particularly brutal and well sustained, but also makes their small numbers scarier than they would normally be.

Edit: So the castles are largely there to be seen, give you a clear signal when shit is going down so everyone can go there. Also somewhere to keep all your Dretches tidied away. Heh, keeping in the things that can't teleport.

DSMatticus · Post by **DSMatticus** » Wed Apr 01, 2015 9:12 am

Among the demons and devils of core, greater teleport kicks in at CR five. The bearded devils who get it are described as front-line soldiers and guards. Hell is just all around a higher CR place; lemures and dretches and the like are less the equivalent of a level 1 warrior and more the equivalent of a level 1 commoner who's been conscripted and handed a stick. You could reserve greater teleport for the demons who matter, but "demons who matter" needs to be set considerably higher than CR 5. And even after doing that, you have done nothing to address the fact that high level characters in general can murder eachother with teleport ambushes and as such can never really settle down anywhere. You have to provide ways to control teleportation within a territory. That's not really optional, because high-level conflict is fucking stupid if you do not do that.

Let's look at the devils:
Lemure (CR 1)
Imp (CR 2)
Bearded (CR 5, GT)
Kyton (CR 6)
Hellcat (CR 7)
Erinyes (CR 8, GT)
Bone (CR 9, GT)
Barbed (CR 11, GT)
Ice (CR 13, GT)
Horned (CR 16, GT)
Pit Fiend (CR 20, GT)

Let's look at the demons:
Dretch (CR 2)
Quasit (CR 2)
Babau (CR 6, GT)
Succubus (CR 7, GT)
Vrock (CR 9, GT)
Bebilith (CR 10, PS)
Hezrou (CR 11, GT)
Glabrezu (CR 13, GT)
Nalfeshnee (CR 14, GT)
Marilith (CR 17, GT)
Balor (CR 20, GT)

If we push greater teleport back to 13, then...

The bearded devil and babau are downgraded to relatively ordinary soldiers.

The ability of the erinyes and vrock to fly actually matters in terms of mobility, because they can no longer just teleport everywhere.

The bone devil, barbed devil, and hezrou are elite units whose presence on the battlefield matters, but they don't just spontaneously show up.

The ice devil, horned devil, pit fiend, glabrezu, nalfeshnee, marilith, and balor are all "nobility," and they are fairly rare. For the most part, they avoid the battlefield. Who knows how big a posse of noble demons the enemy has waiting to gank you if you show your face? And while your death may not be permanent, while you're dead no one is going to respect your territorial claims - so odds are good by the time you have your body back your enemies (and allies) will have torn your domain to pieces.

Pixels · Post by **Pixels** » Wed Apr 01, 2015 6:31 pm

If you want a truly secure space, you have to go to extremes. Using Genesis to make a demiplane and then coating it in permanent Dimensional Locks with Extraordinary Spell Aim to not effect you is probably the best bet for being truly inaccessible.

If for some reason you want a fortress that other people can access, then Dimensional Locks are only a first layer of defense. It doesn't take much effort to bombard from a long distance, fly in, or burrow through any given material. A decent defense is Walls of Force with Antimagic Fields covering them, and even that can be destroyed by an enemy willing to approach near enough to use Disjunction. You can coat the rest of your base in more Antimagic Fields or Dimensional Locks, leaving a very small space that people can teleport to for an entrance. Aim all your guns magic at the small space.

About the only way to be secure against Disjunction is a pile of your favorite flavor of Colossus behind your Walls of Force, but that means you're using epic rules and when you're using epic rules any defense is screwed right out of the gate.

hyzmarca · Post by **hyzmarca** » Wed Apr 01, 2015 6:43 pm

Greater Teleport works better for Tempter Demons than for Combat Demons.

A closet troll that can show up anywhere at any time and kill you makes for a boring game and a boring story. A whisperer who can show up anywhere at any time and offer you exactly what you need to solve your problem in exchange for a very tiny price, on the other hand, is interesting.

codeGlaze · Post by **codeGlaze** » Wed Apr 01, 2015 9:33 pm

hyzmarca wrote:[...]A whisperer who can show up anywhere at any time and offer you exactly what you need to solve your problem in exchange for a very tiny price, on the other hand, is interesting.

Desparation walking (jumping/ travelling)?

Ice9 · Post by **Ice9** » Wed Apr 01, 2015 9:37 pm

Pixels wrote:If you want a truly secure space, you have to go to extremes. Using Genesis to make a demiplane and then coating it in permanent Dimensional Locks with Extraordinary Spell Aim to not effect you is probably the best bet for being truly inaccessible.

Except Wish. Wish screws a lot of things up, with the "transport regardless of local conditions" option.

A possible idea for the Wish case is to make a demiplane and fill it with solid material, leaving only a space the exact shape of your body. Then once you enter it, there will be no space for anyone else to fit. To deal with incorporeal invaders, make the material Ghost Touch and make yourself Ghost Touch with a Amulet of Mighty Fists. Even then, it could be argued that the Wish spell would simply make a hole for the caster to arrive in.

However, if you're not worrying about Wish, there's a pretty handy demiplane set-up you can create that allows people to visit you but only with permission.

1) Your main demiplane, has Conjuration magic barred.
2) Your "foyer" demiplane, has all magic except Conjuration barred.
3) Permanent gate connecting the two. On the main demiplane side, it's blocked by a Wall of Force.
4) Minion (one who's immune to gaze attacks, ideally) stands on the main demiplane side of the wall, opens it only if the person arriving on the other side has permission to enter.

hyzmarca · Post by **hyzmarca** » Thu Apr 02, 2015 1:02 am

codeGlaze wrote:
hyzmarca wrote:[...]A whisperer who can show up anywhere at any time and offer you exactly what you need to solve your problem in exchange for a very tiny price, on the other hand, is interesting.
Desparation walking (jumping/ travelling)?

Oh yes, that's flavorful.

Walk the strings that bind the hearts of the desperate, the afraid, and the alone. They tie all men to the freezing wastes of Cocytus, where despair is born and from whence despair leads them astray.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Fri Apr 03, 2015 6:48 am

You could have a whole set of those things. Some fiends could be able to travel on the Path of Grief, able to travel to places where someone has just found out that a close friend, relative, or loved one has died. Some fiends could be able to travel on the Path of Frustration, where they could appear before people who have had their attempts to gain their heart's desire thwarted three times.

Weird and flavorful travel methods beat the living hell out of boring yet technical discussions of what Teleport can and cannot do.

-Username17[/i]