One of the most exciting reasons why I wanted to play a Wizard in my current campaign (or rather, the current campaign in which I'm a player and not a DM) was Plane Shift.
Plane Shift is a 7th level spell, so even dedicated spellcasters can only get access to it after hitting 13th level - which is beyond the point most campaigns get to, as they tend to cap out somewhere between level 10 and 12.
But with the new revisions coming to D&D, along with Matthew Colville's entertainingly and excitingly candid videos about designing his company's own tactical fantasy TTRPG, I've been revisiting a lot of my assumptions.
To take a step back, I'd say the classes I've played the most of are an Eldritch Knight Fighter, a Hexblade Warlock, my current Scribes Wizard, and a Drunken Master Monk (the Warlock and Monk being part of Adventurer's League, with the Warlock being my character going through Baldur's Gate: Descent into Avernus and the Monk simply going through a lot of one-off AL adventures).
The Wizard is only level 6 - lower than any of those other three classes (our Wildemount Campaign has only been able to play roughly every other week and is a relatively slow-paced, story-focused campaign, and also I think my DM just tends to run things at a slower pace).
But the point is, of the three I've gotten into tier 3, the Warlock is the only pure caster, but Warlocks are also very weird - they do get spells at the same power level as other full spellcasters, but they don't get as broad a selection. Granted, Warlocks also suffer a bit in their high-level spell options (I think I took Finger of Death because it was thematically right for a Hexblade Warlock - I really played up the Shadowfell connection).
But I've been thinking:
Does it even make sense for a player character to have a spell like Plane Shift?
Traveling from Plane to Plane is a big deal. Consider, for example, that in real world religious traditions, a living person traveling to, say, Heaven, is basically an unprecedented miracle. I mean, I think in Christianity I believe (and sorry to any Theologians who know better) Mary is the only living person ever to just go to Heaven without dying (though I guess you could argue that Jesus rises from the dead and then, while alive again, then goes bodily into Heaven). It's an enormous deal.
The Planes of D&D are not quite like those in real-world religion, though there's clearly a lot of inspiration from them. Mount Celestia is somewhat based on Purgatory from Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy, and the Nine Hells are uncontroversially based on his Inferno. Hades and Elysium are naturally based on Greek myth (ignoring that Hades in Greek reckoning would be really True Neutral, and Elysium is technically just the nice part of Hades). Ysgard is largely inspired by Norse myth.
The point being: travel between these planes of existence (more than just worlds) marks a grand moment in almost any fantasy/mythological story.
So, should there even be a mechanical basis for it in the first place?
One of the concepts in the Planescape setting is that planar travel is far more often accomplished via portals than spells. This does, for one thing, make it easier to have a plane-hopping adventure at lower levels. But it also simplifies the geography of an adventure.
As a DM, if you have a location on another plane where you want your players to go, you can build around that - you can put the portal to that plane in a particular place - maybe a remote place, such that there's an entire adventure about just reaching the portal. And then you can have that portal be some place specific in relation to the area on the other plane you want the party to get to - maybe there's some dread fortress within Minauros, the third layer of the Nine Hells, and the party needs to raid the vault of some legendary miser who became a powerful devil after they died in order to secure some treasure they need for... McGuffin purposes.
Getting there becomes a potentially really cool adventure - having to find a way into the Nine Hells and then perhaps only arriving in Avernus (I can't recall, but I vaguely remember there being some rule that you can only go directly to Avernus, though obviously DMs can make it work however they like). From there, you get an adventure where you navigate the literal hellscape and cross the endless battlefields of Avernus, traverse the iron city of Dis, and then enter the fetid swamps of Minauros before reaching this fortress.
But if they're 13th level and have a Wizard with Plane Shift and the right tuning fork to get to Baator, one 7th level spell is all they need to arrive at their destination.
That tuning fork as a material component is there, of course, for a reason: to ensure that the DM ultimately has control over whether they can go there or not.
But perhaps that's too binary of a switch.
See, I think it is part of the fantasy of being a Wizard or other powerful spellcaster that you should be able to do such awesome things as traveling between planes.
But I also think that the spell slot system is kind of ill-suited to this kind of epic spellcasting.
Ultimately, the spell slot system is built to be a limited resource that forces players to judge how much they can expend to survive the day. But it's also meant to turn the "day" (or more accurately the interval between long rests) into the ultimate unit of D&D player power.
While there are downtime rules in D&D, the game kind of struggles with them, and different campaigns can make vastly different use of them. The campaign I'm running right now is designed to involve long periods of downtime (I'm planning to have a year-long gap after the current adventure) and so there is plenty of opportunity to engage in long-term projects. But I've played in campaigns where we haven't spent a single day not adventuring.
And honestly, that latter way of doing things kind of feels like the way 5th Edition is intended to be played. Other than hit dice or more than one level of exhaustion, you get everything back on a long rest (and the 2024 rules will also give you all your hit dice back). This means that you'll be fresh as a daisy as long as you can get your beauty rest, but it also means that there's no real stakes to expending vast resources if you have any sort of time on your hands.
(As a side note, I've imagined running a campaign where the party is cursed at the beginning to die in 13 days, which I figure would really push the players to try to progress as much as possible and push themselves to the limit without just taking a long rest if things get hard. Obviously would want player buy-in at the start.)
If we compare two 7th level spells, we can see how there's a kind of disparity here.
Delayed Blast Fireball is a powerful Evocation spell that can deal a lot of damage in the right combat situation (ideally giving it some time to charge up in power). That's the sort of thing that a combat-focused adventurer like most D&D characters are would want to have ready to use once a day.
Plane Shift, on the other hand, is a spell you basically want to use ideally on a day when you don't have other pressing matters, so that, as a Wizard, you can swap it out and prepare Delayed Blast Fireball, or perhaps only keep prepared to use as an emergency exit button.
Would a campaign not be better served by simply having the party find a portal?
Or, alternatively, should a powerful spellcaster need to prepare some special ritual, some grand project, to travel to another plane?
I mean, consider that in the real world, if you want to fly to another continent, that's a pretty big commitment of money and needs to be planned well in advance in most cases.
In a certain way, I can almost see now how and why I'm drawn to half-casters and third-casters - lower-level spells tend to be more immediate, practical, tactical things. To be sure there are plenty of those at high levels (Meteor Swarm is great if you want to roll all the dice for all the damage now).
But also, I think that this sort of spell is kind of why the game has a reputation for breaking down at higher levels. Things like "Scry and Fry," where you cast Scrying on the boss monster or key treasure of some castle and then cast Teleport while looking at that place to automatically get in safely, right at the target destination, forces DMs to come up with all manner of contrivances to prevent such shenanigans.
I'm curious about MCDM's intentions to make their game go only to 10th level. In a vacuum, of course, this could mean nothing. Level 20 means nearly godlike power in D&D while it was historically the "just out of the racial starting territories" in World of Warcraft (before various level squishes and level scaling were introduced).
But common wisdom says that a lot of D&D campaigns only go up to about level 10 anyway - and there's plenty of fun to be had at level 10, with pure casters getting 5 levels of spells, and most classes starting to really feel like they've hit their stride. Would we, actually, feel the game needed more levels if there wasn't already a tradition of 20 levels? Indeed, in previous editions there were "epic level" sourcebooks that took players up to level 30, but isn't level 11-20 kind of already "epic level?"
But even if we accept and indeed want to see adventurers hitting higher levels (and I think I do - certainly as a player, and as a DM I feel I've gotten pretty used to running stuff for tier 3 characters - just in time for them to hit tier 4) I do think these sort of instant-travel spells, particularly the ones that take you to new planes or new worlds, might actually be a case of mechanicalizing something that should be more of a plot point.
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