How can I preserve medieval transportation tropes for the PCs in a world with travel magic?

Question

The problem: Overland travel spells and magic items disrupt the value of several fantasy elements that I don't want to sacrifice in a campaign, such as mounts (and the classes that make use of them), vehicles, the vastness and dangers of wilderness, the passage of time as a cost when players are making strategic decisions, and so on. Problem spells in particular include teleportation, wind walk and overland flight, but there are many more that I may not be aware of.*

My question: How can I preserve these fantasy elements essential to the game-play style I have in mind?

Class balance matters to me: I want to offset the loss of these critical spells by some means. I think Pathfinder does a good job of class balance, and I want to keep it that way.

Do I have to do it the hard way and track down every such spell and ability and ban/nerf them individually? I am hoping there's a higher-level strategy to instead preserve both these elements and these class abilities.

^{* Combat duration spells like fly or relatively short distance overland spells like tree walk and air walk are not a problem.}

Answer 1

PCs have an opportunity cost to use magical travel (a wizard who prepares teleport is using a high level spell slot, of which he probably has only a few -- possibly only one). If the group chooses to travel by overland flight, they won't be able to take their mounts, so if they get separated from their spellcaster, they'll be stuck on foot. Teleport has those pesky error chances -- etc. If they don't know precisely where they're going, teleport isn't even an available choice, and overland flight or wind walk would require landing short of their goal with spell slots spent and still time to be spent and hazards to be faced before they reach their destination.

I don't see the availability of travel magic eliminating ground or sea travel, only giving PCs a choice (and a choice that can very easily influence decision making, forcing them to spend resources on magic, if they're to save time otherwise needed for ground travel). That choice can become a tool for the DM, with a little care.

Answer 2

My solution for this problem is to not run campaigns with high-level characters in them (either PC or NPC). I plan for my plot to end when the characters hit level 9, and there are no level-9 NPCs, so all those spells you mention are simply not available.

There are still a few low-level travel spells, such as communal mount which summons fresh horses for the party, but I don't mind those as much.

If you want to run a higher-level game but not have travel spells, I recommend explicitly ruling: "travel magic doesn't work in this campaign". If you make any lesser ruling, the players will try to find a way to circumvent it -- for example if you ban teleport they will use transport via plants and you'll have to issue a spot houserule to ban that too.

I don't think you need to worry about game balance. High-level spellcasters are very powerful compared to fighter-types, and taking one or two spells off their vast spell list won't hurt them.

Answer 3

Overland travel spells and magic items disrupt the value of several fantasy elements that I don't want to sacrifice in a campaign

I'm going to be generous and assume that "I" above means "my players and I".

If that is the case and that where your group finds the fun in a the game is in "mounts, vehicles, the vastness and dangers of wilderness, the passage of time" then:

1. It takes all kinds
2. You don't have a problem because you simply agree that, since this is where the fun is, no one will do anything that will bypass this.

There is no game balance issue; a PC who is not using resources on travel magic is using it on kill things magic or heal things magic or divine things magic instead.

If "I" really does mean "I" then your first and most important step is to change that into "my players and I" or else you'll see another kind of travel magic when players stop travelling to your game.

Answer 4

Enjoy the evolving nature of play

All the spells you mention are relatively high spell-level. Overland flight is 5th, so is teleport, and wind walk is 6th or higher. That means characters will not get access to them for the first eight levels of play. That is where all the mundane stuff happens, before play moves into more superhero-like levels of ability.

When you play a normal campaign, you have plenty of time to experience the challenges of overland travel with muddy roads, rain, horses and the need for food and shelter during those eight character levels. This is going to be a large part of your campaign, if not the majority of it. At some point, it actually will be nice to not have to play that out every time.

At higher levels fast-travel schemes are hard to restrict, as there is also summoning of flying mounts, or polymorphing / shape shifting into flying forms to cut down travel times and obstacles significantly.

These spells are more party enablers, than power boosts for the individual character. If you really want to enforce "no flying to mount doom" and no teleport in your world, which can make for an interesting setting, you'll be fine by just banning those spells. There are lots of other good options to pick instead, so the loss will not weaken the class to the extent that you really need to think about compensation.

You do not actually have to remove the spells, just let your players know they will not work well. Narratively you can think of something like the weird radiation in the underdark, that disrupts all long-range magic travel so it fails to go further than a mile or two. Maybe there is some magic dust in the atmosphere disrupting it, or leylines are cris-crossing the world and disturbing transport.

Answer 5

What is the nature of fantasy?

One thing to consider before we even begin is whether or not you really want to keep medieval transportation a thing in your campaign. One thing that I'd suggest doing is making sure that your players actually are willing to play in a campaign where they don't have access to all-action, all the time. If they want a high fantasy game where the world is their oyster and they don't want to worry about transit, that's something that making a GM decision about can backfire on you for.

Although that sounds kind of harsh, there is another thing you can do while talking to your players: ask them not to use teleportation magic of their own accord. Discussing the game with them and coming to a mutual agreement that there will be no teleportation or long-distance flight for the party because that way the campaign will be more interesting and it'll achieve the original feel can be just as good as a mandate from up above. You can even mention that you don't want it "in the setting", if you're not using a setting that has explicit teleportation and so forth.

The Myth of Diminished Utility

Your spellcasters aren't going to be useless if you end the existence of transportation magic. You can always make there be an onerous spell component or limit teleportation to magical hubs if you want to give your spellcasters some utility: they'll just have to hike one way, for instance, then recall back to the town. You can even limit these fast movement spells to individuals, making it impossible to move the whole party but leaving them open to the players in the case of need.

However, when you look in the vast levels of utility that Pathfinder provides, removing these transportation spells aren't going to make as much of a difference as you thought. I saw a GM complaining about how Wind Walk ruined his campaign the other day; Pathfinder has certain elements that often get patched out in individual groups for the sake of "feel" or "cohesion", and you should feel free to invoke rule zero on this matter if you absolutely desire.

Make it Impractical

As other answers have mentioned, it's not always practical to have teleportation magic. Traveling with a large group, mounts, plentiful gear, and even having to deal with spell preparation limitations can all prevent the use of magical travel. Make their destination somewhat uncertain, and they already cannot teleport, and make it hidden by air and they basically are stuck walking. Do this right, and the players won't even realize that you're trying to restrict such workarounds.

At very high levels, it may be possible to bypass all the barriers to travel-assisting magic, but at this point most of the wear and tear of travel is effectively incidental. It's not like they'll run out of gold chartering a wagon or staying in an inn, and potentially the amount of time they have between the world going into a crisis without them means that they can only accomplish one or two objectives, even with magical travel. Remember that anything they have can also be had by their enemies, and high-level characters may have made recurring enemies that are just as (if not more) powerful as they are.

Answer 6

Just get rid of all long distance travel spells. You can still have spellcasters able to cast them but put a hard limit on their duration and/or range, say minutes per level or 400/40 feet per level. This would allow those classes to still make use of those spells to solve immediate problems and for combat but it introduces the need for out of combat travel solutions.

Answer 7

You could houserule in an exhaustion factor. Effects which teleport could tire out characters at a rate proportionate to walking/hustling/running the distance teleported in x number of minutes, and flight effects could exhaust characters as if they had actual wings they were having to pump (which would still mean that flying would be less exhausting than running the same distance due to being able to glide, but would make flying at full speed many miles exhausting). You could decide whether when teleporting the characters can arrive at the destination dead of dehydration, or if the effect dumps them however far they could go before they fall unconscious.

Answer 8

Random Pockets of Antimagic... Go ahead, casually fly, fall hundreds of feet to your death. Also, in pathfinder, feather fall rather stupidly (raw) requires a DC21 concentration check, so.... Good luck.