K wrote:
I never understand why people think high-level wizards are gods. They really aren't.
The archmages of the world don't kill the Zhents because the archmages of the world are glass cannons like every other wizard.
All the more reason to be the one on the offensive. The FR paradigm of having wizards sit in castles and towers and wait to be attacked is just plain stupid. Dying isn't a problem. The problem is dying without backup so that that nobody is there to bring in your body and prevent people from trapping your soul. It's highly unlikely somebody takes out Elminster's wizard strikeforce.
As for teleport, I stand by my argument that you can still tell stories with it. Star Trek has decades of stories that prove that it's possible, and their teleportation has a lot fewer restrictions than many other settings.
Teleporting in Star Trek is limited in that it won't work through shields, across a solar system and is often totally removed whenever the story calls for it by any number of technobabble explanations.
I mean, just because there are teleport circles scattered around the world it doesn't mean that they aren't controlled by dangerous forces AND happen to go to the spots where adventures happen. You can just say "Scrying isn't enough for a teleport" and suddenly scry and die vanishes. Literally, the problems with teleport can be fixed with a sentence or two.
Don't even need scry and die, I'm just talking about being able to teleport within a days journey of your target. Even if you have overland flight there, who cares. So long as you have the potential of massing the magical might of several archmagi on a moment's notice and hitting any geographic location with it, this is going to be a huge deal. There's no effective way to defend a place except to have all the high level archmagi banded there. The attacker always has the advantage because he can mass up every wizard he has and appear at your doorstep, raze the place, then be back home for supper.
So it's in the interest of the good aligned wizards of different nations to just band together to help each other out. So when the Simbul has a problem, Elminster, Khelben and a bunch of Halruaan guys show up and fuck shit up over there. Then when Shadowdale has a new threat showing up, everyone shows up at Elminsters place to fuck up that threat.
You may run into a random enemy on a distant plane to which there's no easily accessible teleport circle, but there are not going to be evil cities on your world. All it takes is setting up a single remote outpost with a teleport circle to gate everyone in and then you can take out one of their cities. No city of good is going to ever get conquered, because of this ability to rapidly respond to threats.
As for the argument that the existence of high-level characters invalidates the work of low-level ones, I have to call foul again. People seem to love this argument, even though it has the assumption built into it that high-level characters know about every danger in the world AND aren't currently involved in some other adventure AND care enough to get out of bed for things that can be handled by lower-level characters.
Anyone with a scroll of sending can totally just send over a 911 emergency to one of the archmagi heroes. As for not caring, if they're good aligned, they should care that people are suffering and they can stop it. I don't buy the crap that high level heroes are constantly busy with saving the world 24-7.
This doesn't mean low level people do nothing, but it does mean that failing a low to mid level quest won't have any serious consequences. Even if you fail to stop the warlord, at most that means that Elminster has to devote a day of his time to smacking him down personally. So the end result of your glorious heroic quest is that you saved Elminster a day to do something else.
. That does remind me, I need to check whether fire trap would be a viable option for them.
