Quote Originally Posted by tokek View Post
On the whole I think these spells are simply one way in which you remove aspects of the game which it was time to move on from anyway.

Teleport is a nice flashy way to not spend the session dealing with bandits and whether you have enough feed for your mounts. But by tier 3 you shouldn’t be spending your session time on that stuff anyway.

As a DM I’m not going to spend all that time on tier inappropriate stuff anyway.
Why not? Why is that inappropriate? The ways that higher-level characters deal with such problems are also choices.

I'm not saying you should be dealing with them at that tier, either, but to say you shouldn't suggests there's a reason why you shouldn't.

If that reason is that the PCs have abilities to trivialize them, then those abilities aren't meaningless. But if that reason is that the DM doesn't want to be bothered so will ignore them or hand out stuff to trivialize them, the question arises as to why that is something the DM thought was once okay but now thinks is not appropriate game time.

In other words: it's quite possible that they do become trivial as player characters gain abilities to trivialize them. But the thing that makes them inappropriate to spend game time on is how trivial they have become, not the tier just because it's the tier. I feel like saying "cars are irrelevant because by the time people have them they're at an age where walking 100 miles being an obstacle is inappropriate, so they shouldn't have to deal with that anyway." No, having a car has made those 100 miles a 90-minute trip, rather than something that will take days of travel. Assuming that distance just is inappropriate to have as a challenge because you're 16 years old and thus having a car is irrelevant kind-of misses the point of what made that 100 mile trip suddenly no longer a multi-day problem.