Do caster out of combat options matter?

[Dr.Samurai]

I didn't call anyone out specifically...

Ah, the age old "but I'm not touching you" argument. Truly we are learning at the feet of the masters!

True... if and only if the GM wants to tell a story and wants to run an adventure. I'm an odd one out when I GM. The game I play is to set a world, build a simple intro dungeon, and then let PC actions and NPC reactions drive things. No plot, no prepped adventure, completely emergent story.

With respect, I want to point out that these factors are not really relevant, in my opinion. You can do these things and also include ways that don't make magic the only path forward.

I've had a lich with a hidden strongbox type place accessible only by teleportation and known to nobody else in the world. A dragon nursery & day care in what was effectively a magma submarine. A wind-mage's home flying in a permanent hurricane. A demon lord using tarrasques as ammo. An invisible brick wall in front of the landing spot on the other side of the barely jumpable chasm. Anything resembling normal PCs simply can't deal with some stuff without certain abilities that noncaster classes don't have.

Of course then there was the not-mount-Olympus where gods literally hung out partying a lot of the time. No form of magic would get anyone to the top, and no form of anything would save them from the consequences. But hey, a high level fighter could at least try to get noticed. Plane shifting was much safer, you show up at the front door and the flunkies kick you out instead of popping onto the dance floor and getting stepped on. Weirdly, magic also didn't help much if you wanted to join the fire breathing arctic dire bear calvary.

This all sounds like a lot of fun.

And I suspect that your players enjoy it as much as you do. And I think this is reinforcing behavior. Players might know when they sit at your table that they're going to need spells in order to interact with the things you have in mind. And it just becomes self-fulfilling.

But I wouldn't make the mistake of thinking all games are like this or have to be like this. Or that these same encounters/scenarios can't exist in a different game without spellcasters, and they have to use other means to engage.

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.

There are random encounter tables for all levels of play though, and a DM can also just put whatever they want during travel.

It's really just up to the DM what they find interesting or appropriate. We can't say for all games.

I'll also point out that Bandits are very far from the only appropriate encounter you can run into during overland travel. Things like a hungry dragon, a drow surface raid, a Shadowfell Incursion, or a bound fiend that just broke free of its wizard's tower are all things that could feasibly pop up in the wilderness while being appropriate challenges for a T3 party.

Agreed.

I mean, a lot of this is just preference or style related.

Take the utterly ridiculous claim made recently that a campaign around a group of all fighters traveling the planes sucks and is bad writing. This is preposterous. There are magic items that let you travel through the planes. Have we never seen stories about a guy or a group of people using a device to travel to other dimensions? A campaign of martials plane-hopping could be a blast to play and run.

Unless you have very specific and narrow ideas about how people should play D&D, and insist that if people are going to plane-hop, it MUST be through the Plane Shift spell.