Portals

[Gulnyr]

I have some portal questions.[LIST=1]

• I was going to ask if the destinations of housing portals are IC or just convenient, but the Portalling page settled that.  IC it is.
  
• How do characters determine where they go in a portal with multiple destinations?  Does the portal read minds, or do characters say the name of their destination, or make a hand sign, or offer a slip of paper with the name, or interact with a floating text box (hehe)?
• Can any regular Joe determine where a portal goes by looking at it or thinking about it, without having to enter it?  Can any caster?  Only Wizards?  Can anyone at all?  (I know players can tell by clicking on it, but I'm asking about characters.)

[Dorganath]

I have some portal questions.[LIST=1]

• I was going to ask if the destinations of housing portals are IC or just convenient, but the Portalling page settled that.  IC it is.
  
• How do characters determine where they go in a portal with multiple destinations?  Does the portal read minds, or do characters say the name of their destination, or make a hand sign, or offer a slip of paper with the name, or interact with a floating text box (hehe)?
• Can any regular Joe determine where a portal goes by looking at it or thinking about it, without having to enter it?  Can any caster?  Only Wizards?  Can anyone at all?  (I know players can tell by clicking on it, but I'm asking about characters.)

1) IC as you determined.

2) I believe the only portals with multiple destinations are housing portals.  It "reality" it would take a Mage (Wizard, likely, as Sorcerers in Layo don't really have access to teleportation, and portals are a form of that) of some capability (possibly more than one) to establish a permanent, stable portal, such as what we have in houses.  I've always thought that housing portals were something of a narrow-focus, special purpose, pre-fab sort of thing that anyone could activate and with a limited, uni-directional purpose.  As part of this activation, there may also be some...rune or somesuch that appears on the floor and allows the user to select the destination, say by tapping it with one's toe.  I do not believe they read minds or respond to voice, though they could.  I've never actually put any RP behind choosing a portal destination.

I don't believe this was ever defined, which is probably why you're asking now!  If it were me defining things, what I wrote above is probably how I'd do it.  Ed should make the final call here, but he's welcome to agree with me. ;)

3) It's long been my understanding that the Average Joe could not look through a portal and know its destination. The housing portals are a defined, known quantity.  For the other static portals in existence (such as the Stormcrest-Dalanthar portal or other similar ones throughout the world, their destination is given by some sort of sign or marking.  It would at least take some magical gift to know where a portal goes, but in truth, I think what makes the most sense is that it would take a fairly high-level Wizard (typically...certain exceptions apply) to determine where a portal might end up.

Of course, in #3, a quest situation is at the discretion of a GM.  Again, I don't think it was ever defined, perhaps because it was never asked.  Ed can agree with my opinions on this one too, if he wants.

[Gulnyr]

I actually thought of the third question first because of the current thread about the length of mining trips.  It has always been my feeling that portals, being magical, require some sort of magical ritual to determine anything about where they go without just jumping in, and that, being beyond the basic mechanics, probably requires a DM, else you're just metagaming it.  With those conditions, plus the other obvious ones, jumping into a portal you happen to find in the Deep somewhere is totally stupid, and there are very, very few reasons anyone playing his character in-character would do so.

Despite that being the reason I thought of it, I think it's generally good to know these things about portals, and that's where the other questions came from.  The more we know how things are supposed to be IC, the better we can play our characters.

[Acacea]

There is no reason sorcerers should not have the same access to conjuration as wizards. All schools have complicated extremes and sorcery is simply a different approach. If wizards are supposed to be higher orders of the art instead of just learned vs innate then that is grossly and wrongly represented in the world thus far. I have always felt that both tomes and branches should be converted to spells accessible at the appropriate levels with the appropriate restrictions, and still think that kind of casual statement ("Sorcerers in Layo don't really have access to teleportation, and portals are a form of that") is very limiting as it applies not only to the "balancing" of mechanics but GM moderated attempts as well.

It also seems strange that the greatest gift of conjuration was gifted to a sorcerer who should by all explained have no ability to access it and no reason to have it run in the blood, no?

Just because it has been offered as a potential reason for supposed balance before doesn't mean it is the only answer or that it has to be a certain way.

[Dorganath]

There is no reason sorcerers should not have the same access to conjuration as wizards. All schools have complicated extremes and sorcery is simply a different approach. If wizards are supposed to be higher orders of the art instead of just learned vs innate then that is grossly and wrongly represented in the world thus far. I have always felt that both tomes and branches should be converted to spells accessible at the appropriate levels with the appropriate restrictions, and still think that kind of casual statement ("Sorcerers in Layo don't really have access to teleportation, and portals are a form of that") is very limiting as it applies not only to the "balancing" of mechanics but GM moderated attempts as well.

It also seems strange that the greatest gift of conjuration was gifted to a sorcerer who should by all explained have no ability to access it and no reason to have it run in the blood, no?

Just because it has been offered as a potential reason for supposed balance before doesn't mean it is the only answer or that it has to be a certain way.

I don't disagree with you from the D&D standpoint, because there is no such limitation in standard D&D.

NWN has no intrinsic support for the Teleport or Dimension Door spells, for the simple reason that the developers of NWN could not figure a way to make the spells work without the danger of bypassing essential triggers that keep the OC moving along as it should.  Clearly, there's scripting support for it, but in terms of a spell available to Wizards and Sorcerers, it doesn't exist.

Layonara was, for better or worse, built on this platform and at least initially with the limitations imposed by NWN. Eventually, a teleportation/tree-walking system was added with some reasonable limits, because such a thing can be otherwise difficult to manage.  Yes, it's a mechanical/balancing decision to have the ability tied to items with limited use on a daily balance. It was also Leanthar's decision (and we had conversations about this) to limit it to Wizards and Druids only. Sorcerers would not get this ability.

Why?

Because on Layonara, teleportation is ritual magic.  It's only somewhat represented in game due to the amount of time it takes to actually transit, but that's the RP behind it, and while we know it is not entirely an accurate statement that Sorcerers are incapable of performing rituals, the typical RP of the class is less on preparation and more on execution.

So yeah, it's a design decision, and one that makes sense in a certain context, even if it's not the one others might make.

So as a long-time D&D player and GM, I agree with you in spirit, and possibly in execution in the context of whether or not a sufficiently-skilled Sorcerer could analyze a portal and determine its destination.  As a GM, I personally would not exclude a Sorcerer from attempting to determine the destination of a portal. I'm simply saying that on average Wizards would have a better chance, though in that vein, I would severely penalize an Abjurationist because of the Conjuration school being forbidden to them.

And yes, I know...they still get the Tome, but I'm not going to go there in this thread.

Anyway, this is sort of a hijack.  All I was saying that on Layonara, Sorcerers will, on average, have a lesser ability with things involving teleportation and portals, but that doesn't mean they're completely excluded from such efforts, and that it is simply more likely for Wizards to have set them up, know how to analyze them and so on.

[Hellblazer]

there may also be some...rune or somesuch that appears on the floor and allows the user to select the destination, say by tapping it with one's toe.

Can some one say would be soo cool for the mmo?

[HooD!uM]

NWN has no intrinsic support for the Teleport or Dimension Door spells, for the simple reason that the developers of NWN could not figure a way to make the spells work without the danger of bypassing essential triggers that keep the OC moving along as it should.  Clearly, there's scripting support for it, but in terms of a spell available to Wizards and Sorcerers, it doesn't exist.

i have seen these spells inplemented in other NWN servers..well teleport at any case..

[Dorganath]

i have seen these spells inplemented in other NWN servers..well teleport at any case..

Oh, I'm sure you have, and there's nothing stopping us from doing it differently.  As I said, it's all about the design decisions Leanthar has made regarding teleportation.  

Again, the reason I remember from the development days of NWN was that Bioware could not come up with a way to implement Teleport without it breaking the campaign.  As such, it was not ever put into NWN as a spell.