Tree Stride Targeting

[Beskytter]

It would be nice if Tree Stride took a forest name as the target instead of or as well as a PC name. It could bring us to the edge of that forest so long as it is within range, or echo that it's too far if it isn't.

Example:

cast 'tree stride' ardeep
You arrive at the edge of the Ardeep forest.

cast 'tree stride' 'high forest'
That is too far away, your spell fails.

[Yemin]

I'm still a fan of the hyperstride I suggested in the other ranger thread.

Tree stride, long / short / med duration,
Syntaxt: stride <direction>
Example: stride north. Teleports you north 3 rooms long as starting and ending area is in wilds. Only region that doesn't naturally have at least 1 tree I believe would be tundra / desert.

We can say it autofails if your not on the world map to nip zipping through zones in the bud??

[hasryn]

Tree stride in itself needs to be taken a look at just for its pitiful distance at low and high skill levels. It has minimal use and such a hard spell to obtain from my own experience. But the ranger spell list I think needs some tweaks in itself. Like perhaps giving them water breathing to compensate for water walking etc.. Or to have the companion part of the class taken a look at in how to obtain them other than buying them. Some you can claim but cannot leave there zone etc. I always had a thought of something we could go and be given depending on alignment and deity be asigned one from the list of them or the exotic list and we do quests as we lvl up they would "grow" and level up with us. Like starting with a cub or even an egg in the way if it's a bird and you do things according to that.

[Beskytter]

I don't like the idea of it instantly moving you a specific number of spaces in a direction, because that just doesn't make any sense to me. Dimension door would make sense doing that because of the need for line of sight, but tree stride isn't the nature equivalent to it.

I like what it does now I just wish it took forest names as targets so that you could, ideally, travel from one forest to a nearby forest. A quick jaunt from Ardeep to the High Forest, edge to edge basically, or perhaps the Reaching Wood to Ardeep if you're really good with the spell.

I agree that the distance of it should be tweaked, it's the only teleportation spell rangers have to them and it really isn't useful at current design. Perhaps the distance could be number of rooms between caster and target based on skill level, so at skill level 1 you're maybe able to move same forest edge to edge but at 25 you're moving Tethyr to Ardeep?

[Yemin]

After reading it again
http://www.d20srd.org/srd/spells/treeStride.htm

I can see your point and after deciding this is one of the most detailed and nightmarish teleportation spells for a DM ever as far as I can tell you still vanish into one tree and pop out from another at a location without passing through the intervening space. as far as the orc in the middle is concerned... unless he can read the roots or something I suppose.

Fluff / method aside though, the longest range I see here is 3000 feet, thats still a relatively short distance. I don't think it was ever designed to be used as the standard cross continental method of transport despite what that green dwarf did in the drizzt books.

So, no real preference for what it looks like exactly, but a straight hop from ardeep to tethyr would be a little far from what i'm imagining.

Near the bottom of the description it says one entry more or less per caster level so perhaps the spell could be redesigned to let you hop with a ratio of 1 skill rank per 1 hop and instead of the 3 room zip I suggested before, it should let you jump to the next forest over.

To clarify, I'm thinking, ardeep to misty, misty to trollbark, trollbark to wyvern, wyvern to reaching, reaching to cloakwood... (I think), cloakwood to sharp teeth, sharp teeth to tethyr. If any forest your trying to jump to is further than say, 15- 30 rooms away from you, you can't manage it.

And with the limits on number of hops, there's real incentive and reward for getting the skill in it up.

The reason I'm proposing it work like this is that if I were playing a ranger, I would find it fun to figure out which forest was close to which. The requisite knowledge of geography would make it different from the wizard's' Oh, I know this one person in that city across over in bezantur. Lets go.

Might not be for everyone though sooo, thoughts?

[Beskytter]

I'm fine with the idea of it being a hop method, so long as what you're saying is that these hops are not additional casts of the spell. At the moment, unless my ranger has owls wisdom on, he only gets one use of the spell at a time. Two with the wisdom boost.
The main issue I can see, is that in this hopping method you're looking at having to travel between forest edge to forest edge. Now, if the spell cast gives you say five hops and these hops are activated by command at any time, and they cast instantly it would make sense.

Eyolf casts tree stride.
You have 5 uses remaining.

'tree stride' Misty
You whisper a word and touch a hand to a tree, melding with it.

You slowly appear to seep from the bark of a tree.
You have 4 uses remaining.
[insert traveling to the other edge of the Misty forest]
'tree stride' Trollbark
You whisper a word and touch a hand to a tree, melding with it.

So on and so forth until the spell is used up and it says, all your uses have been used up.
I can see how someone might try to abuse this, so what I'd suggest to staunch the flow is that
multiple tree strides don't stack in number of uses. Tree stride also can't be cast right away after the
hops have been used up, perhaps it takes a long time to regain the ability to cast it again but it lessens as the skill rank improves.

[Yemin]

Indeed, i was thinking number of hops equals skill rank per cast. So at apprentice it would be at what?... 9? Not bad. Means you could travel up and down the sword coast with some ease.

I'm not seeing how this could be abused. Could you elaborate?

[Beskytter]

That's the point, with it being possible to use the hops at any time once the spell is cast and until the hops are done. Basically it could provide a ranger with a nearly infinite number of insta-teleports, so the restraint that the number of hops is set for the cast and doesn't stack with new casts of the spell so that a PC can't just rack up a million hops so they never have to regular travel.

Basically, I love the concept but even I think it needs some regulation to avoid abuse. I'd abuse it if it were possible, who wouldn't, so let's nip that in the bud. I'd say the skill rank should be sort of a dual system, every other rank adds +1 to number of hops and the inbetweens add distance to those hops. So at GM you have 12 hops and their distance has increased by say 39 rooms in total. This is a fantastic amount of rooms to jump through with plenty of hops to make world travel possible.

[Yemin]

Oh, I see my thinking was too linier. Indeed, I just assumed the number of hops would fade when the spell duration died or when they used the last one as detailed in the SRd.

I agree with the concept outlined so far it seems workable.

how would targetting work? Is it currently possible for PCs to target rooms with abilities or perhaps it would be directional? if there is no forest within 30 or so rooms of the direction you picked it fails if there is, it jumps you to the next forest?

Or should targetted markers just be added to each forest?

Would it be worth adding a feature that lets you know whether its possible to jump or not so you don't waste the jump?

[Beskytter]

Targeting only works with specific names, so you have to be able to know someone is in a room in order to jump there. So my initial request was to add generic forest names as targets too.

At the moment, I can only use tree stride if I know a friend is in a forested area nearby and we're just trying to join up. It's basically useless unless there's a named mob in a room that is unique to that room. However, if we added forest names to the list it would just pick the nearest room that has that forest name.

So, I could type 'tree stride' ardeep and it would take me to the closest room with that name.
No fancy way marker system or anything else. We just add forest names to the list, so that I can stride from the High Forest generically to the Ardeep generically without having to know if there's someone in that forest to stride to.