Dimension Door No Longer Reveals Turns: Hurray!


Skills, Feats, Equipment & Spells


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To my knowledge, in a previous edition, there was apparently some kind of game-breaking combination with the Haste spell and Dimension Door. At the time, this problem, however it manifested, was dealt with by introducing a clause in Dimension Door making the caster disoriented until his next turn started. Editions changed, and apparently this game-breaker combo didn't manifest in the new edition. Dimension Door's "no further actions because disorienting" clause, however, did.

I always hated that clause. First of all, it's singularly unique to Dimension Door. Any other teleportation spell simply takes whatever action or actions the casting requires and whatever actions you have left, you get to use. Why was DD the only spell that HAD to have a disorientation effect? And why did that spell have to be the one referenced for not-spell teleport-like abilities (the 3.5 Warlock's Flee the Scene invocation or the Monk's Abundant Step, for example)?

Even worse, this spell served to point glaringly at the artifact of the turn structure, by dint of how fickle its disorientation actually was. For example, let's suppose a caster with DD is casting the spell and walking to traverse a long distance (never mind for a moment why he's in this scenario or why he's resolving it in this fashion). If he moved first and then cast DD, and did the same thing in the same order the next turn, then his end result would be twice his movement plus twice his DD distance. He would have been disoriented twice, but since he cast DD at the end of his turn both turns, it never interfered with his turns' worth of actions. He can plausibly be said to have not been particularly inconvenienced by DD's disorienting.

On the other hand, had he tried to DD first and then moved, and then DDed and moved again on his second turn, DD's disorienting effect would not only be taking away his actions after his turn, but also his moves during his turn. He only traverses twice DD's distance (instead of that plus twice his movement), and all because he wanted to do the same thing but in a different order. For some reason, his castings of DD serve to be more disorienting this time around.

And for the record, Ultimate Combat's Dimensional Agility was not a satisfactory fix.

So I wanted to make sure to say "thank you" for finally getting rid of that nonsense. P2E's DD now only takes the actions it takes to cast. Do it at the beginning of your turn or the end; it doesn't matter. No longer does it point out how you're a character in a game with a turn structure.

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