Good points from everyone. I'll point out the reasons I'm considering it...
a) As noted above, the travel. Not so much that it's part of an adventure but it's what makes isolation, lack of information and so on, so very important in the medieval age. Why wouldn't redcaps just jump from covenant to covenant all the time? The communication barriers would not be what they are assumed to be... and, frankly, I want my characters to feel that 200 miles is a long journey.
b) I have significant concerns that someone will find an article or item that would constitute an Arc and simply cast the spell and find the BBEG hideout. So on. Instead of being difficult and saying "you appear inside a rock," I just make it restricted to someplace that they have been and collected an Arc.
c) I don't want other individuals (NPCs) to have the ability to hop around either as it destroys the isolation/communication barriers that make medieval diplomacy a shade more nuanced.
I like the idea of making it a ritual but that doesn't jive with my ideas for enchanted items allowing the Leap.
As I asked earlier, are you also doing something about flight? Overall, flying (fast) is similar level, similar arts can achieve it, and it is much safer (particularly when you've cast invisibility on yourself first)...see next point.
Just one 'blind teleport' and you can stop players abusing this - anyone trying to teleport without knowing exactly where they are going deserves to find themselves smeared across a regio boundary...or in a summoning circle with their spirit bound to the bad guy's wishes...or something else unpleasant. Even trying to use Intellego spells across these things can be painful - see what happened when Pippin tried using a palantir in Lord of the Rings: mind control nastinesses. And they don't work across regios either. And if your PCs are good enough to cast teleport, then their enemies can easily be intelligent enough to hide in regios.
Making your players have to have visited a location is fine, if you are all happy with it. Making them have to keep re-inventing the same spell would be something I would strongly object to. A simple way to nerf teleport itself is to declare that it transports you instantaneously through the intervening space, not disappearing and then reappearing in a new location. Then the players have to consider where walls, mountains, trees, etc are and they can't escape easily from some traps.
Then you have to consider all the other methods of fast travel too. Muto Animal on large birds to make them big enough to carry people. MuCo to shrink people so they can be carried by small birds. MuCoAn to turn yourself into a bird. Summoning spirits/genies that can arry you. Making flying carpets. Basic flying spells. There are many more. If you nerf teleport but not anything else, you will still have characters able to bypass travelling.
Hermetic/Mercere Portals? Breakthrough research based on this so some ritual spells can be enchanted into items...
In a way you want teleport to not be used and the flavor it brings out makes for an interesting campaign. Now I don't know why you want to make it a rule, can't you discuss it with your troupe and have them decide not to use any sort of fast travel? If you don't trust your players to avoid this, pink dot defense is going to be a much better problem.
It does not matter why pink dot does not work, it does not matter why fast travel does not work, it's just that nobody uses it (For all we care, maybe it's a peripherial ruling set in place by some bored Tytalus). Once this is set, you can concentrate on subjects that enable the players rather than spending your time on defining restraints.
As a GM i had a problem with this too. It wasn't the lack of travel stories itself that got me, more the security teleporting provided.
Our three magi each had a spell or item that would teleport them to a location. They would often travel by flight (which i don't have a problem with) but instead of camping for the night or settling in an inn, they would take an AC to whereever they were when it got dark and teleport back to their sanctums. Sleep in safety and then teleport back after breakfast.
This meant they never really had problems with locals that weren't directly plot relevant (i.e. no stopping over in inns, monasteries, local nobility, etc). They never got ambushed during the night as they were all tucked up safe behind their castle walls. They never had to stagger, wounded to the nearest church looking for aid as they would just teleport to their castle and be carried to the infirmary.
Its not that it wasn't fun, but it did remove many options from the GMs (me) armoury.
I like the idea of having arcane range teleports as ritual spells. Then they could still use teleports but only for 1 league/7 leagues/etc. This would make it time consuming and annoying to travel longer distances but useful for shorter range stuff.
I think I did not make myself clear. My troupe's issue was that the text might be interpreted as saying: "You can't taylor a formulaic to a specific individual at the time of casting. For a formulaic spell to be taylored to a specific target, you need to invent a specific version of that formulaic spell; just like you would to if you were to invent the "same" spell again to cast it with a different Duration or Target". One could argue that since with spontaneous spells you can effectively adapt the magic on the spot in terms of Duration and Target, you could do the same in terms of "tayloring". It's not clear at all, at least to us, that this runs against the RAW. I think it would be a good subject for errata.
I totally agree. The same thing happened in our old russian saga.
In our old russian saga (that we played without the "Ritual Teleport house-rule"), one of my player was specialized in teleportation and with Flawless Magic and Indipendent Study and he was able to have Leap of Homecoming with a mastery of 8 (mostly spent for Precise Casting), so he never botched a spellcasting or a Finesse roll for landing.
In our current saga, we decided that teleporting is ALWAYS Ritual (not only the Arc Range) because having a similar character with Seven League Stride, instead of Leap of Homecoming, means only more dice rolling (if needed).
I know it's a radical choice, but we valued teleport (even for short distances) too much convenient. You think only the extreme flexibility of having a short range teleport (5 paces) mastered for fast casting and precise casting: it's a type of defense so efficient that you don't need of many other type of fast-cast spells.
IMS the central point of our decision was the opportunity for plots that travel offers, not nerfing the possibility of speeding a travel. Teleport totally kills the travel, all the other methods not. Flying invisible it's not guarantee of safe travel: Second Sight is a common virtue, and in the sky you can encounter creatures like in a forest.
I don't see this as a big problem. It is just the player characters being clever. It just means that the player characters are very unlikley to be casually ambushed by other characters who don't have suitable powers or spells --- which seems fine --- because the magi should be able to deal with casual ambushes by mundanes. This is just one way of doing so.
Anyway, it's not entirely fool proof.
If the characters are very heavily wounded or in hostile auras then they do run the risk of botching their teleports. It is also possible for other Hermetic (or non-Hermetic) effects to interfere with the character's attempts to teleport.
Also, this practice is actually a huge security risk for the player characters. They must be carrying ACs with them that link back to their sanctums. Having these ACs stolen or lost would be catastrophic if they fell into the hands of hostile characters who can utilize the ACs to teleport or scry.
Bingo. Exactly my concern in a number of different scenarios. I want travel to be an impediment as the setting is a significant and dangerous frontier. Hermetic magi are more than powerful enough without being able to blink anywhere they happen to pick up some dirt. As I mentioned, I don't want to be an ass and say... "You teleport into a rock." So I'd like to avoid the entire issue.
Also, it feels too World of Warcraft... I return home each night and relax in a featherbed to go adventuring on the morrow! I want travel and adventure to be dangerous, fraught with uncertainty etc.
As for fast travel... shapechanging, flying... that's exactly what I want to be the focus. I want folks to transform into birds or whatever to travel somewhere. That's cool. Just "BLIP" and there... lame.
I think the "we don't want to teleport (easily)" issue is one of the expression of the fact that storyguides can't handle the level of power magi should have.
Overall, I agree with Exarkun - I get the feeling that you're not happy with the style/abilities/etc of more powerful hermetic magi. Look for ways to make this fun, not ways to stop the players enjoying their wonderful abilities.
A few suggestions: 1) go with the flow - If magi are doing what Gribble wrote, then there are plenty of ways of 'doing stuff' to them. I'll list a few, below.
2) Nerf teleport: easiest method is to make it need a direct line of travel. Trees, hills, walls, etc get in the way and the magus either goes splat or doesn't move (depends on how mean you feel). Making them keep re-learning it is lame (in my opinion).
3) Make teleport higher level. Merely delays the problem.
'Doing stuff' to PCs so they don't abuse teleport:
a) if they use grogs to do the walking, then have enemies kill the grogs when the magi are safe at home. If your PCs are able to teleport, then they can have enemies that are a) intelligent; and b) magically capable. Alternatively, mind control on the grogs so they turn on the magi when they appear is even better.
b) if they don't use grogs, but keep teleporting in and out, then their intelligent, magically capable enemies simply lie in wait for them to re-appear and ambush them. Teleport is fairly easy to notice, so any basic scrying ability (and even experienced mundane followers of a magical enemy should be able to work out what is happening) should lead to the enemies being able to arrange an ambush.
c) ACs which have not been fixed can be awkward - that chip of rock you picked up is actually linked to a big boulder that is several miles away. That dirt? When you entered your Aegis, it lost its connection to the rest of the dirt - it doesn't link to anywhere now. The pebble? It links to a river and you get very wet. Remember that ACs link to whatever is most significant - and being picked up by a magus might be the most significant thing that happens to many of these items. Don't overdo this one, but it's fun to inflict it at random.
Overall, you said that you didn't have a problem with flying, yet that will also lead to magi being able to go somewhere and return home for the night (when you reach the point of being able to fly at 100mph, your there-and-back-again-in-one-day radius of operations is enormous, so you'll lose any camping out soon enough even without teleport.
As far as style is concerned, how soon will you be getting the Power Armour Mages? What about the ones who are invisible all the time? There are lots of ways for the players to change the 'feel' of their characters.
Elder magi tend to stay in their labs all the time, but why wouldn't they teleport whenever they need something? They also know that wandering around with high-level spells up leads to their enemies/rivals being able to find and kill them, so they are totally paranoid if they are out of their (well-defended) labs - this is one of the main reasons for them to want to use younger magi to do all the outside work for them. PCs using teleport to sleep safely fits in fine with them developing this attitude, particularly after they reappear of a morning to find an immediate Perdo Vim knocking down their Parmas, a Rego Vim ward-type spell blocking out-bound teleports and ravenous summoned beasties gnawing their heads off. If they survive, they will need quite high-level Intellego spells to get any clues about what happened. No need for the ambusher to be the SAME bad guy as the one they were after at the time...
The PCs are powerful - so their enemies should be too! By this time, it is reasonable to have (some) enemies who have put some effort into knowing the PCs' specialities, spells, favoured tactics, etc. And only one ambush is needed to make players think again about how safe they really are.
I think that you will ignore all this. A shame, this game can take almost any abuse and still work well. And teleport isn't abusive.
Gilarius
The problem of magi being able to do too powerful stuff in 4th and 5th compared to what most people think they ought to be able to do, has already been pointed out dozens of times in the forum. What is done causally is generally ritual stuff in the general imaginarium of magicians.
A lot of the countermeasures sound too much of killer SG to me.
The guys wanting teleport to be banned IMS were 2 of my players actually since it broke down their suspension of disbelief. They also pressed for us to increase x3 the might level for the creatures being presented in the books when one of them worked out that he could enter a trial by combat with an avatar of Archangel Michael and come out on top.
I probably play in the most high powered saga of all the members of this forum right now (we have an archmagus as a PC and a vis income of 120 pawns per year), so I also hate people telling me that I cannot cope with the game in a patronizing way, BTW.
The basic problem is that the setting breaks down if you can travel from extreme to extreme of ME in a single day. Not because the PCs can teleport, but because everybody would be doing it.
So you've mentioned before. It does get more true because you mention it again - or more polite for that matter.
Teleportation is potentially a problem. But so is R: Arcane telepathy and mindcontrol, and those are possible as well, at about the same effect levels.
So, why do we keep seeing teleportation crop up?
Because few stories involve the need for telepathy or mind control and getting ACs to people is often tricky, especially the kind of people that might rank as adversaries. Whereas almost all stories involve travel and ACs to locations are trivial to pick up.
Not that i don't have a problem with powerful mages. I really don't. The brunnaburgh saga got quite powerful indeed (100 foot dragons decimating armies with fiery breath anyone?). The problem lies in removing a lot of story ideas once teleporting at AC range has been achieved.
Note that i don't even consider boots of seven league stride to be a problem. While it'll get you close to your target (ie. within seven leagues), you'll still want to hike the remaining distance.
Mythic Europe is a fun and interesting place and teleportation removes the need to interact with vast swathes of it. Particularly on the terms of the locals.
And once again i restate, we had loads of fun with the Brunnaburgh saga. But as the ASG i do wish i could have had the option to run some more stories that teleport denied. We actually got around this in saga by all taking apprentices (and then secondary mages) so it ended with all players running three mages, roughly just out of gauntlet, experienced and powerful. We'd get our more human stories with the junior and baby mages. So we did find a nice way around it. But it was rare that our senior magi got involved in such stuff (although Santiago did always make a bee line to any tavern he spotted).
What attracts me to Ars Magica is the idea of playing wizards in Mythic Europe... which is to say, a fictional medieval Europe where the folklore and magical beliefs of medieval Europe are true. So to my mind the level of power magi should have is the level of power medieval European folklore and mythology grants them. I therefore find some Ars Magica spells - such as easy teleportation and hurling bolts of fire from your fingertips - to be off the mark. By the same token, I find Ars Magica spells of emotional control, healing and blessing crops to be off the mark in the other direction. (Really a good old fashion love spell, the stock and trade of every village witch is as hard or harder then hurling fire at someone... something I don't recall ever seeing in folklore?)
That doesn't mean I "can't handle" the level of power of magi... it means I have a different vision of what magi ought to be able to do and a different kind of story that I want to run.
If you want harder Teleportation, i suggest you play with the spell requiring a "Range". So, otherwise by RAW, Leap of Homecoming becomes level 55, ie must be ritual.
Telepathy is rarely a problem, useful but very rarely gamebreaking. Mindcontrol(and mind affecting spells overall) by RAW however is WAAAAY too easy and powerful. If staying close to RAW, i have mindcontrol being resisted, making it much less "all-powerful".
If you think teleportation is a problem, you can also start by enforcing the rules for casting requisites and targets to the letter:
clothing only teleports if appropriate casting requisites are added to the spell (Animal, Herbam, maybe Terram, depending on what the magus is wearing). I guess your players could start wearing hair shirts and human leather boots, but that's unlikely.
other than talismans and stuff that fits in pockets (wait, did medieval clothing even have them ?), equipment is not part of the spell unless the spell is designed with a Group target, or at least an extra magnitude. And, of course, casting requisites, including for the talisman.
That means that the magi must develop several additional forms to teleport around with their clothes on (or really be Rego specialists), and higher level spells to actually bring any equipment with them.
Oh, and Finesse rolls for arriving safely. Sooner or later there will be a botch, and after that the players will be more cautious. Or if the characters overuse it they might get a Reputation, and after that it's only a short step to an ambush...
Put all this together, and teleportation remains a useful escape spell, but is less powerful as a travel spell.
Consider how the Lord of the Rings would have gone if Gandalf had been able to teleport...
"Frodo, we need to destroy ring immediately. Hold on tight. Ok, toss it in the river of lava. Congratulation, you've just saved the world from evil and the tea isn't even cold."