[RPG] How to prevent the players from teleporting out to escape any dungeon

dnd-5eteleportation

My high-level party now has 2 casters able to cast teleport. They can now run into any dungeon and just escape freely when things get dangerous. Forbiddance does not prevent you from teleporting out and Antimagic Field is a 10ft radius spell that requires concentration.

How can I prevent my players from pulling off this cheesy strategy against smart opponents who have witnessed this strategy multiple times and can plan beforehand?

So far, I've only come up with Darkness spells (to prevent players from seeing each other to teleport) or Counterspells at the time of cast. Both are fairly unsatisfactory solutions, PCs can just run into another room, or behind a pillar, and teleport there. Is there any RaW way to protect the entire dungeon?

  • The module's recommended approach is to capture PCs alive and enslave them, with escape being a part of the chapter. A military invasion is possible, but can prove deadly. In my version of the campaign, the PCs have an insider which has revealed the enemies have now set some traps and that the party needs to find a different strategy, be it infiltration or letting themselves be captured or something else.
  • The PCs have an Helm of Teleportation on their Monk and a Wizard with Teleport prepared, not too large of an investment.
  • Continuously adding random reinforcements to a dungeon with an established set of members (which the party have scouted with a Warlock Imp) seems to be a cheesy response to their strategy. By doing what they're doing, they slowly chip away at the enemies, killing a few of them every incursion, and slowly thinning out their forces
  • It also makes it so that each incursion is a drawn out encounter without large consequences, part of a larger (and boring for both sides) attrition war
  • It is a bit late to change the plot of the story and change the established "enemy took McGuffin from place before you did, and they are keeping it safe, as commanded by BBEG"

Best Answer

You're looking for the private sanctum spell

This spell allows the caster to block all teleportation and planar travel in an area. The area is a 100ft cube for a fourth-level spell slot, a 200ft cube for a fifth-level spell slot, et cetera.

Note that the player characters can use dispel magic on this, so a determined opponent would probably want to cast it several times on the same area (using scrolls?), to make it really expensive to dispel.

This is the "intended" way for NPC opponents to prevent planar travel.

It's also fine to homebrew something -- for example you might adapt the AD&D weirdstone item to 5e.

It's good practice to not use this too aggressively

Many tables will consider it "cheap" for the DM to deliberately shut down player character abilities.

It's better to build a plan that will handle it gracefully if the player characters teleport out. For example:

  • the player characters are on a time limit, and if they teleport out then it will take them time to get back
  • the NPC opponents are currently being ambushed, but if the player characters teleport out partway through the attack, the opponents will find lots of reinforcements
  • the NPC opponents have teleport as well, and if the player characters teleport out, the NPCs will follow them and continue the fight

At my table, I generally consider this sort of escape mechanism to be a good thing, because the player characters won't use it unless they're at risk of TPK -- so allowing teleportation is a way to make sure I don't accidentally TPK the group. If you're planning an adventure where you shut down teleportation, you'll want to be extra careful that you don't accidentally kill your adventurers when their escape route is cut off.