Sprucery wrote:TheMeInTeam wrote:Using them safely requires more foresight than haste/tp/blink
Sure, but Swiftness as a level 2 spell can be cast by anyone. My first reaction when I last played a formicid and realized I could memorize and cast Swiftness was "this feels wrong". That's why I started the whole thread...
You can "fix" anything that way. Right now minotaurs are allowed to cast mephitic cloud. That can be "fixed" by adding a line to their description that they can't cast mephitic cloud.
Sure, if there was a reason for such a restriction. I don't feel like there is any.
It's not "perfectly understandable" that you can use portals except that you can't use portals. It's internally inconsistent and silly.
How about a species which is "completely impervious to being teleported" being able to "instantaneously transport"? Feels internally inconsistent and silly to me.
Again, this comes down to how *you* feel, and how you feel is quite frankly totally unimportant. You've said "you think there's a reason they should be this way" but the only actual *reason* you were able to actually articulate other than your *feeling* is that "it encourages you to use some less common escape tactics"
That's a valid reason, but PoG and swiftness *are* less commonly used than haste, blink and teleport, because they have drawbacks, require more planning etc. So it's a question of what degree of "uncommon" do you want to encourage, which comes down to personal preference, and as it happens it's not *your* personal preference that counts, further as we've discovered through this thread your preference isn't an overwhelming majority (it's not particularly rare either)
You can argue till your blue in the face, but if all you've got is "I think it should be this way because it seems like it should be to me" you're not going to change anyone's mind, because *everyone else* has already decided to have an opinion too, it's not like nobody has thought about it, and we're all like "ooh yeah, I never thought about whether that made sense to me or not"
So here's *my* opinion: Formicids aren't the way they are to "encourage using the specific racial escape abilities over common ones" they're set up to encourage you to use "escape tactics which require more forethought" dig and self-shaft require either advance preparation, or earlier escape (in the case of comparing self-shaft to teleport, self-shaft has more risk associated than a typical teleport, requiring you use it further in advance) and both blink and haste require less advance planning than swiftness or PoG.
That's an equally valid interpretation, and one that *actually fits with the current racial design* there's nothing to say my opinion is right and yours is wrong, nor is there anything to say the reverse is true.