Early on in my current campaign my players were sent on a quest by a wizard friend of theirs, he gave them a sending stone so he could keep in contact with them. After that quest ended my players got a nice big downtime, 1 month. One of my players, who owns a tavern, asked to dedicate that downtime to finding some more sending stones, one for each player and the pairs to be held by the barkeep NPC she employs. I rolled on the tables in XGtE and got a price that they could afford.
Are there any unforeseen downsides in letting them spend all their money on sending stones? I know this effectively gives them party wide telekinesis but since they’re using this NPC as a telephone switchboard (literally how they pitched the idea) I can reserve the right to say he’s busy and can’t forward their messages.
I decided to give them the stones and then ran a session, they got separated for a few minutes and spent most of it talking through that npc to each other instead of trying to solve the problem that separated them. They’ve implemented a rule that he needs to write down what they say and relay the message exactly. 10/10 it was quite funny. Try doing this with your players.
The switchboard model is going to make it a lot worse than telepathy. Consider the action flow:
- Alice wants to send a message to Bob.
- Alice uses her action to send her message to Switch (who, let’s assume is paid to give this job his sole attention.)
- Switch must then spend their action to send to Bob. Bob can freely reply.
- Switch must then spend another action to relay the reply back to Alice.
Switch at any point may need a message repeated costing another action for the sender, and is more likely to need a repeat when messages are sent in stressful situations.
If Switch has other duties, the party might need to arrange ahead of time that they are going to need the service. The service also lacks efficient broadcast capabilities. Each stone needs to be activated sequentially, and Switch can reasonably only be expected to understand one person talking at once.
I think it sits closer to telegraph than a moble phone. Depending on the kind of campaign it might represent a vulnerability that can be exploited.
