Tree Stride: Make Like a Tree and Get Out of Here
Spell Level: 5
School: Conjuration
Casting Time: 1 action
Range: Self
Duration: Concentration, up to 1 minute
Components: V, S
You gain the ability to enter a tree and move from inside it to inside another tree of the same kind within 500 feet. Both trees must be living and at least the same size as you. You must use 5 feet of movement to enter a tree. You instantly know the location of all other trees of the same kind within 500 feet and, as part of the move used to enter the tree, can either pass into one of those trees or step out of the tree you’re in. You appear in a spot of your choice within 5 feet of the destination tree, using another 5 feet of movement. If you have no movement left, you appear within 5 feet of the tree you entered.
You can use this transportation ability once per round for the duration. You must end each turn outside a tree.
Review by Sam West, Twitter: @CrierKobold
Picture this; you’re a cloaked ranger, longbow in hand, pursuing a group of fifteen goblins armed to the teeth carrying a precious stolen jewel. From the canopy above, you pick them off, shot after shot. Each time they look to retaliate, you’re gone, vanished into the canopy, only to appear two-hundred feet down the path in front of them. No matter how fast they run, no matter where they try to go in the woods, you’re there, waiting, ready. It's a pretty sweet fantasy, right? All of this is possible with Tree Stride!
You can actually have the badass moments of teleporting around high above the ground while taking shot after shot at your enemies, and can do it without it majorly impacting your other resources. At its best, it's a multi-use dimension door that can’t bring friends that costs a single action, which is phenomenal. You are faced with the glaring problem where you can only teleport to spaces near trees, gimping the majority of its practical applications.
In specifically densely wooded environments, you can live the dream. Swamps and forests stand out to me as the most likely places this spell will flourish. Some settlements and structures can have trees decorating the perimeter as well as within courtyards, giving moderate utility in urban settings. If you’re delving into lairs, dungeons, and caves, though, or dipping your toes into planar travel to go to some unfriendly places like the plane of fire or the abyss, you’re going to be hard pressed to find a single living tree around.
If you’re working with a barbarian or somebody else with a massive strength, consider tying a potted tree to their back or otherwise travel with a medium or larger tree. While it may be a tall order, having the ability to have at least one point you can consistently go back to or use as a means to get somewhere from turns the spells practical uses up dramatically. If you’re a full caster, doing this at 9th level will be a bit more tricky than if you’re a half-caster, as if you’re traveling with a group of level 17 characters and CAN’T figure out a way to keep a tree alive and bring it with you, I don’t know what I could tell you that’d be helpful at this point.
Tree Stride is a spell with the rare benefit of actually being decent on half-casters, while being substantially worse on the full casters. Rangers and paladins typically care more about their positioning and mobility, and will likely get the most out of the spell compared to their full caster buddies. They suffer the most from it being concentration, but even if you only get a single five-hundred foot teleport, if you set it up prior to the fight, it's a massive resource advantage. It still isn’t close to a 9th level spell, but I actually get a bit hyped when a ranger picks this up in the right setting. If you want Tree Stride to truly feel like a top end spell for the half-casters, consider dropping the concentration component and bumping up the spell's duration to ten minutes or an hour.
At the end of the day, Tree Stride CAN be exceptional, but it will heavily depend on the table. It fits in the game as an awesome spell that will shine in specific environments and circumstances that tend to be common enough it’ll lead to memorable moments but won’t warp all future adventures around it. This is a great example of a powerful spell done right; it only ends up suffering from the fact that the classes that can use it best likely won’t play long enough to ever get to try it. Poor half-casters.
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