This might come as a surprise to the many incredibly driven modders on this site, but... I am a lazy person. I am truly ashamed of myself, but there it is. I have been in my lifetime the worst of all power-gamers, exploiting every loophole to end up with the most maxed-out character possible. I am getting better. As a writer of fiction, I have come to appreciate the fun of roleplaying in an RPG. Morrowind of course does not make itself very hard to exploit, but most of that has been addressed with BTB's Game Improvements list. But as far as I can tell, one thing has not been addressed at all; teleportation.

My usual and favorite character takes Mysticism as a minor skill, and so my days of having to walk everywhere are only as long as it takes for me to acquire the spells. The intention of the game devs seems to be that Intervention spells especially be used mostly as a last-resort to escape a fight you can't win, but I doubt I'm alone in using it almost entirely for the secondary purpose of hopping around Vvardenfell, getting slightly closer to the objective. Playing a warrior character with an ample supply of magicka and not much else to use it for, there is really nothing stopping you from just zapping to the temple across town to save ten seconds of walking time. I very quickly learned the best ways to chain Teleportation, boats, and striders so that I could get to my objectives with the least possible effort. While I far prefer this to the fast-travel-to-anywhere approach of later games, it still feels a little wrong to me that something as powerful as instantaneous personal transportation would be so simple and easy.

In my mind, teleportation of any sort should not be taken lightly. And it certainly shouldn't be thought of the same way we might think of hopping into a car to pick up groceries. Perhaps for a Telvanni mage-lord who had been studying Mysticism for a thousand years, but a comparative novice of the craft that would make up a player-character, there should be consequences. For one thing, I see that instant transport from one place to another would be quite jarring on a mortal body. I see nausea, dizziness, headaches. Not to mention the risk of appearing in the exact spot where someone or something may be standing that wasn't there before. In that scenario, best case would be that you get hurt, worst would be that your body would be fused to the matter of the object, killing you instantly.

While I doubt the latter of those would be possible with Morrowind's limitations even if a player would want such a thing, how hard would it be to institute a temporary (But quite long, perhaps sixty seconds or longer) stat-penalty to a player character after they use Intervention or Recall? Perhaps Twenty or more points off of Speed, Agility, and Intelligence. Perhaps Strength and Personality would also provide suitable discouragement, but I'm not quite sure how that would be justified just by feeling a bit woozy. By far the most awesome would be if this penalty was reduced gradually with a higher skill in Mysticism, with it negated entirely at level 100.

What do you think, oh awesome tech-savvy modders?

The only teleportation penalty that would make sense to me is disorientation upon arrival. None of the Fantasy novels I have read ever had a character that would teleport to a place and be handicapped at arrival. They did worry about where they were teleporting to, as in not zapping themselves into a rock or something. The only references I have seen on post-teleport were some temporary disorientation or vision or something.

So, a Stamina drain would be something that might fit in with the idea of this act causing a physical condition to the PC.

But, the one thing to remember, Divine and Almsivi (sp?) Intervention take you to a place of sanctuary, so any hits on the character stats would not matter in the game. No one is going to challenge or battle you on arrival. Only Mark and Recall could do that, and since we can only place a Mark at a place we have been, it would stand to reason that we already made that place safe, or should have. So, a character stat hit there would not be a game penalty either.

Remember that teleportation in Morrowind almost always teleports you to a safe spot (that's the whole point of the Interventions). So why would a player really care if they get a penalty like that for tp-ing? They're just going to be busy pawning off their stuff to the merchant or just wait it out in perfect safety anyway.

Have you heard of the http://www.gamesas.com/topic/887715-relwip-miscast-mod/ A possible side effect in that mod is that the player is teleported to an unexpected location if they fail to cast the spell.

I'd prefer to see something like that. The cost for casting tp spells could be increased so that the entry requirements to mastering those spells would increase. And novitiates who try to cast them are going to end up placing themselves out in the Sea of Ghosts by mistake.

Just my two cents.