Is there a known implementation for teleporting the player short distances in such a way that will prevent clipping and falling through the world?

For instance, a script that teleports the player a few yards forward (e.g. a Blink spell) using MoveTo or SetPosition will place the player inside rocks and other objects, will not follow the contour of an incline, and will often cause the player to fall through the floor.

Thats a really tough call. We implemented a similar spell in our mod, and what we ultimately did to prevent exactly that issue was spawning an invisible actor before the player actually gets teleport and then asking whether the player had a Line of Sight to this invisible actor. If yes, the teleport would take place, if not, a message would be displayed. Not the most elegant solution, though a functional one.

But I guess that wouldn't work for you, would it?

What about looking inside the Whirlwind Sprint thu'um?

Perhaps a script that makes them walk to the spot instead of moving to it. Just have them walk really fast.

Most of the time, the game scripts disable the character in one place, then spawn them in another place when it is moving NPCs around. Not sure if this is done to keep the game world from killing them or it gets past this clipping issue. However, you would have to defined the XYZ for place to appear.

The biggest problem I have using MoveTo on the player is that it tends to do funky things with the weather, especially if you have 3rd party mods like CoT installed. As it was with Oblivion, you will see some very obvious weather transitions as it seems the weather system "resets" when the player does a MoveTo, just as if they had left and re-entered the world space.

That said, probably the safest way to go about this would be to use the spell type that conjuration summons use, where you get a target ground art indication of where the spell will take effect, then spawn an invisible marker there on cast and move the player a few units above that.

I tried that. It wont work. Neither will using the bat teleport from DG.

This would be really simple if the translate series of functions updated collision(which is messed up because the bat teleport uses TranslateToRef() and collisions update fine..guess its awesome to have access to the source code, huh beth?)