Teleportitis is the ADOM community catch-all term for a state in which the character will randomly teleport. It is caused by the presence of an intrinsic, which can be gained from various sources, voluntarily or involuntarily. The name follows naming conventions for illnesses due to the fact that the random teleportation need not always be wanted or desirable.
- The condition can be caused by wearing certain items, namely either the helm of teleportation or the cloak of Oman. In these cases the teleporting effect will disappear once the item is unequipped. As such, this is no "true" teleportitis, as it can be usually freely "turned off" (unless the item is cursed).
- Teleportitis can be caused by the astral planes corruption. The character will randomly teleport as long as the corruption is present.
- Lastly, it can be obtained as an innate intrinsic by drinking from pools or eating pixie corpses.
How much the player will suffer from Teleportitis, should he suffer from it at all, depends on whether or not he has teleport control. Without teleport control, exploring dungeons becomes quite annoying as the PC will usually take quite a bit more time to traverse through the levels successfully; fights might be left unfinished, loot unpicked, as the character suddenly and frequently shows up in entirely different parts. There are benefits; the random teleportation makes the character hard to pin down and trap by monsters, on levels with rivers the character can cross them without swimming, and occasionally the character might be dropped in a secret room the player didn't even realize existed.
The prime danger of uncontrolled teleportitis, however, is shopping; there is always a chance the character will teleport while carrying an unpaid item, resulting in the shopkeeper declaring a robbery and trying to kill the involuntary shoplifter.
To avoid this and make teleportitis an overall pleasant thing to have, it is crucial to obtain teleport control. Like teleportitis, it can be gotten from pools, but blink dog corpses have a 100% chance to grant it. As blink dogs summon, once one is found and the player is reasonably powerful it is possible to let them keep summoning and kill them until one drops a corpse. The only downside to this method is that killing blink dogs is a chaotic act, so killing too many of them will result in alignment shifts downward.
With controlled teleportitis, the character will be able to traverse through dungeons much more freely without having to know the Teleport spell or wasting wand charges. The risk of involuntary shoplifting is also eliminated, with voluntary shoplifting of course still very much possible.
A negative/annoying effect of teleportitis is that while the PC is in the Casino shop, each teleportitis "fit" will teleport him/her back to the entrance (teleport control or not); on the bright side, this means PCs suffering from uncontrolled teleportitis will never end up shoplifting. Having companions (such as a necromancer slaves) waiting in all adjacent squares around the shopkeeper (the squares the PC would have teleported to) appears to completely disable teleporting while in the shoppe, including teleportitis.
While teleportitis triggering does not interrupt reading a spellbook in the latest versions of the game[1], it did carry that considerable annoyance in earlier versions, most notably 1.1.1, stopping the reading and forcing it to be started over again. Spellbooks which take longer to read might take several tries to be successfully read, and some very hard spells might take ages to finally get to grips with. This effect can be avoided by reading the books in no-teleport areas.