Yes, it's a couple of years and an edition change late, and eminently ignorable, but I've only just noticed: does anyone think they know why teleport without error (greater teleport), a 7th-level wizard spell, lost interplanar travel capability and plane shift was added to the wizard list as a 7th-level spell? The reasonings I could come up with, off the top of my head:
1. Wizards ought to pay a few more gp for scribing the spells.
2. Sorcerers should have it harder when it comes to planar travel.
3. People might get confused by a spell that could do two related but dissimilar things.
4. Tuning forks are a cool component, and wizards ought to get to play with them, too.
5. Monsters with greater teleport as a SLA should not be plane-hopping (seems unlikely, and counter to the point of the SLA, i.e. to allow them to show up in or disappear from anywhere).
6. A consistent teleport subschool that can state its inability to do planar travel was wanted (for less than a handful of spells).
Any other ideas or better insights?
I suppose if you were going to rationalize it... 1 Teleport Without Error - 'Greater Teleport' demands enough concentration\power on one plane. Adding planar travel is too powerful for a 7th level spell. 2 Plane Shift should not be a safe thing so easily. The 7th level spell should not be precise because of the difficulty of piercing the fabric of the universe. Of course the real reasons are undoubtably game balance. I think its reasonable to think that plane shift adds a random factor because it chooses travel by path of least resistance. If the thinnest barrier between planes puts you on the top of a mountain thats where you end up. Sigurd