Feat Dragonmark Feats & Ritual Casting

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

I hope that WotC is planning to add some new feats, powers or rituals for the Eberron Dragonmarks in the future. But as long as they don't have anything out, here are some ideas...

One think I'd like would be to give people an additional motivation to use rituals. Though I was thinking about having something like the 3.x Artificers craft/reserve points for creating magical items.

Dragonmark Reserve
Prerequisite: Dragonmark, ability to cast one or more rituals.
Your Dragonmark grants you a reserve of energy that you can use instead of material components when performing a ritual.
When you take this feat and each time you level, your reserves refreshes to a value equivalent to a number of gold pieces as indicated by this table:

Level  - Reserve Value - Level - Reserve Value
1       - 50 gp            - 16     - 4.200 gp
2       - 75 gp            - 17     - 5.000 gp
3       - 100 gp           - 18     - 9.000 gp
4       - 125 gp           - 19     - 13.000 gp
5       - 200 gp           - 20     - 17.000 gp
6       - 250 gp           - 21     - 21.000 gp
7       - 375 gp           - 22     - 25.000 gp
8       - 500 gp           - 23     - 45.000 gp
9       - 625 gp           - 24     - 65.000 gp
10      - 1.000 gp        - 25     - 85.000 gp
11      - 1.250 gp        - 26     - 105.000 gp
12      - 1.800 gp        - 27     - 125.000 gp
14      - 2.600 gp        - 29     - 225.000 gp
15      - 3.400 gp        - 30     - 325.000 gp

If, when gaining a level, you still have a reserve left, that reserve is lost.

When performing a ritual, you can spend a healing surge to gain access to your marks reserve, and spend any number of gold point equivalent value to replace some or all of the rituals component cost. Your reserve is reduced by the amount of gold piece equivalent you take.

Special: If you have the Dragonmark of Scribing, you can also expend your reserve to create a scroll of up to your level and paying part or all of the creation cost with your reserve pool. You still need to expend a Healing Surge for each scroll you create this way.

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For outside of Eberron, one might just change the prerequisites of the feat to "Ritual Caster" and rename it "Ritual Reserve".


The number values are based roughly on the value of consumable items like Potions. The starting value, 50 gp, is the price of a level 5 potion.

If anyone hasn't noticed yet, the values of item prices increase by a factor of 5 for every 5 levels - so a level 9 item costs 5 times as much as a level 4 item, though there is some rounding going on. The values above 27 and some empty spots in between could be easily extrapolated this way.

Question might be if the values are just too high? Basically the number means that any low level ritual will be trivially easy to perform at high levels (but isn't it already?). And it is advisable to get more than a few high level rituals done to have a chance to expend the entire reserve.

To put things in perspective:
Typical Component Cost for rituals:
- Level 1: 10 gp
- Level 5: 25 to 100 gp
- Level 10: 200 to 400 gp
- Level 15: 500 gp to 3.000 gp.
- Level 20: 5.000 gp
- Level 25: 25.000 gp
- Level 30: 600.000 gp

Maybe the reserve is too large overall? You can create about 5 rituals each level of your level with the reserve.
The ritual might be very strong for people using it with Enchant Magical Items. You still can't afford the high level stuff you want to use as implement, weapon, armor or neck slot item, but you can certainly afford a few of the lower level items.

I guess I'll have to ponder the values a little more. Maybe directly using potion values is the better approach?

[Jaysue]

The concept is amazing, to me (as a player) the most annoying thing about rituals is the cost - especially because at times it severely outweighs the benefit (and maybe because we are not the most creative bunch of players we often can think of 'no other way' - but im sure there is, our DM is just much smarter than us!).

We also have a low amount of gold probably because he knows all the trouble we'd cause if we got our hands on too much money!

Keep at it to get the maths right (if they are wrong, im not saying they are!) - i'll try and work out how many rituals on average (and the costs) i'd use and hopefully that is some benefit to you.

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

Originally Posted by Jaysue

The concept is amazing, to me (as a player) the most annoying thing about rituals is the cost - especially because at times it severely outweighs the benefit (and maybe because we are not the most creative bunch of players we often can think of 'no other way' - but im sure there is, our DM is just much smarter than us!).

We also have a low amount of gold probably because he knows all the trouble we'd cause if we got our hands on too much money!

Keep at it to get the maths right (if they are wrong, im not saying they are!) - i'll try and work out how many rituals on average (and the costs) i'd use and hopefully that is some benefit to you.

I suppose there are maybe three design guidelines for the balance of the value gained:
1) How much is a feat worth?
2) How many rituals do we expect people to cast each level?
3) How many rituals do we want people to cast (for free?) each level?

I suppose 2) is currently lower than it "should" be.

3) I'd say it should be at least one but probably more than that, but does it have to be a ritual of your level?

1) Feats that might offer help:
- Weapon Expertise is probably a very strong feat. If it was increasing a weapons enhancement bonus, it would mean that it quintuples the value of your magic weapon (since that's what it costs to get an extra plus.) An alternate approach might be to consider it as an item bonus like they exist for Reflex, Fortitude and Will defense. In that case, they are probably around "medium" level items of their tier (5th, 15th, 25th).
Again, Weapon Expertise is very powerful, so that's the upper limit. Weapon Focus might be considered weaker, since you can get a +2 damage bonus per tier with magic items.
But if that's our estimating, a feat might be something like an item of your level or 1/5th of that value. I think my current value is somewhere in between, too. But that doesn't make it "right" for 2 or 3. Or at all, because it's just guesstimating and trying to make comparisons between things that might better not be compared.