Rituals and You

[Falling Icicle]

I really like the flavor of alot of rituals, and love that I can use any ritual I know without "preparing" it in advance. As the party wizard, I have a "gotta catch em all" attitude toward rituals. But I've noticed that despite all the rituals I've learned, I rarely ever use them except for enchant magic item. My party and I have a very frugal attitude and hate spending money on non-permanent things. This attitude goes back even to earlier editions, where we'd rarely spend money on consumable items. So the only rituals I usually end up using are those that are very low level and inexpensive, and even those I don't use very often. We look at the higher level rituals which can cost tens of thousands of gold per cast and just shake our heads. We would never use such a ritual unless absolutely forced to by the story, and even then there would be alot of grumbling about it.

Unfortunately, while I really like the flavor of rituals, I end up using them far less often than the equivalent spells in past editions, simply because of the cost. I was wondering how other people felt about this and if their experiences were similar? Do you think rituals are worth the cost? How often do you use rituals in your game? Would you prefer a rituals/day or some other way of balancing them than money?

 

[Mort_Q]

Balance is always the hardest thing to achieve, and I get how gold is used as a balancing mechanism.

That said I hate, as a player, collecting gold. I can't get into it... I know I need it from a gamist point of view, but I have a hard time using it as a character motivation for roleplaying.

It's hard to feel like a big damn hero when you're going through pockets of the dead looking for loose change like a common thug.

I suppose an XP-like system would work... not that I'm suggesting actually spend XP. Maybe for every XP earned you earn X amount of ritual points or something?

I haven't really looked at the math/balance of it.

 

[Prism]

I guess it all depends how much you value money and permanent magic items. In 3e I would often spend as much on potions and scrolls as I would on anything else. We rarely bought or crafted items and simply used what we found.

4e is looking pretty much the same so I can't imagine there will be too many worries spending the cash on rituals. If anything, magic items are less important than before and we have more free cash sitting around

It also depends on what kind of adventures you run. In our higher level stuff if you can't plane hop and scry for example you probably can't finish the adventure (and possibly can't start it)

 

[Rechan]

Doublepost.

 

[Rechan]

One thing I try to do as a DM is give "GP in residuum" or whatever you can use for ritual casting. That way it's GP straight up that is all ready slated for ritual usage.

You can even do this by adding it as part of monster corpses. "Demon teeth = residuum" or "dragon bones = residuum".

 

[Flipguarder]

I did that Rechan, and the end result was my players asking me the same questions over and over again. Not that it was their fault, I got way into making this complicated system, and they just weren't having any of it.

But if it works for your campaign then more power to ya.

 

[LostSoul]

Adventure design plays a large role in the utility of rituals.

 

[Flipguarder]

And player dynamics "should" play a large role in adventure design.

 

[the Jester]

I've hardly played 4e, but I've dmed a ton of it, and I've seen parties make varied use of rituals- from "just about every game once they had some components or residuum" to "not really".

One thing that I noticed was that parties that throw in on ritual expenses tended to have ritualists that used rituals more. It sounds obvious, but I've also seen players bitch about why the ritualist never casts any rituals when they won't throw in any money unless it's for creating a magic item for them.

On the whole, the 'team play' nature of 4e really encourages pcs that think about it to kick in for ritual components, which makes the cost... not so bad.
At least, IME and IMHO.