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Making Rituals Permanent by Spending Healing Surges for a Year
Several rituals have been published that allow the caster to make their effects permanent by spending a healing surge every day for a year. This seems like a really tedious and clumsy way to handle permanency. I certainly don't want to keep track of that for an entire year! I'd much rather pay exp like the old days (even though 4e has gotten rid of exp costs).
It's also strange that there is no way to dispel a ritual. So once a ritual is made permanent, unless it offers a way to counter it, there is no way to dispel it, ever.
However, I am more ok with healing surge loss than xp loss, because you can get back xp. This ensures that a party doesn't just all spend lots of xp and then get it all back. There is a clear trade off imo that xp doesnt equate to.
Can you cite reference of rituals that does permanency this way?
From what you see, it is a clunky way of handling it. Personally, I would simply up the cost to make the ritual permanent, or perhaps put a higher skill DC.
Can you cite reference of rituals that does permanency this way?
The first one I remember seeing is Create Teleportation Circle from the Manual of the Planes. Another is Guards and Wards from Arcane power, which can be seen freely at: Arcane Power Excerpts: Rituals
I like the mechanic. I think it's simple to keep track of and since anyone who aids in the ritual can pay the cost, it gives the fighter with 16 surges a way to contribute nicely.
It also makes a great plot device for evil cultists, providing a mechanic for them to suck the vitality from their faithful and deluded worshipers or unsuspecting victims (most of whom only have one healing surge) to fuel their rituals.
"Everyone in the town seems weak and sickly, as if old before their time."
Can you cite reference of rituals that does permanency this way?
From what you see, it is a clunky way of handling it. Personally, I would simply up the cost to make the ritual permanent, or perhaps put a higher skill DC.
In Dragon 366 they had quite a few new rituals, and the Safeguard, Teleport Catcher and Voicecatcher Veil rituals used the "spend a healing surge every day for a year to make it permanent" mechanic. Interestingly, the Arcane Barrier ritual in that same magazine worked differently. You only had to spend 4 times the ritual's normal cost to make it permanent.
In Arcane Power, we see this mechanic again in the Guards and Wards ritual and the reprinting of Arcane Barrier.
So if the "pay 4x normal cost to make permanent" mechanic works for Arcane Barrier, why not use that for all rituals with the permanent option instead of the pay a healing surge every day for a year crap?
I like the HS cost. Make magic feels personal and exhausting in the long run. When you could just make a high check or spend more money, takes the whole "sapping my life away" thing.
It's also strange that there is no way to dispel a ritual. So once a ritual is made permanent, unless it offers a way to counter it, there is no way to dispel it, ever.
That's where the DM (the lord and master of game and never a slave to the mechanics) comes in. The evil cultists have set up permanent ritutals at heir secret hideout, the DM designs a skill challenge for the PCs to overcome the devices and infiltrate their base of operations. Fun.
Perception checks to see a slight flaw to exploit in the magic circle. Acrobatics to Laura Croft your way through the area of effect. History to get background on the use of these devices and how they were overcome in the past. Arcana to recall the secret word to disable it.
I used a similar set up for a break the "magic circle (no doubt a permanent ritual) to retrieve the warded item (magic sword)" skill challenge after the players got through the first encounters to set them up for the final show-down to ge them to 2nd level.
__________________ Anyway, to cut a long story short I threw a and a which beat his and a , another double followed by a double and a double . After he'd thrown a and a I threw a and a .
I also like the "one healing surge a day for a year" mechanic. In a sandbox campaign, time usually passes in much larger amounts, and this gives ritual casters some nice long-term projects to mind. In a bash-the-door campaign, this puts the effect out of player hands, and players really don't need in in such a campaign anyway. (The whole campaign might be less than a year long; I'm playing Rise of the Runelords now, and that's written to take 6 months to epic levels.)
__________________ Carl Cramér
Member of the Netbook of Feats review board.
Several rituals have been published that allow the caster to make their effects permanent by spending a healing surge every day for a year. This seems like a really tedious and clumsy way to handle permanency. I certainly don't want to keep track of that for an entire year! I'd much rather pay exp like the old days (even though 4e has gotten rid of exp costs).
It's also strange that there is no way to dispel a ritual. So once a ritual is made permanent, unless it offers a way to counter it, there is no way to dispel it, ever.
Am I the only one bothered by these things?
Don't track it. Just subtract a healing surge from your total healing surges and occassionaly ask the DM if a year has passed.
On dispelling - it might be there is no generic way to facilitate that every kind of ritual is unique. If you want to break it, it might require its own ritual, components, skill challenges or similar things.
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Don't track it. Just subtract a healing surge from your total healing surges and occassionaly ask the DM if a year has passed.
This! It's easy
Also having your life-force drained to maintain a powerful ritual feels so much more magical than dropping 3 extra bags of gold in that magic circle.
It feels more personal and more magical, cause you have a piece of yourself in there.
Last edited by Wepwawet; 10th June 2009 at 11:03 AM..
While the idea of tracking something for a year of game play is tedious, permanency is potentially one of the most unbalancing things in the game. By making it possible, but difficult, you effectively control it. How many players are really going to want to track something like that, or have their characters take a year off from adventuring, just to make something permanent?
You don't have to take a year off adventuring. Most, if not all, of the rituals with this sort of cost specifically note that you can be anywhere, even a different plane, and still commit the ritual.
In essence, it is a -1 healing surge tax for an arbitrary amount of game time. Not a big deal, but it could become costly, especially when you are pimping your wizard's tower with many different things simultaneously...
MAkes perfect sense to me - as Mustrum said; reduce your healing surges per day by one and ask the GM when a year is over.
Yet another case of "when is 4E Earthdawn coming" to me.
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