Converting ritual scrolls to books?

The PCs in my game have a few scrolls that are slightly above their level. If they don't use the scrolls by the time they get high enough to learn those spells, I suspect they're going to ask about how to convert ritual scrolls to books.

Is there any way in the rules currently to do this? Would it be reasonable to allow Transfer Enchantment to serve this purpose? A ritual and a book both have the same market price, so it's not like they've cheated the treasure curve if I allow this. Is there any hidden gotcha I'm missing there?

From memory, the rules specifically say you can't go from scroll to book.

That said, also from memory, there is no level limit on scrolls. If you have the scroll, you can perform the ritual.

Nope, can't do it by the rules. A scroll is a partially cast ritual and can't be 'converted.'

Maybe let them research the ritual, and the scroll gives a hefty bonus to their rolls.

blargney the second said:

Maybe let them research the ritual, and the scroll gives a hefty bonus to their rolls.

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4e doesn't have any research rules; and even if it did (allowing you to make skill checks to learn a new ritual without copying it from another source), you'd still have to pay the market price of the ritual, since that is the cost of the raw materials (inks, papers, etc) to scribe the ritual in your book, not the price you have to pay at the Ritual Library to get a book to copy from.

Myself, whenever I have an item that for game reasons converts itself into another item (for example, the character goes on a side quest that ups his sword from +1 to +2), I simply subtract the difference from their next treasure bundle. Or, to think of it the other way around, I give them a +2 magic sword in their treasure bundles, and add the price of the +1 sword to the treasure bundles for that level.

In this case, if the character spends the required plot time and effort to work out the ritual from the scroll, simply subtract the value of the ritual from their treasure for that level and add back in the price of the scroll.

msherman said:

4e doesn't have any research rules; and even if it did (allowing you to make skill checks to learn a new ritual without copying it from another source), you'd still have to pay the market price of the ritual, since that is the cost of the raw materials (inks, papers, etc) to scribe the ritual in your book, not the price you have to pay at the Ritual Library to get a book to copy from.

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Technically, yeah. But researching rituals sounds like the stuff skill challenges are made of. If the PCs succeed, they can learn the ritual. If they fail, they waste money, time, and the scroll they started with.
-blarg

blargney the second said:

Technically, yeah. But researching rituals sounds like the stuff skill challenges are made of. If the PCs succeed, they can learn the ritual. If they fail, they waste money, time, and the scroll they started with.
-blarg

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Yay! A skill challenge for a single person to perform a mundane task!

Either the ritual is important enough to be worth a mini-adventure, or just charge the gold and go on your way.

I have a house rule for this situation, that you may want to consider:

Ritual Books & Scrolls
Ritual books as described in the rules don’t exist. Ritual books are simply binders to compile a collection of ritual scrolls, and costs 1 gp. You can use a ritual scroll as you would normally use a ritual book by providing the necessary component. Creating a ritual scroll takes 8 hours. Because ritual scrolls are made with the best papers and inks, ritual books and scrolls are waterproof.

This is a carryover of my house rule for wizard's spell books from 3rd edition. There's no good reason why a person couldn't copy a spell from a nonmagical D&D spell book and have it cost so much time and money to do so. Although this rule retains the costs of creating copies of rituals (since you can treat them as a Ritual Book for this purpose), it grants you the benefit of being able to use it as a scroll in desperate situations.

Hang on here - nobody's asked the vital question:

Might there be a reason you can't convert ritual scrolls into ritual books?

And yes there is - ritual scrolls as written leave the control (the flow of ritual casting) up to the DM. If you want to lend the players a hand in some adventure, you might arrange for them to find or buy up to three ritual scrolls. This allows them to cast that ritual (for example; finding their way through a labyrinth) three times but not more.

Once you've given the adventurers a ritual book, they can effectively cast it forever (barring minor issues such as component costs). For the purposes of my example adventure, this might ruin it completely (if they cast the pathfinding ritual at every turn in the maze, the entire exercise becomes pointless).

Same thing, another example: you could have your heroic level party find a single scroll of Raise Dead. This essentially gives them a single "get out of jail" card, but they can only mess up once, keeping them on their toes. Otherwise, you'd immediately end up with a situation where level means everything (are they level 8? Everybody gets as many "get out of jail" cards as they want. Are they level 7? No they don't) and such a sharp delineation between levels 7 and 8 are most probably not intended.

So the inability to convert a consumable into an at-will (as it were) is probably intended to be a positive quality of the game, and not a detriment.

In short; I feel it is much better you tell your players you have someone willing to trade in the scroll as part of the payment for a book containing the same ritual just this once.

The important part is "just this once". You wouldn't want to give up all future control just because your in this particular situation now.

Zapp

PS. If you want, you could re-skin scrolls into glowing gems of crystallized magic. This I feel makes for a less strong connection than between book and scroll: it becomes much less "reasonable" that you could convert one into the other.