Could Trance be a ritual instead of a racial.

Garthanos said:

I am considering labeling some of them bloodline rites and having those accessible by ritualists too.

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Its just that the ones that are pretty 'magical' don't seem like they are really 'practices', which seem to me, descriptively at least, like 'acts of skill' more than anything else. There's clearly a grey area, but the various ways of 'Seeing an Aura' all seem pretty much magical and thus basically ritualistic to me, as an example. Clearly on the other extreme 'forging a document' is a practice.

I don't think the problem is the categorization in 4e, its who gets to access what...

AbdulAlhazred said:

I There's clearly a grey area, but the various ways of 'Seeing an Aura' all seem pretty much magical and thus basically ritualistic to me, as an example.

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And to me its seems like a monk / martial artist creating an altered mind state and pretty subtle

There was a book I read be-damned if I can remember the name in which a ranger did something kind of like this and called it "Hunters mind"... it was more of an enhanced perception an completely unsurpriseable state and to hell with obscuring land features etc.... so could be it's own thing, just related because the user was effectively in a trance like state.

One could change the duration to be till one takes damage.

To modern sensibility Grail Quest is pretty damn magical as is blood oath.

The 4e having access is why I figured giving them another key word that makes them both a ritual and a practice for purposes of who gets what might solve things.

Garthanos said:

And to me its seems like a monk / martial artist creating an altered mind state and pretty subtle

There was a book I read be-damned if I can remember the name in which a ranger did something kind of like this and called it "Hunters mind"... it was more of an enhanced perception an completely unsurpriseable state and to hell with obscuring land features etc.... so could be it's own thing, just related because the user was effectively in a trance like state.

One could change the duration to be till one takes damage.

To modern sensibility Grail Quest is pretty damn magical as is blood oath.

The 4e having access is why I figured giving them another key word that makes them both a ritual and a practice for purposes of who gets what might solve things.

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Yeah, I just don't have that consideration with my own game So, I'm left with that some things are CLEARLY 'practices', they involve some sort of procedure which accomplishes some specific thing. All (or virtually all) of the 4e practices fall into this category. Then there are things that are CLEARLY rituals, creating a teleportation circle, curing an affliction magically, etc.

Then there's stuff like 'Sense Aura'. This clearly involves some form of magic, whether explicitly or not. It also involves some sort of preparation, possibly use of some sort of materials, etc. Is it a ritual or a practice? Is there a useful distinction here? Honestly, both classes of thing follow a single pattern, you do some sort of activity for some period of time, pay some sort of price, and something happens or you gain some sort of ability, etc.

Frankly, I can see, from a flavor perspective, wanting to categorize these things, but from a rules perspective its hard to come up with any systematic difference which that categorization is enabling.

AbdulAlhazred said:

but from a rules perspective its hard to come up with any systematic difference which that categorization is enabling.

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In character builder they are very nearly the same thing too... martial practices are implemented as a sub-type of ritual.

I brought up the ranger taking on a trance to point towards fiction with martial types using altered mind-states just like the berzerk uses an activated altered mind state to achieve something.... ie doesnt feel clearly non-martial at all to me, in spite of your assertion. I think recognizing the ambiguity is valuable.

I know about the science of coal walking... however what do you want to call that focused fire resistance

Look out Woo Woo ahead

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Garthanos said:

I brought up the ranger taking on a trance to point towards fiction with martial types using altered mind-states just like the berzerk uses an activated altered mind state to achieve something.... ie doesn't feel clearly non-martial at all to me, in spite of your assertion.

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I know I brought up the Berserk... but there is also historic precedence for them using herbs/drugs to aid what they did too. Does that make "berzerker-gang" - clearly a spell... well it may be seen that way or it may be seen as explicitly martial power.

On the other hand Pass without a trace... and why is that a ritual, other than tradition

4th Dimensional Packing

4th Dimensional Packing
(thieving)
This practice allows one to compress excessively large amounts of supplies and equipment in to smaller spaces, reducing one aspect of encumbrance, it also allows for improved balancing of the weight which is carried, it allows the troops to carry significantly more but also to remain more rested with the weight they do carry and has a positive impact on endurance checks when travelling. This can affect the carrying capacity of not only the heroes but saddle bags and similar. At epic levels this practice can increase the parties carrying capacity by thousands of pounds and potentially save them the loss of many healing surges.
Other practices may also aid this such as the Military Rations practice (aka Lembas and such).

This is often combined with Trained Preparedness (for flavors sake if nothing else).

Some flavor - "What do you mean we should trust the rogue to lighten our loads!!!!!!!!!!!", "No I don't use 4th dimensional space to pack things, stop spreading that rumor"

cost special.

More flavor - "Why again do we need to spend so much on expensive packs and saddle bags and those extra straps for the backpacks and even the knights armor?... the damn things arent even lasting longer." ... "You are buying new straps and getting them stitched reinforced again and repaired of course, trust me its worth it, i even have to repair and repack the things between stop overs you probably should be paying me something for it"

Details still required.

AND there is a very martial flavored Tensors floating disk.

Garthanos said:

In character builder they are very nearly the same thing too... martial practices are implemented as a sub-type of ritual.

I brought up the ranger taking on a trance to point towards fiction with martial types using altered mind-states just like the berzerk uses an activated altered mind state to achieve something.... ie doesnt feel clearly non-martial at all to me, in spite of your assertion. I think recognizing the ambiguity is valuable.

I know about the science of coal walking... however what do you want to call that focused fire resistance

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Wait, remember, I'm the one that asserts that Martial is a magical power source, just like 'arcane' or 'divine', so I am not in any way considering it impossible to have a Martial Practice that is magical in some sense. I'm only questioning how you would partition this off from a Ritual, and why. In other words, there are many categories of rituals, it seems to me that a 'practice' like 'Sense Aura' in essence IS a ritual, its just a 'Martial' ritual (potentially, I actually don't see a reason for it to be so classified, it seems like a divination actually). I think its perfectly fine for a Fighter to have this ability, its great, so give it to them. It just seems to both defeat the purpose of having a separate category of practices and the purpose of having categories of things when things that have the same attributes are put into different categories to satisfy some fairly academic desire to be able to categorize some things as practices merely because that will grant them to Martial characters more easily (a circumstance that IMHO is actually a badly constructed feature of the 4e rules which arose merely because of piecemeal implementation of things, not due to any thought-out concept).

I'd rather just fix the underlying issue. Get rid of the whole need for a feat 'Ritual Caster' and simply allow characters to learn rituals that suite them. Heck, label them ALL practices for all I care, some are just "Magical Practices". This is kind of where my mind is headed anyway. I am considering writing mine such that the significance of the Key Skill is a bit higher and insure that they all have some real need to want to get success. Not so much because I want to see people failing when they do these practices, but more just to create a bit of differentiation. In other words, fighters probably don't USUALLY pick up 'Knock', but they don't need to waste a feat in order to do so. OTOH when they cast it, assuming they lack training in Arcana, they probably aren't super effective. Of course a smart fighter that DOES train Arcana will then be perfectly good at those sorts of rituals!

In other words, I think the ritual/practice system definitely needs the cleanup that we've all talked about at various points, but once that's done? I think the idea of bins like 'practice' vs 'ritual' become pretty much obsolete.

Sorry if that was a bit long-winded. hehe.

Actually, thinking about this a bit deeper...

Consider it this way. The existing Martial Practices are all things that, before MPs were thought of, were likely to just be either an SC or a simple skill check, maybe a 'trained only' one, etc. but clearly they are in the domain of skills. So, why not consider them to be basically parallel to powers? If you have a power that says you can do X, then you can do it. If you don't then you go to page 42 and try anyway (less effectively etc. perhaps).

So, think of practices/rituals in the same way. A character could, in principle, try to pull off any of these sorts of things. Its just that if you have invested in the ritual/practice it mostly 'just works' (well, like powers you may still need to pass a check, but its one check, probably not hard one to pass, and you probably geared up for it). If you don't know the proper practice/ritual then you go on to winging it, where you're into the realm of passing a possibly difficult SC and it takes longer, costs more, or whatever.

This feels a bit more cohesive to me. It even leads pretty naturally to 'research', you hack your way through doing something the 'page 42' way, and write it all up, polish it, and now you have a ritual/practice! The flavor can of course be appropriate to whatever it is, if its a relatively less mystical sort of thing, then you're mastering the process through practice and perfecting the tools and techniques. If its more mystical then you're researching exactly how to call down the proper form of magical energy or the most fitting form of prayer and meditation etc.

Its not really super different from the existing system or from whatever we have discussed, just a bit more cohesive in approach.

EDIT: and I think it also utterly subsumes things like Alchemy as well, though there could still be a feat for that, as it may be considered a pretty specialized subset of ritual practices.

Garthanos said:

4th Dimensional Packing
(thieving)
This practice allows one to compress excessively large amounts of supplies and equipment in to smaller spaces, reducing one aspect of encumbrance, it also allows for improved balancing of the weight which is carried, it allows the troops to carry significantly more but also to remain more rested with the weight they do carry and has a positive impact on endurance checks when travelling. This can affect the carrying capacity of not only the heroes but saddle bags and similar. At epic levels this practice can increase the parties carrying capacity by thousands of pounds and potentially save them the loss of many healing surges.
Other practices may also aid this such as the Military Rations practice (aka Lembas and such).

This is often combined with Trained Preparedness (for flavors sake if nothing else).

Some flavor - "What do you mean we should trust the rogue to lighten our loads!!!!!!!!!!!", "No I don't use 4th dimensional space to pack things, stop spreading that rumor"

cost special.

More flavor - "Why again do we need to spend so much on expensive packs and saddle bags and those extra straps for the backpacks and even the knights armor?... the damn things arent even lasting longer." ... "You are buying new straps and getting them stitched reinforced again and repaired of course, trust me its worth it, i even have to repair and repack the things between stop overs you probably should be paying me something for it"

Details still required.

AND there is a very martial flavored Tensors floating disk.

Click to expand...

I find the practice of envisioning how things might be accomplished in a martially flavored way analogous to many of the rituals more than a little invigorating even finding multiple ways. For instance a trained preparedness boyscout/batman practice can get you mount replacements but so can a more focused animal training: bringing in the herd practice