Balancing Rituals without Gold

[divinenathanica]

Someone mentioned something about losing healing surges, and it got me thinking, maybe the healing surges don't come back naturally after rest. It can be a form of spell sickness. It might have another issue of trying to figure out how to balance the loss of healing surges against the time to regain the surges.

I think that the best way to lessen the extent of ritual casting is to require very specific, and rare, components. Basilisks' eyes, Unicorn fur, etc. It doesn't always have to be something that's dangerous to get, just difficult. Maybe magic rituals were much more prevalent in the world prior to the start of the PCs. Trade flourished so ritual casters could get the components that come only from the summit of the Sun on the other side of the sand-sea. Or whatever flavor works for your campaign.

Also, if your PCs are down with you running a low money campaign, why don't you tell them about your ideas for the rituals. I'm sure that the players won't want to spend feats and time learning rituals if they are then going to be very dissuaded from using them. Something like this, to me at least, seems best settled with the gaming group.

 

[mmadsen]

Another obvious "component" we've ignored: human sacrifice. How quickly will the party turn chaotic evil when they find the path to power lies in killing the innocent?

 

[Plane Sailing]

Residuum.

Probably a good idea to remove the cost of the disenchanting ritual if you're doing it this way.

This was my first thought as well.

In addition, (borrowing from the_redbeard's idea), there could be a similar 'harvesting ritual' which allows the collecting of residuum from magical creatures remains. For the evil among us, a 'sacrificial ritual' allows gaining residuum by sacrificing sentients.

Cheers

 

[dasheiff]

Give them options with a feat?

EscuMaterials
When choosing this feat choose a ritual that you have mastered. You may cast that ritual 1/day without paying the gold cost. You may take this feat multiple times either choosing another ritual or adding another free useage per day to the ritual.
This feat cannot be applied to: Brew Potion, Enchant Magic Item, Raise Dead or any ritual with a cost of "special".

 

[N0Man]

Give them options with a feat?

EscuMaterials
When choosing this feat choose a ritual that you have mastered. You may cast that ritual 1/day without paying the gold cost. You may take this feat multiple times either choosing another ritual or adding another free useage per day to the ritual.
This feat cannot be applied to: Brew Potion, Enchant Magic Item, Raise Dead or any ritual with a cost of "special".

You know, a variation of this might not be bad. I'd require that Healing Surges be used instead of the gold, maybe 1 or 2 surges per 50 or 100 gold, and I'd cap it low, at maybe 100 gold is the max you could get for free. Plus, obviously, no magic item creation, potions, etc.

 

[kennew142]

I'm not convinced that rituals (aside from magic item creation) need anything to balance them out. I like low (or perhaps reasonable) character wealth and the gold piece cost for rituals really bothers me.

I may give it a try without components, or with much cheaper components. Since rituals have no effect on combat, and most of them could be cast as spells in earlier editions, I don't see how they can unbalance the game. Since anyone can take the ritual caster feat, they don't allow one character class to overshadow the others either.

If the gold cost is necessary for some reason, I can always add it back in. With the gold I give out IMC, we may as not have rituals. No one will ever use them as written. I've just never been able to stomach the idea of a campaign where the characters are all functionally equivalent to billionaires before they reach level 10.

The cost of magic items (although I seldom allow PCs to buy them) and the cost of rituals is the first information about 4e that I haven't liked.