Making adjustments to Rituals?

[Giryan]

Speeding up rituals at the cost of Healing Surges appears to be the way that WOTC are taking it.
The Manual of the Planes except today has the planeshifter prestige class that can essentiall perform the linked portal ritual as a standard action instead of 10 minutes casting time, at the cost of 3 Healing surges +1 per round of sustaining

 

[Mort_Q]

Speeding up rituals at the cost of Healing Surges appears to be the way that WOTC are taking it.
The Manual of the Planes except today has the planeshifter prestige class that can essentiall perform the linked portal ritual as a standard action instead of 10 minutes casting time, at the cost of 3 Healing surges +1 per round of sustaining

Manual of the Planes Excerpts: The Planeshifter

I just came to say the exact same thing.

 

[DracoSuave]

That's a pretty darn useful encounter power. But it is -costly-. I suppose, if the party wanted to give up precious power slots to take ritual-equivalent stuff at much higher level than the ritual, while using their healing surges/damage to empower it, I'd have no problem with that.

But that's if they want to give up precious power slots, and at much higher level than 12.

 

[Ahglock]

Most of this is cut, but this is my rebuttal. If the time it takes makes no difference, then what point is there in shortening them? I mean, if you agree that it's handwaved most of the time, then whats the difference between handwaving 2 minutes and handwaving 10 minutes?

If it doesn't make a difference then there's no point arguing for -either- side. My point is that it does actually allow the party time to do something they might not ordinarily do.

But in most terms, there is no difference between 2 and 5 minutes for a ritual, both disallow the short rest while others can have one-you'd have to spend 10 minutes anyways. (Can't perform a ritual while resting) So you're really looking at 10 vs 15 minutes.

For me it is totally because I think the imagery of the ritual taking 10+ minutes to do some minor magical effect is just boring, lame, uninspiring. Pick your favorite adjective, I just kind of think if the ritual takes longer than a Disney villains singing ritual in a movie the imagery of chanting and tossing dust in the air passed cool and went to boring and lame.

For balance my opinion is it should be long enough so you have to decide between a short rest or a ritual when pressed for time, and in most cases it should take at least twice as long as the mundane skill method of handling things. I don't mind the clean room ritual taking less time than actually cleaning your room, but anything that is a skill a player would take it should take at least twice as long to do. 2-3 minutes for most rituals would cover this for balance. The extra things you can get out of the rituals being shorter only help in small enough corner cases that I don't consider it a balance issue.

Then again the monetarry costs are so high you could make rituals instant cast and most of them would be balanced.

I think the 4e team is starting to see this to some degree as well, more and more rituals are coming out with less than 10 minute and even 1 minute cast times. A lot of rituals really don't unbalance things but they help the story progress or are basic conveniences for these rituals the cast time can be reduced to a really low level.

 

[Bladesong]

How about some off-set like burn a healing surge and half the casting time or double the money and half the time or both to cut it to 1/4 the time?

 

[Wolf88]

But there IS a difference between five minutes and ten in 4e. One can be done during a short rest, the other can't. That's important for characters not performing the ritual, so a cleric can, for example, use the opportunity to use Healing Word a couple times to make post-fight healing more efficient.

wait a second.... why can't a ten minute ritual be cast in a short rest? cannot a short rest last any longer than 5 minutes?

 

[DracoSuave]

Well it could. But if it's beneficial to have two short rests for certain abilities, why not take advantage of that?