Rituals

[Uller]

I've been playing 4e for about a year now. I've played everyvother edition all the way back to OD&D. I started 4e with essentials. We've recently broken out of the published adventures which are mostly dungeon delves and are starting to break out into more sand box style campaign with shorter adventures of the pc's choosing.

This is a great opportunity to introduce rituals both for the pcs and npcs (one of their current villians is a bog hag and a current ally is a priest of the raven queen). The essentials books gloss over rituals completely. There is only one mention of them in the rules compendium and none in any other essentials books. I have ddi and access to the phb and dmg. So I have the rules and can find rituals to include in the game (on pc is cursed with lycanthropy...so they are currently on a quest for some remove affliction reagents

Anyone have any tips on rituals? Things to watch out for? House rules? Homebrew feats? It seems to me component costs are high and I don't like that essentials classes need to take a feat to use rituals from a book. I may bhouse rule that characters with arcana religion or nature training as a class feature automatically have ritual caster as a feature as well...

Edit: oops. Meant "homebrew _rituals_"

 

[Radiating Gnome]

I frequently use rituals as story elements -- maybe use a ritual from the book as a template or just make it up entirely, but I just create a skill challenge that PCs can pretty much only use magical skills for (arcana, maybe religion and nature depending) and there you go.

If you want your players to use rituals more, think about not requiring the feat to use rituals -- maybe it just goes with training in the appropriate skill (if you're trained in arcana, you can cast rituals that have arcana as a primary skill).

Another idea to make them a little easier to cast would be to make the components reusable (not consumed in the casting of the ritual). Maybe if the ritual fails somehow the ritual component is destroyed (or on a roll of 1 on the skill check) but otherwise it's reusable.

-rg

 

[SensoryThought]

I also like rituals as a way to give magical pcs extra abilities that aren't combat focussed. Having them cost is great for balance too (yes they buy rations rather than summon meals at 50gp a pop).

I have houseruled lower casting times for some rituals and/or made it so dragonmarked pcs can use their domain rituals faster or cheaper. Some 4e rituals are too long to be practical. Even 2-3 min is still long enough for them to be excluded from combat.

 

[tuxgeo]

If you want further variety of rituals, there is also "Azagar's Book of Rituals" from Goodman Games, which was designed to be compatible with 4E, and runs 160 pages (including title page, contents, and index).

 

[Uller]

Current important NPCs in the area are:

1) A bog hag (defacto ruler of the village they are in) - the PCs are in the middle of a quest for her in order to aquire the components for a Remove Affliction ritual.

2) A priest of the Raven Queen (not an adventuring cleric mind you...just a parish priest...he likely can cast some spells and perform rituals up to 10th level)

3) An imprisoned vampire lord. The PCs are in his house right now and (unbeknownst to them) have the means to free him...but not control him...should provide me with endless entertainment if they actually free him. (oh...and they just slew the ghost of his wife...so he will probably not be very pleased with them)

4) Also a PC Cleric just became an NPC as the player decided to play a different character (he wanted to give a Warden a try). So the former PC is hanging out with the Raven Queen priest for now...since the party is now lacking a healer, he is going to brew some potions for them.

Any suggestions for what rituals any of these characters may have available for the PCs to purchase or to discover after they slay/defeat them? (or to use against the PCs?)

I guess the thing that bothers me the most about rituals is the cost of components...They seem prohibitive. Why would anyone go to the trouble of purchasing the reagents to brew a potion when you could simply buy the potion (assuming you are at a market that has both available)? If buying the parts to install new brakes for your car cost the same as having a garage install new brakes for you, who would ever buy the parts (and how would the garage ever make any money)?!?! If you go to the local shaman and ask him to sell you a potion that cost him 50gp in components to produce, why would he sell it for 50gp? Maybe I'm misunderstanding?

So I think house rule number one is that the "Cost" for a ritual is not the component cost, but the cost to have some NPC perform the ritual (so for an NPC to brew you a healing potion costs 50gp...). The cost for components to peform the ritual yourself will be considerably less. I lean towards 1/3. Will this break anything?

House rule two is that if you have training in the relevant skill, you can perform its associated rituals.

I also intend to start including in treasures, components and ritual scrolls.

 

[Ryujin]

The big advantage of brewing your own potions, is that you can brew your own potions. They place no prerequisites on what and when you can create, other than by level and time constraints, so you can set up your portable brew factory wherever you like. I used to turn out resist potions during long rests, to cover our perceived needs of the moment, because as an Eladrin I was sitting around twiddling my thumbs for half that time anyway.

Given the list of characters you've given I would say that undead related rituals would be high on the list. The Bog Hag might have Corpse Light, Skull Watch, and Undead Servitor, for example. Throw in Seek Rumor, so she knows what's going on in town.

The priest of the Raven Queen might well have Remove Affliction just like the Hag, Undead Ward, Deathly Shroud so that he can move among the enemy without being recognized for what he is....

 

[Dragoslav]

In our group, my PC (a psion) is the ritual user, but unfortunately I haven't had much call to use them yet. I've been trying to come up with creative uses for them, but sadly have not come up with much.

Enchant Magic Item is a potentially useful ritual because, unlike Brew Potion, you can actually get a high level magic item for cheaper if you already have the lower-level version.

Some ideas from our campaign to encourage the ritual use of rituals: Our DM also reduced the cost of Enchant Magic Item and one of my other rituals by 10%. The party killed a dragon, so I harvested what I could from it for ritual components, and that was the DM's ruling on it. He also allows gold to be directly used for rituals (so you don't have to buy components first), which basically makes residuum pointless, but I guess it makes it less likely that I will want to use a ritual and be unable to because of lacking the proper components.

 

[Tony Vargas]

I've been playing 4e for about a year now. I've played everyvother edition all the way back to OD&D. I started 4e with essentials. ... The essentials books gloss over rituals completely. There is only one mention of them in the rules compendium and none in any other essentials books. I have ddi and access to the phb and dmg. So I have the rules and can find rituals to include in the game

Rituals were a nice idea - you take the old out-of-combat spells that more often got made into scrolls than prepared, and separate them from class spells so players don't have to choose between being effective in combat or having a cool seldom-used spell on tap, and give them a per-casting cost to keep them from being systematically abused (like, oh, Fabricate in 3e).

But, it turned out that groups often just didn't use them at all, for three reasons: 1) rituals took a long time to cast, the quickest requiring you to take the equivalent of multiple short rests, 2) they cost a lot learn, when you already had the option of buying magic items magic items, instead and 3) by the time the per-casting component cost was reasonable, the ritual was well below your level, that meant that at 1st level, no ritual was economical to cast, even if you got some for free for being a Cleric or Wizard, so players just got in the habit of not using them.

Anyone have any tips on rituals? Things to watch out for? House rules? Homebrew ferituals? It seems to me component costs are high and I don't like that essentials classes need to take a feat to use rituals from a book. I may bhouse rule that characters with arcana religion or nature training as a class feature automatically have ritual caster as a feature as well...

Component costs are high for a ritual of our own level, but rituals are more meant to take the place of lower-level spells that you might have put on scrolls in earlier editions, it's good that your party has advanced some in level (and hopefully wealth) before being introduced to rituals, as 1st level ritual components are probably in their price range.

The only house rule I implemented for rituals was to change the casting time. Time tends to flow around encounters, short rests, and extended rests - there's none of the exacting rules on how long it takes to search a 10x10 room or sneak down a 60' long corridor or whatever, like there were in AD&D, so there's very little exact time keeping to deal with. Rituals, though, have exact (and long) casting times, making them seem inconvenient. What I did was to change the casting time of rituals that took less than an hour to "You can use this ritual as part of a short rest" and longer ones to "You can use this ritual as part of an extended rest," and, if it had ever come up I'd have had 8+ hour rituals basically take "a day" to cast.

Essentials classes get plenty of goodies in place of the Ritual Caster Feat, so I wouldn't worry about that. A variation I considered, in order to make rituals feel more like class spells, was to limit Religion rituals to Clerics (and Divine classes), Nature rituals to Rangers (and Primal classes), Arcane rituals to Wizards (and other archanists), and Heal rituals to leaders. You omit the Ritual Caster feat, and instead allow rituals for those trained in the skill and of an appropriate class, as above. So a Warpriest could cast Divine & Heal rituals, while a Hunter could cast nature rituals, a Mage arcana rituals, and Sentinel nature & heal rituals.

Another tip I'd have for introducing rituals is to place them as treasure. Ritual books, components and scrolls can all be placed as treasure (and unwanted magic items can be rendered for Residuum, the universal component). Scrolls are a particularly nice introduction as you don't need Ritual Caster to use them, and can use a higher-level ritual on a scroll. So you can 'try out' a ritual before letting the players get access to it permanently or give them access to a ritual that's necessary for the plot but not otherwise something they might want to have or you might want to include. (The odd thing about scrolls is they still require components, so I've seen some DMs always include the components with the scroll, and I see no reason not to go old-school and say the components are baked in - in which case include a single casting cost in the price of the scroll).

 

[Radiating Gnome]

An idea that might be interesting would be to introduce a ritual focus -- like the black and white cubes used by the Deryni in Katherine Kurtz's novels. It might be specific to a school of study, or each individual caster, etc. But using that focus might replace some or all of the component cost of a a ritual -- maybe 100gp/level, etc.

-j

 

[(Psi)SeveredHead]

Anyone have any tips on rituals? Things to watch out for? House rules? Homebrew feats? It seems to me component costs are high and I don't like that essentials classes need to take a feat to use rituals from a book. I may bhouse rule that characters with arcana religion or nature training as a class feature automatically have ritual caster as a feature as well...

Edit: oops. Meant "homebrew _rituals_"

Alas, I have little experience with them. I think rituals are more important in an urban campaign where PCs have more time to play with them.

I wonder about the skill DCs of non-ritualists interacting with rituals. For instance, the DC for detecting a ritual with Arcana is with the old skill math in the PH1, and this hasn't been errata'd. The Perception DC to notice the Alarm ritual is also too high. In a recent encounter, I used the new rules. However, the villain has 4 levels over the PCs, so they couldn't make their skill checks anyway This was a clue that the villain was not a pushover, although the clue didn't work; the PCs backed off and used a better plan because an equal-leveled encounter spanked them (warned by the Alarm ritual, of course).

IMO, you should use the new skill DC rules.

I find a lot of the (unfortunately non-core) rituals make good minion traps, as in one-shot traps. Wyvern Watch and Glyph of Warding can go off, immobilizing or damaging PCs. I don't like to use these to "guard doors" unless there's an encounter to go with that. A PC being immobilized in the midst of a raging battle is likely to be very worried, and perhaps a little respectful of the ritualist. (Also murderous.)