What do you think is wrong with rituals?

[Legildur]

1) Cost - once or twice is okay, but it prohibits regular casting as it soon eats into funds.

Our party invests regularly in rituals, but more as an insurance policy. Hopefully we'll never need Raise Dead

Comrade's Succor, once again, is insurance. We're in a pubslished adventure, and I can recall finding at least two ritual books. And then we have purchased others like Water Breathing and Enchant Magical Item. We also purchased Disenchant Magical Item so that we could create Residium on the fly for casting of other Rituals, should we need to do so.

Can't recall what else we have as I play the Rogue

All ritual costs come from party funds first and then wealth is disbursed.

2) Organisation - not well organised for easy reference.

 

[Dungeoneer]

I'm with those who say that they like the concept of rituals, but see the execution as something to be desired.

I think tying ritual casting to gold was definitely a mistake. Not necessarily because that makes them too expensive (although in some cases that can be a problem). But a) because players are simply loathe to spend gold without good reason, so they may be initially unwilling to give rituals a shot, and b) because ritual casting = gold just seems so... unimaginative.

I would have liked to see a more substantial system for alchemical reagents and the like for casting rituals. I know that would add to the complexity but it would be WAY cooler.

In my game I actually told our sorceress that she had to gather specific components to perform a ritual to convert a pseudodragon she captured into a familiar. She was constantly on the lookout for these items, and she was so excited when she got them! That was a lot more fun then just having her spend 1000 gold or something.

I'm not saying every ritual should require a scavenger hunt, but just that the system could be a lot more interesting than it is. Or should I say, more magical...

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

While I don't have a problem with Rituals as a concept nor in their mechanics (including having GP costs, which I see as a stand in for all the little things you need to do to get everything just so), I found the following 2 comments to be right on:

• Power balance seems to be off. Sometimes the level of a given ritual just makes me scratch my head. Admittedly, rituals can be tougher to gauge then a power, but still.
  <snip>
• Not enough use of the ritual design space. Martial Practices was a great idea weakly executed. There's tons you can do here. Hopefully we'll see more innovation in this area in the future.

 

[GRStrayton]

We've been using the following house rule for pre-casting rituals with great success:

After spending the necessary time and components to cast a ritual, the caster may choose to delay the onset of the ritual’s effect. Before the end of your next extended rest, the ritual’s effect can be unleashed with a standard action. If not used before the end of your next extended rest, however, the delayed ritual’s magic dissipates.

So, you're running away from a particularly lethal encounter and the wizard casts Arcane Lock on a door, slowing down the pursuit (hopefully).

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

We've been using the following house rule for pre-casting rituals with great success:

After spending the necessary time and components to cast a ritual, the caster may choose to delay the onset of the ritual’s effect. Before the end of your next extended rest, the ritual’s effect can be unleashed with a standard action. If not used before the end of your next extended rest, however, the delayed ritual’s magic dissipates.

So, you're running away from a particularly lethal encounter and the wizard casts Arcane Lock on a door, slowing down the pursuit (hopefully).

It is a good concept. I wouldn't make it a general rule, but I would really consider allowing a character to make basically a consumable that was a specific ritual. One way to do it would be to require them to use Alchemy and the ritual. So for a small extra cost you could freeze the effect of something like Arcane Lock into a minor consumable item.

There could be a lot of other minor rituals too, ones that emulate some of the other classic spells like Light, Silence, etc. Some of those would work quite well as freezable rituals. It would give back a bit of the old "The wizard prepares some some dirty tricks for tomorrow's adventure". Obviously an artificer would really excel here...

Yeah, rituals power levels are not always totally logical, but I don't think they're too far off of reasonable either for the most part. Mostly it seems like they are positioned at levels where a capability is most appropriate. Seeing as anyone can cast a scrolled ritual the DM does have a lot of leeway in the downward direction. Not sure I know of any that are really too LOW a level, but then the DM can always just not give them out if he doesn't want the PCs to have them until a higher level.

Mostly a book of rituals would be pretty nice.

 

[Stalker0]

First thing I'll say is that my group found rituals to be more of a paragon level ability.

At heroic levels they weren't using rituals much. Rituals were too expensive and generally too weak.

At paragon level, you start getting some powerful rituals, and the low levels ones are now cheap enough to be used whenever.


Overall, here is my problem with rituals

1) Some of them are way too expensive. I'll use wizard's curtain as an example. All it does is create a curtain to give you some privacy, why does it have to cost so much gold?

2) The levels on many of them don't seem to reflect their power.

3) There is no incentive to share rituals in a party. If one caster has a ritual, that's pretty much all you need. It means that one guy tends to be the ritual guy, and everyone else just does there thing.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

3) There is no incentive to share rituals in a party. If one caster has a ritual, that's pretty much all you need. It means that one guy tends to be the ritual guy, and everyone else just does there thing.

Not really sure why this is a problem though. In the old days you had generally one wizard and one cleric in the party who could do the utility spell casting, maybe a rogue that could in a pinch read a scroll. Seems about the same in 4e, you have the wizard and the cleric that have ritual casting. Granted they can probably mostly cast the same rituals now, but I don't really see a problem.

 

[mkill]

My biggest beef with rituals is not gold, but casting time. It's just too damn long in most cases, without any way to reduce it within the rules.

The idea was to encourage PCs to solve problems by mundane means rather than rituals.
However, that's counterproductive. It forces the other PCs to idle around in-game and do nothing while the Wizard casts. That's not fun. Just let the guy in robes mumble a few words and the game can continue.

 

[Propheous_D]

I haven't had much problem with Rituals in my groups. I have noticed that the LFR players in my group didn't even bother with them. So now the group is walking around with 500gp of ritual materials and a couple ritual books and they have no clue what to do with them. So one of the players is going to invest in the feat and see were it leads.
In my group that I play in my bard uses rituals all the time. I remember one encounter were the party had to hold back a pack of undead while I performed a short cast ritual to prepare myself to take over the power of a medallion that had come into our possession that could control the horde. It was a great encounter with a few nice skill challenges for the other PC's while I prepared.
I think that rituals can be an amazing tool especially for a DM, but I do believe they are very underdeveloped and rated currently.

 

[Tony Vargas]

I generally like rituals and the way their implemented. I can see the objection that some take too long to cast or cost a too much for what they do. A casting time of 10 minutes or an hour really is an uneccessary limitation, even a casting time of 1 minute keeps them completely out of combat. Anything over 5 minutes makes casting a ritual take longer than a short rest. Most rituals should be castable as part of a short rest - that would help them to see more use.

Asside from that, the big thing I don't like about rituals is the impracticality of copying them. It's nice to have all your rituals in one ritual book. The rules, however, make copying a ritual as expensive as buying it, which is excessive. If you do find rituals as treasure, you end up carting around a varitable library of captured ritual books. I think it should be possible to copy or, perhaps, /transfer/ ritual writings to your own book. Similarly, you should be able to expend a Scroll of a Ritual to add the ritual to your book.

I like the general idea of components, but it'd be cool to allow that some component - arcane reagents, in particlar, be gatherable rather than strictly buyable. Part of the treasure parcel of some monsters (particularly those that wouldn't tend to accumulate treasuer) could be in the form of components that could be 'harvested' from them. "Dragon's Blood," is a classic material component, for instance.