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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Robert Ranting" data-source="post: 3441967" data-attributes="member: 28906">Stop the Ceremony!Ritual and ceremony in AE are entirely flavor text, don't get hung up over it.  Mechanically speaking, ceremonial feats are no different from core D&D feats except that they cost money to take and do not function in an anti-magic field (being supernatural abilities).  In this way, they combine aspects of feats and magic items.  How those abilities are gained in-game is completely up to the DM, and may not require complex ceremonies or rituals to unlock the powers.  Sure, every feat has flavor text about the rituals necessary, but that's all flavor text, and can, and should be ignored if it gets in the way of the game being fun.Even the ritual warrior doesn't really rely upon "rituals" mechanically.  Combat Rites are like martial arts maneauvers.  Certainly, they are a formalized motion which can be called ritualistic, and the name emphasizes that aspect, but there doesn't need to be anything ceremonial about gaining a bonus to hit, or to a skill check, or gaining a die of sneak attack when you happen to be flanking.I started playing AU four years ago, and we quickly discovered that the ceremonial aspect of things only got in our way by the time we reached 3rd level.  Our DM was running the Shackled City AP, and we didn't have a whole lot of downtime, and our oversized party meant that we were often starved for loot, unless our lazy DM bothered to adjust the totals from the adventure.  We had not the time, money, or out-of-character patience to deal with the rituals, and so the group decided more or less to ditch that aspect of the system.When I began DMing AE about a year later, I decided to keep that ruling.  I tend to be rather stingy with loot, and for the most part, AE classes can hold their own with sub-standard equipment for their level.  I removed the ceremonial flavor text in my setting, as well as the associated gold cost.  Instead of paying for their feats out of their loot, I reduced the amount of loot overall, and made the feats free.  This, coupled with 32 point buy, has more or less kept the PCs competitive, despite being slightly behind according to the wealth per level chart.  I also adopted a variant damage reduction system which Monte Cook posted on his website, which allows weapons with enhancement bonuses to be considered equivalent to special materials or damage types.   If your +4 weapon can ignore /silver, /bludgeoning, /piercing, /slashing, /cold iron, and /adamantine, then you probably don't need to carry around a golfbag of various weapons, and therefore, you need less loot.  Further, since Champions, Mageblades, and Iron Witches can create weapons with enhancement bonuses as class abilities, they will essentially always have some ability to pierce DR that scales with level.The biggest issue with Ceremonial feats, however, is that having one at first level determines if a character has a truename.  Without a truename, a character can't take any more ceremonial feats (except as class bonus feats), cannot be made the target of various curses and bindings, but also cannot be resurrected.  I personally found it useful to keep Truenames around, since it made it more difficult for both PCs and NPCs to cast debilitating de-buffs on one another in the form of curses, and because it encouraged players to take ceremonial feats.  However, the longer I have played in the system, the more I wonder if Ceremonial feats are really that much more powerful than the general feats of D&D, and the more convinced I've become that some general feats (Speed Burst, Modify Spell) are actually better than some ceremonials (Wild Mage, Priest, Title, Infuse Weapon).  If it weren't for the messiness of determining whether a character has a truename or not, I might just write off all feats as "general", "spellcasting", or "class specific".  Really, if you didn't mind curses and resurrections being as common as they are in core D&D, it might be beneficial for you to just eliminate the truename requirement altogether for simplicity's sake.The bottom line is that ceremony and ritual are not as ingrained into the mechanics as the flavor text makes it appear.  There are a couple concerns regarding cost, and truenames, but it's entirely possible to gloss over or drop these elements without loosing too much in the way of balance.Robert "Just My Theory" Ranting</blockquote>

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