Are Rituals Vaporware?

[IceFractal]

That is a good question. to me it translate in "if you were a wizard in real life, which spells would you want to be able to cast?" and my answer to this would be "certaily not 100+ variations of "kill enemies with magical energy blasts".

That nails it on the head - exactly what I was trying to say. The reason why levelling up as a Wizard (or any character) is fun is not because your numbers get bigger, but because you grow in influence and power within the world. Because now you can easily do what you wished you could do three levels ago.

Mechanically speaking, you could have a game where you started out in a village fighting level 1 rats and goblins and getting thrown out of the tavern, and it stayed that way the entire time - eventually you'd be fighting level 30 rats and goblins, and the tavernkeeper would be some 30th level warrior. Mechanically, you'd be levelling up, getting stronger attacks, and facing tougher enemies - but I doubt most people would enjoy playing a game like that.


Levelling up is about aspirations. And most people don't aspire to be doing the same thing but slightly better. If you're a so called "archmage", able to blast demon lords apart with fireballs, but who can't fly over a swamp or summon shelter from the rain ... then you're a waste of magic!

And hence my concern for rituals. If they support combat magic and plot-important magic but leave out the rest because it's "boring", then they make becoming a better Wizard a pointless experience.

 

[pemerton]

I haven't written off too, but I won't look for it in during challenges, but more in the overall flow of the campaign, i.e. what will the next adventure be about ?

IMO, in a typical D&D 4E challenge, the player should assume the classic author stance : 1) find the best action (tactically) 2) justify it in-character.

Adding an extra thematic constraint still pose a problem for me

I think of it less as an additional (external) constraint, and more as an emergent (internal) payoff: if I've build my character correctly then every time I make the correct tactical choice I also express the thematic point I was intending to.

The first time I was really exposed to this way of approaching character build, action resolution and their capacity to interact in the interests of thematic expression was by an old friend of mine playing in an earlier RM campaign. His sorcerer (something like a 4e warlock) was extremely tactically effective, but virtually every action he took, and every skill on the character sheet, said something about the nature of human suffering (inflicting it, undergoing it) and how one might hope to be free of it. To put it in non-RM specific terms, it's a combination of choosing a theme that is apt to be expressed in challenge-oriented fantasy RPGing (ie love and friendship are probably not viable themes for this purpose, but honour and suffering are) and then having powers whose flavour and mechanics are able to, at the behest of the player who has built them into her/his character, deliver payoff in respect of that theme.

It's a type of play that's a pleasure to GM, and when a couple of players are engaged in it it produces a very exciting (for me) and dynamic RPGing experience that mixes the best of gaming (ie working with the mechanics matters) and story payoff. It speaks to a gamist aesthetic (only gamers are likely to see a mechanic as making a thematic statement) but not necessarily to gamist priorities for play in the Forge sense.

My problem is that RM (the main system I play with my regular group) has nearly as many features that militate against this style of play as support it (at low levels players have little mechanical control over the gameworld, at high levels play slows to the speed of treacle). So I'm hoping that once our current campaign ends (it's been running a long time and probably has a few months of life left in it) we can try something different - either modified HARP, or perhaps 4e.

What attracts me to HARP (a moderately incoherent but easily drifted narrativist-inclined tweak of RM) or 4e over a more abstract action resolution system like HeroWars is that the greater degree of simulationism (eg in the way powers are characterised and resolved) creates a more robust scaffold during gameplay on which the players can hang their thematic concerns (eg the colour contributed by the mechanical resolution of the Warlord powers we've seen seems a lot richer in this respect than either 3E's Aid Another mechanics, or HeroWars AP-sharing mechanics). Of course, this also creates the possibility that the scaffold won't support the thematic concerns in question. We'll have to wait and see!

 

[Lurker59]

Three rituals (though not their descriptions/mechanics) are named in KotS and others hinted at.

Spoilers on adventure content:
[sblock] Raise dead, gentle repose, and cure disease are mentioned by name. One NPC is described as having a small selection of 1st and 2nd level rituals he may sell. Whether the level is merely an indication of relative value/power or a requirement is uncertain though. [/sblock]

 

[Lizard]

4. Despite apparently not being a Revolutionary Enhancement Such As We Have Never Seen Before, paragon paths have managed to spur people to consider things which have never really been a part of D&D before. Like this, say. Unless we are now limited to including only Things Lizard Considers To Be Real Roleplaying, of course.

"Going on a quest to keep gaining levels" isn't new to D&D. Ask a 1e monk, druid, or assassin. (Or anyone who didn't have enough gold to pay training costs...)

Now, what would be interesting is if you had Heroic Tier lasting 1-30, BUT, you could, at 10th level, undergo a quest to ALSO gain access to "Paragon abilities", and then later a different quest for "Epic abilities", so that one 15th level character might just be a very skilled fighter, while another has nigh-supernatural powers.

Now as for rituals, the only railroading that can happen is if they happen to take 2 hours to cast instead of 6 seconds and so foil certain tactics that the player doesn't consider cheesy but the designers do. Otherwise, you might as well say that a 3E party with no wizards has been railroaded.

The last game I was in, we had no wizards. No clerics, either. We had a warlock with a high UMD skill, a psion, and a bunch of rogues. (Current game, we still lack a full-time cleric, but we have that warlock/cleric hybrid thingy.)

Anyway, railroading with rituals is easy -- just remove from the game any ritual you don't want. This is fair, to my mind, if it's done at the start of the game -- "There are no teleport rituals. There is a portal network built in the long long ago, but no one today knows how it was done. Neener." -- but not if it's suddenly sprung on the players because the DM decides today is the day they will not teleport, even if they'd been able to find ritual scrolls easily before.

One is worldbuilding, one is plot hammering.

 

[Lizard]

Why is it that when players brute force their way to the story they want it's called "player creativity", but when a DM does it it's called "railroading"?

Because the player has to make do with a limited set of tools and the DM has, in effect, limitless power. Thus there's a social contract -- the players are encouraged to think of highly creative uses for their abilities, while the DM is constrained to be "fair" and not simply walk the players through his Brilliant Story so they can admire his creativity. ("See! If I'd let you use passwall there, you'd have missed this really clever trap I invented! Wasn't it cool how your character got mangled? I spent five hours on that! Here, let me show you the CAD drawings I made of the spleen-remover!")

What will be interesting about rituals is if there's a mechanism for player creation of them...

 

[hong]

"Going on a quest to keep gaining levels" isn't new to D&D. Ask a 1e monk, druid, or assassin. (Or anyone who didn't have enough gold to pay training costs...)

It is, however, new to D&D if introduced as a general rule for all characters in a campaign, as opposed to specific classes. It is also certainly new in the environment post 3E, which posits a steady level advance by default without any specific milestones or transformative experiences.

And it counts as noncombat information, which is what was asked, and what was provided.

Now, what would be interesting is if you had Heroic Tier lasting 1-30, BUT, you could, at 10th level, undergo a quest to ALSO gain access to "Paragon abilities", and then later a different quest for "Epic abilities", so that one 15th level character might just be a very skilled fighter, while another has nigh-supernatural powers.

And this is relevant because...?

 

[UngeheuerLich]

Because the player has to make do with a limited set of tools and the DM has, in effect, limitless power. Thus there's a social contract -- the players are encouraged to think of highly creative uses for their abilities, while the DM is constrained to be "fair" and not simply walk the players through his Brilliant Story so they can admire his creativity. ("See! If I'd let you use passwall there, you'd have missed this really clever trap I invented! Wasn't it cool how your character got mangled? I spent five hours on that! Here, let me show you the CAD drawings I made of the spleen-remover!")

What will be interesting about rituals is if there's a mechanism for player creation of them...

Bad design... the trap is always behind the wall your players used passwall at... (its called adapting your dungeon on the fly)

but don´t tell your players...

 

[Lizard]

Three rituals (though not their descriptions/mechanics) are named in KotS and others hinted at.

Spoilers on adventure content:
[sblock] Raise dead, gentle repose, and cure disease are mentioned by name. One NPC is described as having a small selection of 1st and 2nd level rituals he may sell. Whether the level is merely an indication of relative value/power or a requirement is uncertain though. [/sblock]

Interesting.

This seems to imply the "Bag-o-scrolls" will still be around in 4e, it will just be a bag of mostly non-combat scrolls. I'm not sure if I like this or not. Well, I don't like it if it's just scrolls. I *do* like it if PCs can learn these rituals, as it feels in-character for someone to say "I know a rite which will remove the plague from you". But I'm back to NOT liking it if rituals are, in essence, an at-will out of combat power once you've learned them, because if a)All it takes is a feat, and b)anyone can learn that feat, and c)there's no resource cost once the ritual is learned, you lose a lot of character distinctiveness as everyone has access to the same non-combat "spells".

I'd really like for there to be a limit on rituals known, even if it has to be coupled with 'retraining' for balance, but I think it's been stated outright that there will not be.

 

[Lackhand]

I'd really like for there to be a limit on rituals known, even if it has to be coupled with 'retraining' for balance, but I think it's been stated outright that there will not be.

Do all your wizards end up with the same spells known now (Mine don't)? Especially ignoring fireball and magic missile?
Because if they don't, the limit is likely to be the same (gold, opportunity cost) as it is now; an arbitrary rate limiter rather than a total cap.

If yours do, then there's nothing I have to offer, mind you.

 

[Lizard]

And this is relevant because...?

Because it WOULD have been new.