Are Rituals Vaporware?

[Jer]

The sad thing is, the 'fix everything' is completely a fan created thing. The devs haven't talked about them enough to have created any buzz beyond 'they exist, they can be learned, some spells have moved to ritual territory'.

This. Let me repeat loudly: THIS! With arrows

The ritual mechanic is probably going to disappoint a heckuva lot of people around here because a lot of folks have built ideas of what the ritual mechanics are going to be through a process that combines wishing for a pony with the game of telephone. I keep looking for official sources of the ritual speculation and, other than the bits that ForbiddenMaster points out above there aren't any - anything beyond that is built on hope, rumor and speculation.

In particular, the 'any missing monster abilities are just rituals now' has wandered solely out of the heads of people on this board, with no help from the devs at all.

And this one is really kind of irritating because most of the things that people keep speculating that monsters will have rituals to accomplish are things that can just as easily fall into the realm of "DMs don't actually need a mechanic to accomplish this - it's more a plot point than a monster ability". And a good chunk of folks seem to be ignoring the giant flashing neon signs that the devs have placed in a few areas (notably the podcasts) that the new edition is going back to an attitude of earlier editions - that not everything needs to be defined by a formula and a rule, some of it really is a set story points.

 

[ProfessorCirno]

To clarify, I don't think rituals will fix everything - far from it. I've just noticed "Rituals will fix it!" has become a common saying around here

 

[Kordeth]

To clarify, I don't think rituals will fix everything - far from it. I've just noticed "Rituals will fix it!" has become a common saying around here

This is a common misconception--fortunately, rituals will fix it.

 

[Fallen Seraph]

I think Rituals will mainly fix the Spells issue, which is the main reason behind Rituals. However, the concept of Rituals, can be used for a whole plethora of things.

We have already seen the beginning of it with Alchemy being similar to Rituals. So I suspect both the fans and WoTC will go crazy with using the concept and mechanics of the Ritual for a wide variety of things from the mundane (professions such as being a sailor or shoe maker) to the spectacular (parting the waters of a ocean, casting down a god).

 

[Lanefan]

"Rituals can fix everything" makes as much sense as "spells can fix everything".

Except in 4e it's "Spells break things. Rituals fix them."



Lanefan

 

[Sojorn]

This is a common misconception--fortunately, rituals will fix it.

No, the purview of rituals is everything, not anything.

Everything that is anything will not be fixed by rituals.

 

[Fifth Element]

Most notably, we do not know that there will be actual rules for any specific rituals in the PHB or DMG. Nothing WotC has said contradicts the possibility that the ritual rules will simply be a list of things rituals can do, a vague guideline regarding difficulty, and the DM has to ad-hoc the specifics.

And this is a problem because...

Nothing WotC has said confirms this either. Why assume the worst? We're getting a rituals preview soon enough.

 

[Stogoe]

Why assume the worst?

Because spite is one of the four humours of the internet?

On topic, I don't think there's any way I'll be disappointed in rituals. Can they be:

One-shot? Yes.
Learnable and repeatable? Yes.
Expensive and time-consuming? Yes.
Limited in availability by the DM? Yes.

These are all things we already know. I'm already satisfied. Unless, I dunno, the Ritual section in the PHB is replaced by Scratch'n'Sniff Poo Scented Stickers, it's all good.

I'm looking forward to 5/28, when we'll get to see more specifics. But it looks good to me.

 

[AZRogue]

If Rituals supply the means of adding divination and long-range teleportation to the game they will have fulfilled their purpose. I think they will be the tool used for those magical spells that don't fit easily into combat. And that's about it. I will be very surprised if they do anything more than that.

And nor should they, really. The game seems to have made a very conscious effort to NOT supply rules for a lot of non-encounter situations, leaving the decisions, instead, to the DM. I see this as a feature, not a missing element. 3E made a very great effort at hitting the other side of the spectrum and I found out that it wasn't for me, so this aspect of 4E is just what I'm after.

 

[Rechan]

Doublepost.