Best use of rituals you have seen so far?

[satori01]

I have not had the opportunity to play as much as I would like...and my character is only 2nd level...but Tenser's Floating Disk has been quite fun.

1) my character will often ride the disk , floating around like Baron Harkonen in Dune is how I describe it.
2) Ferrying the party down a Trapped hallway.
3) Letting a Dragonborn Party mate ride the disk so they save their move action to do another Breath attack.
4) having a Party mate bull Rush an enemy onto the disk, then moving the disk over a large cravas...that was 100' deep.....since the disk wound up being out of range of me for 2 rounds...it poofed and down went the bad guy.

My group is basically in a Competitive Death Trap Dungeon setup...find the prize before the other guys and get out safely for fame and glory. The place is a serious maze w/ some shifting walls and so forth. To secretly mark our progress and to guard our backs....I have also been placing Magic Mouths at intersections and other points to either scream when someone other than the group approaches...and other magic mouths that will whisper to us that we have been there when the group approaches.....that way we do not leave chalk marks in the maze.

Admittedly my DM is ignoring Component cost for low level Rituals which is making them more useful.

Silence, and Magic Mouth can make a random room into a more secure sleeping quarters....and if I ever get Arcane Lock....man I will have a blast w/ the doors in the place

 

[Dr_Ruminahui]

At some point I intend to use the ritual casting time as a way of creating tension - basically, the party will be trying to get out of a dungeon via a portal beofre the bulk of the baddies find them.

Essentially, I think I will have them start the portal, and the first wave of baddies find them. After the players beat them off, they have time for a short rest.

With 10 or so rounds left to the ritual, the main group will show up, which the players will need to hold off until the portal activates.

I think I will combine it with the ability for the players to lightly fortify the area to make it more defensible.

Now I just need to figure out how to run it so that the ritual caster isn't just forced to sit there - I want them to be part of the fun too. That's easier for the later encounter - I can make the last few rounds of it the portal powering up - but not for the beginning. Hmm... I'll have to think on it.

So personally, ritual casting time is less bothersome for me than the mechanism for short rests - rituals take time, so its easy enough to plan that time into an adventure if the players are intended to use one - this is aided by rituals being a relatively rare occurance. Short rests, on the other hand - its hard to plan an adventure where the players are in a rush yet also give them the chance to replenish their resources so as to be able to actually have fun options in combat and be able to actually spend their mutliple healing surges.

 

[GorTeX]

They would have looked in, seen the setup (big idols, pools of blood across the whole room, bits of dagger on the other side), backed out, done the ritual, then made the dash and grab. The monsters are all hidden until people step in the blood...

exactly this.

 

[UltimaGabe]

Probably, but that is a really nit picky thing. If he was that anal about the rules we probably wouldn't let him DM. Now, If I started abusing it hardcore then he would apply it. But storing a few corpses I'm going to use for later purposes is hardly abusing.

Hmm, I wouldn't at all call it "abusing", but that's not what it was intended for. The thing that bothers me about hearing stories like this is that 4e is a different game- completely different. If you try to play 4e like it was 3.6, you'll only be disappointed. When something is different in 4e, it's different for a reason. I don't like seeing things used in 4e like they were used in 3.x, when they've been specifically changed.

The Portable Hole is one of those things. It works differently. It's not a portable space to carry objects like it was before- it creates a hole, like a portable hole should be. It's not a matter of abusing it, it's a matter of playing the game wrong.

 

[Mr. Wilson]

After reading a ton of rituals, I have decided they take way to long to be useful, which is really a shame. I understand the balance aspect this is meant to enforce, but what it means IMHO is that I've seen 4 total rituals effected in 8 months of gaming:

Transfer Enchantment, Create Magic Item, Raise Dead, and Tenser's Floating Disk.

Even though the Wizard religiously bought new rituals, it was simply to cost and/or time prohibitive to use them.

I'm now running a new campaign, so I'm pretty sure I'll be reducing the time required for rituals to 1 minute, except in a few cases.

 

[Anguirus]

We used Water Walk to assault an enemy ship. It was epicly awesome. We had just enough time to throw it before the fight, and my dwarf paladin ran across to the other ship and hacked a hole in the side.

 

[Mirtek]

water walking

I found that a really useless ritual unless you have a really small party. It applies only to one target per casting and if you have to cast it on 6 people the first recipient's duration is already all but worn off when you finally finished with the last one.

 

[jorrit]

We just used the Silence ritual in Thunderspire Mountain at the starting encounter of the Chamber of Eyes. This is an encounter with no monsters so plenty of time. First we listened at the door and heard noises behind the door. Then I spent 10 minutes of the encounter time to cast silence in a burst 4 so that the door was just inside the burst. In the mean time the bear companion and the fighter climbed the balcony and after the silence the ranger used thievery on the lock. This was not guaranteed to be silent so we entered the second encounter with a good surprise round.

After all this was a pretty easy encounter.

Greetings,

 

[Nytmare]

I found that a really useless ritual unless you have a really small party.

I find it really useless if the DM only puts you into situations where you need to make the entire party walk on water at the same exact time.

 

[Dr_Ruminahui]

I find it really useless if the DM only puts you into situations where you need to make the entire party walk on water at the same exact time.

In my campaign, I'm thinking of having a water walking session - but for rituals like that, I'm house ruling it so that the ritual takes # of recipients x 10 minutes and at the end of it, all the recipients can then waterwalk.

So, rather than having to chain it, the effect comes into play for all at the same time.