Cast Ritual

[small pumpkin man]

Ritual use is out of combat, there will usually be no time limit involved, as such, having more than one character in the party with the feat is unlikely to give significant rewards.
Even if you have the feat, you still have to spend time and money getting the spells.
As, say, a fighter, you're going to have to spend multiple feats to have the skills necessary to cast the rituals reliably.

So while the Warlock/Paladin taking ritual magic if no-one else has it may be somewhat of a "no-brainer", this doesn't make it more powerful than skill training diplomacy/theivery if no-one else has that skills.

 

[Cadfan]

Even if ritual casting is available via a feat, it doesn't follow that everyone will want it.

1. Since they happen out of combat, you might as well have any ally do it if he's already got the feat.
2. Some rituals are group efforts anyways, so the advantage of being able to do rituals solo is reduced.
3. The ritual feat may have prereqs.
4. The rituals themselves may have prereqs.

 

[Shabe]

As pointed out by other people rituals seem to have skill requirements and cost requirements and don't seem to be combat orientated (from what we can gather) so it wouldn't be optimising a character, more optimising the party's options.

I think the whole ritual idea gives rise to the idea of the ritualist class, someone who does rituals quicker / cheaper / better or am i approaching that from a 3rd ED perspective.
Although with 4th EDs powers being concentrated on combat perhaps those would be put to the utility powers so once a day they could knock X off the price if they spend upto Y healing surges? and perhaps one to increase the bonuses if other people participate, a class feature to have all skills treated as trained when used in a ritual.
I think the concept is a strong one, in terms of fantasy archtypes, perhaps it would fit better as a paragon path.
For combat, perhaps if rituals are tied to creating magic weapons perhaps they could have combat spells which imbue weapons to increase the + or give it a different ability.

 

[ShinRyuuBR]

Along with the skill requirements, consider that it has been stated that other characters can assist the "ritual leader". That could mean you only need one PC with Ritual Casting. Or not...

 

[Stormtalon]

Ah, another Ritual detail I just remembered from my browse of the PHB: any ritual can be cast from a Scroll (one-use item, same as always) and when doing so, it takes half the time listed in the ritual description.

 

[DreamChaser]

I would argue that given their versatility, rituals would be unbalanced if they were not equally available to all classes. Since all the classes are balanced in combat, they should be out of combat as well.

DC

 

[Jack99]

You haven't seen Conan the Barbarian then. That's one fighter with the Raise Dead Ritual right there.

Sure, although it has been at least 15 years since I saw it last. Either way, I still don't like the flavor of pure fighters casting Raise Dead. Maybe I just need some time to digest it.. /shrug

 

[Blackeagle]

Either way, I still don't like the flavor of pure fighters casting Raise Dead. Maybe I just need some time to digest it.. /shrug

Well, one way to digest it is not to think of a fighter who takes the ritual feat and can raise the dead as a pure fighter. Instead he's a fighter with a strong connection to the divine or nature or whatever supernatural power makes it easy to bring dead adventurers back to life.

Thinking about this, I wouldn't be surprised if rituals were divided into divine and arcane (perhaps with some overlap) and instead of a generic Cast Ritual feat, we get seperate Cast Divine Ritual and Cast Arcane Ritual feats.

 

[Daniel D. Fox]

Technically, you could easily houserule Raise Dead as nothing more than a complex Heal skill to revive/reccessitate someone on the brink of death.

 

[Incenjucar]

Basically, anyone who has "Perform Ritual" has multiclassed into "Ritualist," which is distinct from being a Wizard or a Cleric.