D&D 5E D&D Next Q&A: Caster Level, Multiclassing & The Apprentice Tier

[Gadget]

OTOH not having Fly in the game in any meaningful sense made it not feel very ...exciting. Hey, I can cast "overland flight" using a ritual in real life, it's called Expedia. Siloing good spells and effects like Fly, usable for time periods > 5 minutes per day, into a ritual bucket, made it feel like a cut-scene and the casting time was ridiculous. It was a mechanical hack to avoid having to design powers that worked in 3 dimensions, or balance pillars of play in an organic way. I don't siloing is roganic at all, it's a wall preventing all sorts of neat things from happening in the game. If you need ten minutes to get your party to fly out of the exploding volcano, the DM has no choice but to alter the flow of the lava to suit the game rules, or just kill you.

If you need to fly around like Peter Pan to make the game exciting to you...well I can't argue with taste and game style, but it always felt kind of silly to me. I don't think the wizard always having the Get Out Of Jail card up his sleeve was all that great of a game style myself. There are plenty of utility powers that can help in the volcano situation, maybe even a good opportunity for a skill challenge.

That sucks. 4e Rituals suck donkey juice and ruined the magical feeling of the game for me. If I want to be stuck to the ground, and I can play a game called Warriors and Warriors, not Wizards and Warriors. You cannot balance fly with not flying, except by duration and x/day. 4e nerfed it waaaaay too much, and the rituals were like a slap in the face to proper D&D experience.

Now you just sound like someone who is miffed because the wizard no longer has the 'I win button' handy. The 'Proper D&D experience' is QWLF? Rituals had some problems, no doubt about it, but I don't see the huge issues you state.

Not once in any other edition with DMs have I seen the fly spell ruin an adventure. It's called design the game with 3d in mind, accordingly. That's just one example. There are just so many times when we wanted to do something that was only available in a ritual during combat in the heat of the moment, to react to an in-game event, but oh no, the duration silo'ed that possibility out of existence. It was a lazy hack to remove magic from exciting, real-time situations. Ten minute casting times is good for a cut-scene, but personally as a player, whether it's a videogame or an RPG, I hate cutscenes where I can't control my character. While a ritual is being cast, there is no possibility of combat, narratively (imagine a DM being a dick and dropping orcs on you in the midst of your ritual that you just spent 500gp on...wah waaaah, sucks to be you).

IMHO, no edition has been really designed with '3d in mind'. And bad DMs could be bad dms. Not having this magic in combat was an attempt to balance it, it was not a perfect attempt, and having things siloed to such an extent could have been a bit to far in hindsight. But it was still a nice attempt, IMHO.

The problem that siloing solves is not worth killing the entire flavour of the game over. It's just another implicit way they forced combat / non-combat time to be strictly separate. THAT would be a dealbreaker for me. The fact that spells now have ritual versions attached to them as an option, is the best way they could do it. But making stuff ritual only was one of the worst design fails of 4e and an utterly detestable atrocity.

What you call 'killing the entire flavor of the game', I called getting rid of the Angel Summoner & BMX Bandit syndrome that brought its own flavor to the game. You may be right about the current options, I hope you are. Time will tell.