Essentials -- What happened to Rituals?

[Olgar Shiverstone]

What happened to Rituals in the Essentials books? There's a reference to them on page 134 of the Rules Compendium, but no rituals in the players' books, nor even references to them in the wizard or cleric class features?

Seems ... incomplete.

 

[Dice4Hire]

All I can say is they apparently were not essential

 

[Dice4Hire]

More seriously, I think they left them out to keep the game simpler. Whether they will show up in essential products or not at a later date, is unknown, but I think it is doubtful.

 

[Olgar Shiverstone]

In that case the reference in RC is odd. Though they were presented as being fully compatible with prior published 4E material, there aren't references to other 4E material in the books I've reviewed (no suggestions to buy the PHB, for example). So I guess I'm confused about the intent -- is Essentials able to stand on its own (for the newcomer to the game), or is it an expansion of the existing 4E rules set, or is it an introduction to D&D just lacking the pointers to the core books?

If rituals were left out ... no more raise dead? Divinations? Guess that's another sacred cow on the barbie.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Raise dead is a level 8 Warpriest class feature. Some other classic spells that are rituals in standard 4e are also now class features of various casting classes.

As for rituals appearing in RC, they are only 'sort of' there. They are mentioned, but not even the basic rules for ritual casting are presented. RC has a secondary purpose though, to be a single source for all standard rules, regardless of where they were implemented or if they exist in Essentials. There are plenty of keywords that are explained in RC for example that are not used at all in Essentials. I think they just left out the ritual casting rules because A) they haven't changed at all since PHB1 was release, and B) since no rituals were going to be presented anyway and no Essentials class uses rituals anyone who wants to use them has to have PHB1 anyhow. I suspect they felt that since they weren't needed and would be a strict reprint they saved themselves a couple pages by leaving them out.

Note of course that anyone with a PHB1 can take Ritual Caster with his Essentials character and use rituals if he so desires. They are compatible and still exist, they are just not using that subsystem in essentials. There are a lot of other things you can't do with Essentials and that no reference exists to at all in RC. That includes things like familiars and skill powers. They don't appear in the RC either, but then again they were all things that showed up in later books. I don't think the RC and Essentials in general should be considered a 'complete' 4e system. It is a subset and here and there they do cover some things that aren't in Essentials in the RC, but not consistently. It is really more of a compendium of Essentials rules than of all 4e rules.

 

[Klaus]

Warpriests get Resurrection and Holy Cleasing (akin to Remove Affliction) as freebies.

The RC mentiones Rituals so it can be used as a complete rules resource by all players, either Essential or core.

 

[mattcolville]

It's unfortunate because I felt Rituals represented some great design.

In AD&D a magic-user is presented with a list of spells. Some of them are stupid. But you don't know which ones if you're a first time player and have no idea what an Adventure entails.

So they take all those spells no one took and make them Rituals. Perfect. Now you can be effective in an encounter, and have cool things to do outside of combat.

But like so many other things in 4E, they just assumed that having designed the system, they were done. No effort made in the adventures to push challenges to the fore that relied on Rituals. Instead of making them relevant in adventures, they essentially designed them out of the game. They're not relevant in combat, and that's really all the game is about now.

D&D is becoming more and more like Warhammer Quest or Descent, where there's no world outside the Encounter. That's too bad, as I think it's the only thing D&D does better than those other games.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

It's unfortunate because I felt Rituals represented some great design.

In AD&D a magic-user is presented with a list of spells. Some of them are stupid. But you don't know which ones if you're a first time player and have no idea what an Adventure entails.

So they take all those spells no one took and make them Rituals. Perfect. Now you can be effective in an encounter, and have cool things to do outside of combat.

But like so many other things in 4E, they just assumed that having designed the system, they were done. No effort made in the adventures to push challenges to the fore that relied on Rituals. Instead of making them relevant in adventures, they essentially designed them out of the game. They're not relevant in combat, and that's really all the game is about now.

D&D is becoming more and more like Warhammer Quest or Descent, where there's no world outside the Encounter. That's too bad, as I think it's the only thing D&D does better than those other games.

Yeah, I agree. I've tried to make rituals a pretty integral part of my game. One thing is for sure, they are an excellent answer to "how can that NPC do that?". I think the problem is they did a pretty good job of putting all these cool elements into the game itself, but the official adventures are mostly a barren wasteland when it comes to anything but combat encounters, and a lot of those are filler. It almost seems more like the response to "make more interesting adventures" was Essentials, which just seems to remove a lot of the things that were actually useful for anything but combat. The system certainly can still handle all the other cool stuff, they are just leaving it in the PHB-era 'attic'. Maybe the theory is people will appreciate the super combat heavy adventures more if the rules don't really mention other possibilities much? I dunno. Seems like a losing strategy to me. PF OTOH seems to be going the other direction. The PF crunch is haphazard, but the adventures are rich and really use the system to its fullest. Ah well, I never run published stuff anyway, though I will make an exception for Courts of the Shadow Fey for sure.

 

[Shazman]

They ended up being ignored my most players for various reasons, so might as well get rid of them, and make those that are "essential" class features instead.

 

[Olgar Shiverstone]

It's unfortunate because I felt Rituals represented some great design.

In AD&D a magic-user is presented with a list of spells. Some of them are stupid. But you don't know which ones if you're a first time player and have no idea what an Adventure entails.

So they take all those spells no one took and make them Rituals. Perfect. Now you can be effective in an encounter, and have cool things to do outside of combat.

I agree -- the rituals design was one of the things that attracted me to 4E, as it restored a lot of the flexibiilty to spellcasting classes for non-combat events that I was afraid would get thrown out. Rituals still have that "look what clever idea I came up with for a floating disc" that D&D has had since its inception.

But like so many other things in 4E, they just assumed that having designed the system, they were done. No effort made in the adventures to push challenges to the fore that relied on Rituals. Instead of making them relevant in adventures, they essentially designed them out of the game. They're not relevant in combat, and that's really all the game is about now.

Ironically, my original question was prompted by reading Tomb of Horrors, which I just picked up. It has several spots that mention rituals or where rituals provide very useful shortcuts for the adventure -- it's designed with them in mind (Go Mouseferatu!). It then occurred to me that I couldn't remember if they'd introduced any new or modified rituals in HotFL, so I picked that book back up, and when I couldn't find anything, went to the next book, and eventually to the RC ... and ended up here, confused. (Yeah, I'm aware ToH pre-dates the Essentials products).

I find the design decision in the RC a bit odd, to retain the throw-away ritual reference. If you have the other 4E books already, you don't need the reference. If you don't (as a new player coming in to Essentials), that sort of reference will just be confusing, because there is nothing to point you at a source. I'm surprised WotC passed up the opportunity to pimp some of their core products.

I'm still confused, but now I see the confusion is intentional.