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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 5413971" data-attributes="member: 82106">Interesting. That is new since a while ago, not sure when I actually searched for it. Nice to see it is there anyhow.I keep hearing this, but then people generally compare with previous edition 'ritualistic' type spells (ones that are generally non-combat and often in AD&D at least had onerous costs and casting times). What is the difference? What is the difference really between 4e rituals and a lot of the things in 3.x where you spent time and money to do something (crafting mostly)? I haven't seen people complain that any of those things were 'bad designs'.Honestly I really haven't yet gotten from anyone what is bad about the DESIGN? I'm interpreting what you're saying as basically it should be more flavorful, but isn't that kind of really up to the people in a specific game? The DM (or the player for that matter) can describe the actual casting process in whatever way they want. Generally the rituals specify about as much information about how they are cast as say an AD&D spell ever did. For that matter 4e spells don't really detail how they are cast either, even when it could potentially be mechanically significant, but I haven't really heard people complain about that as bad design.I've also heard lots of complaints about cost, but the cost of MOST rituals is trivial. The ones that aren't trivial have major game impact and casting them is pretty significant. A character would want to consider carefully what advantage he's getting, just like if he was going to say drink a potion. Effectively saying that giving rituals a cost is bad design has to cover ALL OTHER CONSUMABLES as well, since there is really no significant mechanical difference in terms of you pay for something and you get something. Now maybe all consumables are a bad idea, but I haven't really heard that suggested too seriously. The other aspect of this is that if a ritual is BUILT IN to an adventure in some fashion, then of course the PCs shouldn't be paying for it. They may be out of pocket, but if casting it was the only way to succeed and the adventure was designed that way then the cost should be made up somehow.So we are back to presentation and motivation basically IMHO. I'm not really super comfortable with the 'it is the failing of the DM that rituals don't see much use in a given game'. OTOH I just haven't seen where the design really falls down or what the better alternative design is (and trust me there are a bunch of threads here where we've gone over this numerous times, ALL the alternatives to a casting cost have significant issues and aren't really well suited for all cases even if they would work for a few).</blockquote>

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