How much gold do people spend on rituals?

[Nork]

I've been looking at rituals and I just don't have a good sense of them. They are odd because magic item progression and ritual casting capacity are conflated (both cost gold), so while I can see how much gold WotC thinks a party should have, I don't see where they give advice on how much of that gold they guesstimate is going to different uses.

I was wondering about how much of the party gold people spend on rituals. Not counting enchant magic item rituals.

If gold wasn't a factor, how many rituals cast per level is "too few", and how many are "too many"?

Does anyone have any good general insight or observations about using rituals?

 

[Blue]

One game I'm in it averages out to probably be 75-100/session in rituals, though usually bunched up. That's been going on since around 4th, we're now just shy of paragon and costs haven't really increased dramatically. One of the two ritual casters can also do a number of rituals for no cost, and that regularly gets used.

Two games I'm in don't even have a ritual caster, so it's easy to do without whatsoever. In one of them we have a PC looking at the martial practices feat, which are along the same concept.

A game I was in that ended had a bard that would occasionally use the once daily free bardic, but besides that rituals were rare. (We also had an alchemist in that particular party, who did make some things.)

To give something to standardize against other parties, I would say in all of them consumable usage is very light.

 

[cignus_pfaccari]

I noticed our ritual usage went up the higher level we got. In heroic, we didn't use many rituals until the later part of heroic, and it just went up from there as the relative costs went down.

Part of that is we do take a share of gold for ritual usage, which is convenient, and encourages ritual use.

Brad

 

[On Puget Sound]

At level 15, we hand-wave away ritual costs under 360 gp, unless players want to abuse one by, say, casting a ritual every hour for a 1-week journey. Of course, we are also ignoring a lot of money issues because of a campaign decision to silo money away from magic items, letting us treat money as "a lot" or "not quite enough" instead of fixed quantities.

 

[Saagael]

I try to avoid tracking gold with rituals, simply because trying to get the players to remember and mark down how much of each type of reagent they have is a pain the rear. Still, I like seeing them use rituals, so I usually hand out a custom wonderous item that lets the players cast 1-5 rituals regardless of cost. Heroic rituals use 1 charge, paragon rituals use 2 charges, epic uses up 3. The items are usually flavored like a "candle of casting" or "ritualism dust" or something like that. It makes rituals much easier to track.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I tend to think it is up to the players and their style. Some players will do more with rituals, others will do more with consumables, and others will spend a lot of resources on crafting items. At low heroic tier the party will be fairly resource constrained and the choices can be fairly significant. Once you get up to the high end of heroic tier and into paragon a lot of the choices are trivially low cost. The higher cost options can still require some thinking and planning by the players, but whether or not to cast a low level ritual isn't much of a choice, they do it if it is likely to gain them some advantage. Likewise with the less costly consumables and minor but useful items.

Then again, I'm pretty happy with the ritual casting system. I like to play it up. Lots of things happen via ritual magic. Non-ritual-casters can do pretty much the same with practices or concentrate more on consumable and minor item stuff that they can whip out at the opportune moment. It seems to balance out OK. Some specific things can have issues though. I'd actually say that consumables are the area that probably needs the most work still.

 

[Mengu]

My characters avoid ritual casting like the plague, and the one time I played an invoker, I told the DM, my character does not know ritual casting, I don't want it, I'm fine without anything to replace it. In the games I'm playing, if other characters want to cast rituals, and ask for help or party funds, I'm begrudgingly willing to pitch in. But I won't ever be the one asking for a ritual to be cast, except for raise dead.

In my game, I don't use player rituals other than raise dead. I see rituals as story elements. My players have been involved in casting rituals, protecting ritual casters, disrupting rituals, etc. But little pixies setting up a campsite for 15 gp is not for my game. When they need to cast a ritual, it's in the story, and I don't require the ritual caster feat. I only require they find the appropriate elements and knowledge to cast the ritual. And it's usually a big deal. Not some silly Clear the Path ritual to lift some rubble out of the way. They are raising a sunken city, awakening an army of tree ents, summoning gale force winds, or destroying an army of undead.

I think trying to convert what used to be 3.x utility spells, into rituals was a poor design decision. They cost so much money, and require so many conditions to be met, I find them very hard to use. Something might look cool for a minute, until I get to the "gotcha" part, like Chameleon's Cloak sounds intriguing for a stealth mission, until you realize, you can't move. (So, uh, I have to stand in the same spot for 24 hours to benefit from th stealth? Riiight.)

 

[Nork]

I don't much care for the money system in 4E (not that 3E was any better).

The first problem with it is that the DM simply can not take the players' equipment from them. The players are mechanically gimped without their equipment, and 'proper' equipment costs so much gold that losing equipment isn't an annoying setback, it brings the entire system to a screeching halt while the players sit there and do nothing until the DM gives the equipment back (and the players are right to do this).

Inherent bonuses seem like a good first step to solving this issue (i.e. "drat we got our equipment taken, lets go find some basic equipment" instead of "we need wagon full of gold to buy some magic gear, and getting a wagon full of gold with no gear is absurd"), but that leaves you with the problem of disentangling math affecting magic items, utility magic items, and rituals.

Rituals don't seem bad in themselves, they just seem to lose very badly to utility items, and they flat out seem to be a joke compared to math affecting magic items.

Rituals seem like they would be far more liked if they were judged on own merits, and not in comparison to other things like magical items.

However, letting players cast rituals as they like is just going to result in them using rituals to solve everything (or more specifically, the player with the ritual caster is going to start trying to have their character solve everything with rituals like a 2E or 3E wizard).

It seems like what one would want to shoot for is a balance where rituals are a "sometimes" solution and not an "all the time" solution, and never a solution that takes resources away from non-ritual options (and not have non-ritual options take resources away from ritual options). Putting a limit on how many rituals can be cast seems a good way to solve this, since the ritual caster might see a ritual solution they could apply, but might decide that the problem isn't sufficiently annoying and decides to save their ritual capacity for a later problem (just like players save their dalies instead of blowing them every time they see a chance to use one).

 

[Tony Vargas]

I was wondering about how much of the party gold people spend on rituals. Not counting enchant magic item rituals.

I played a Wizard through early paragon, and he spent most of his gold on acquiring rituals and reagents. The concept was based on the old-school AD&D wizards who had to put a lot of effort into filling thier spellbooks - that all being automatic in 4e, rituals were the things to go after to get the feel I wanted. I did make good use of a number of rituals, but far fewer than you might have thought.

I found that you mostly use rituals that are much lower level than you, so trivially cheap. If something is important enough that dropping the gold to cast a ritual closer to your level is an option, it's probably /too/ important to waith the 10 minute or hour casting time. The occassionaly exception, IMX, 'proves the rule.' ;(

 

[wedgeski]

The wizard in my party casts probably 1 or 2 rituals per session. I strongly encourage ritual use by the liberal sowing of reagents into the party's surroundings and allowing skill checks to "harvest" reagents where it's appropriate.