How much gold do people spend on rituals?

[AbdulAlhazred]

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).

Well, there are ways to achieve something like this. Allow ritual casters to acquire ritual components to some extent without taking it out of other resources. This effectively lowers the cost of ritual casting a bit, but since you haven't changed the actual rules you can pretty easily control exactly how good that benefit is by how much they can 'harvest'.

You could also simply decree that you can't sell ritual components. Technically even residuum isn't a magic item and the PHB1 does state that non-magical 'stuff' can only be sold at the whim of the DM and only for whatever amount the DM feels like paying for it. So if you place components in treasure and/or allow some harvesting you've now decoupled the cost of rituals from basically all other aspects of the economy. Again, you can decide exactly what ratio to give out components in treasure (it could be 1:1 to gp value or it could be some more favorable ratio if you wish).

In other words, there's not a LOT of tweaking needed to achieve this. At the most basic level it is practically achieved already by the rules as presented. I don't recall any overt suggestion to make components part of treasures, but it is certainly a very minor variation on normal treasure rules and seems well within the parameters of what is expected (Draconomicon for instance already suggesting all kinds of goods that could be part of a treasure).

 

[Nork]

Well, there are ways to achieve something like this. Allow ritual casters to acquire ritual components to some extent without taking it out of other resources. This effectively lowers the cost of ritual casting a bit, but since you haven't changed the actual rules you can pretty easily control exactly how good that benefit is by how much they can 'harvest'.

You could also simply decree that you can't sell ritual components. Technically even residuum isn't a magic item and the PHB1 does state that non-magical 'stuff' can only be sold at the whim of the DM and only for whatever amount the DM feels like paying for it. So if you place components in treasure and/or allow some harvesting you've now decoupled the cost of rituals from basically all other aspects of the economy. Again, you can decide exactly what ratio to give out components in treasure (it could be 1:1 to gp value or it could be some more favorable ratio if you wish).

In other words, there's not a LOT of tweaking needed to achieve this. At the most basic level it is practically achieved already by the rules as presented. I don't recall any overt suggestion to make components part of treasures, but it is certainly a very minor variation on normal treasure rules and seems well within the parameters of what is expected (Draconomicon for instance already suggesting all kinds of goods that could be part of a treasure).

I pretty much agree with this.

That however lead to the question: but how much gp worth of ritual materials per level should I be shooting for?

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I pretty much agree with this.

That however lead to the question: but how much gp worth of ritual materials per level should I be shooting for?

Ah, it is a good question. My solution was to just give the party some, see what they did, and if they seemed to need more, then I gave them some more or created some pretty obvious opportunities for them to do some harvesting. When it seemed like components were cutting into the amount of treasure that was fun to play with, I just upped the monetary treasure a bit (effectively making the ritual components a bit cheaper when found). Honestly I'm not entirely sure of the exact numbers at this point. The current party is just about level 13 and has something like 30k of gold (they just found a big treasure trove). They've got something like 5-6k worth of components too. OTOH there a few items under the curve as well, so they'll probably end up seeing a few more items and a bit less of the other stuff for a bit. As you can tell, I've gotten a bit lazy with exact numbers, lol.