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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 5337005" data-attributes="member: 82106">Nothing I know of in the rules would say that solving an SC by some means other than skill checks would negate any of the XP award. In fact the rules tend to suggest otherwise. I guess it would be up to the DM, but I don't think I'd dock the party XP simply because they happened to have thought to bring along a power that made it trivial.Whatever, lol. AD&D had its day. It was long ago. Things progress. What part of being a flagship RPG product is it about 4e that would make one want to be dwelling in 1979? AD&D was a fun game, but really it was in spite of the mechanics, not because of them.Actually the effect line says explicitly that the target does not remember being charmed. They MAY notice that you tried to charm them if you fail, if they are higher level than you are. Otherwise they remain blithely ignorant. So it is actually a zero risk ploy against anyone of your level or lower. For a higher level orb wizard with a couple items and a jacked up wisdom score it is pretty close to a sure bet against anyone.Nobody is saying that the spell has UNLIMITED utility. Just that it is a pain in the arse to adjudicate it, it tends to either preclude or greatly simplify a whole swath of potentially challenging or interesting situations, and is very hard to balance.The point about balance is actually not that it is so hard to balance, it is that it would be UTTERLY UNNECESSARY to carefully balance a ritual. You can make it as weak as you care to, it takes virtually no resources to acquire. So what if it is of very little utility? The one time it will come in handy pays for the trivial gp cost of buying it. Surely even if the DM is a real hard case on ruling against it working in a given situation there will be SOME situations where said ritual will come in very handy nonetheless. If you rule the POWER version that harshly then you're basically screwing the player out of the use of a utility power that the rules say they should legitimately get as much use out of as say Shield, which is a good bit. So I would find the ritual to be a superior implementation on that basis. The DM now has a real choice as to how much to let the players get away with.I really don't get the big bias against ritual magic. It seems like people are saying basically "I don't want to have to plan ahead at all, I just want my solution to be easy so I can be lazy about it and just whip it out at a moment's notice." Personally I like to make the players think a bit more than that. I feel like this whole trend is just catering to players. Even if you are of the opinion that this is a lovely power and all why is it so low level? I never understood why such powerful magics were so low level in AD&D either. I mean fireball is nice and all but it has only very limited uses. Charm Person or its 4e incarnation have a vast array of uses, some of which can produce results all out of proportion to the thought or energy put into using them. It is pretty hard for me to see the logic of where this is a low heroic tier power. It could just as easily be relegated to paragon or even epic, or be a PP utility power that requires you to at least really dedicate your character options to using it. It was a bad move in AD&D 1e for it to be a level 1 spell, why do we need to repeat even THAT obvious mistake?</blockquote>

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