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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5629714" data-attributes="member: 42582">My experience is closer to yours, [MENTION=82106]AbdulAlhazred[/MENTION], than to yours, [MENTION=2067]Kamikaze Midget[/MENTION].The only PC in my game who knows rituals is the wizard. The player of that PC is pretty happy to use rituals - especially information gathering ones like Comprehend Languages and Object Reading, but he has also used Purify Water to dispel a water weird, for example, and last session used Remove Affliction to cure the insanity of a rescued prisoner who had been kept tied up too long next to a gibbering mouther.I haven't found the rituals weak. I agree that money is probably not be the best way of rationing them - why should the players forfeit build options (ie items) for progressing the narrative? - but the amounts are modest enough relative to the cost of level-appropriate items that in practice I don't think this is such a big deal.I think that there does need to be some sort of rationing device. For the reasons AbdulAlhazred gives, I'm not sure that surges or action points would work better, and casting time on its own is perhaps not enough. Essentials, for its Resurrection power, uses the occurence of an extended rest as the rationing device. This also has obvious cons as well as pros.On skill challenges, I agree also with AbdulAlhazred that the answer to (1) and (2) is for dynamic encounter design and resolution, supported by the sorts of guidelines one finds in better books than the 4e DMG (HeroQuest, Maelstrom Storytelling, etc) - although DMG 2 makes a reasonable attempt at beginning to deal with issue (2).As to issue (3), this is related to LostSoul's point that I made earlier - the GM gets no dice. Again, the solution to this is encounter design and resolution. The failure to deal with this is, in my view, one of the biggest gaps in the 4e GM's guidelines.On the issue of "the encounter" vs "the adventure" - I like this aspect of 4e's design, and rather than turning away from it I would like to see more advice on how to handle traditional exploration within this framework, and how to integrate non-combat and combat action resolution more smoothly (at the moment this is very underdeveloped - there are a few throwaway remarks in the DMG 2).I certainly don't find that 4e is all about comat. Even when combat is occurring - and the game does prioritise combat as a mode of conflict resolution - I don't think that the game is generally about that combat.</blockquote>

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