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Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 5629911" data-attributes="member: 2067">Which is fine! I'm not going to go crazy in-depth, but here's my considered reply:<ol> <li data-xf-list-type="ol"> That's just shifting the blame, I feel. The budget mentality exists, and Rituals completely ignore that it exists, and that's a problem for Rituals as they exist now. I think the treasure system could use a boatload of attention, too, of course. In my home games, I use Inherent Bonuses, and roll on 2e charts for random treasure. This treasure is all "award": It's unessential, unexpected, and it's all up to how you use it. Gold Pieces here are largely for mundane items and consumables, and are basically purely story items. The treasure system needs fixing of its own, and its problems do contribute to the Rituals problem, but it's not JUST a problem with the treasure system. You're essentially paying GP to make a skill check, and a lot of folks won't find that palatable, especially when skill checks can mostly do the same thing. It enters into how dramatic you want your noncombat challenges to be. If you don't want them dramatic, if you just want to get them out of the way, 30 seconds and a skill check are exactly what you want. If, on the other hand, you want to consider them as part of the challenge of the game, 30 seconds and a skill check is basically like a Save-Or-Die effect. It's severely anticlimactic. That's part of why they're weak as noncombat elements go. They just get the check out of the way as quickly as possible. They don't work in a game that wants these moments to be dramatic and tension-filled, 'cuz you can't build a party's tension on a single skill check. I've seen many crappy rules used surprisingly well by imaginative and engaging players and DMs. That doesn't mean the rule is good, that means the player or DM is good. Which, again, is a problem if you want this to be a major pillar of your adventure design. You want everyone to be able to participate without having to basically compensate for a rule that doesn't serve your purposes well. It's not a problem with "long" casting times, it's a problem with meaningless casting times. "You just tick off an hour" might as well be "you just tick off 30 days" or "you just tick off twelve point five minutes." It's pure fluff. It needs not to be fluff (casting time: short or extended rest), or it needs to be excised as pointless. This is exactly the hinge of the problem, though. In a game that valued noncombat participation, rituals would not be simply narrative devices. They need to be part of the challenge and drama of playing D&D, of overcoming the challenge of the adventure, or else you're basically saying, "We don't care about that part of the game, it doesn't matter, move on to more important things that the game cares about, like combat." It is not good for a game that values exploration or roleplaying to have those things be simply narrative devices. If they don't matter to the game, then they often won't matter to the group. That's a problem, if you want interesting things to do outside of combat. A ritual is not an interesting thing to do outside of combat if it is just a plot device. It needs to be a dramatic challenge, like combat already is. SCs ARE just about checks, mechanically speaking. The game does not care about your narrative. That is a problem, since the game should care about your narrative, if you want your narrative to be a big part of playing the game. Again, I point to my point above about how bad rules are often compensated for by good players or DMs. Why don't D&D combats usually degenerate into 2x2 square rooms? And why do SCs degenerate into "Make a check....now make another one....now make another one...."? The rules can help ameliorate the condition by adding interesting variety, but they DON'T, which makes them not good rules if what you want is interesting variety. You have to add that manually, which means overcoming the bad rules. Failing to encourage, reward, and enable good encounter design is a tremendous failure of mechanics. As above, a system that requires a "good DM" to be interesting is a bad system. There's nothing in the SC System that makes anything interesting or exciting. That's all in the group. That's a problem, since it means the SC system is no better than the FATAL rules: a good DM will run a good game with it, since a good DM trumps any rule. It's not exactly an edition comparison. It's specifically a weak point of 4e, and 4e stands or fails alone on this. If you want to force the comparison, the best analogue is probably the class system. In pre-3e D&D, certain classes provided you with things outside of combat, and other classes provided you with things inside of combat (and wizards usually provided you with both, though tending to favor noncombat). The thief class was not made for combat, for instance, it was made for exploration. If you wanted to explore, you played a thief, or possibly a wizard. If you wanted to fight, you played a fighting-man. If you wanted to interact, you played a cleric. The class system itself was the noncombat system. You also might look at the reward system, which rewarded you for treasure, specifically and only, which meant that the system was method-neutral for how you get that treasure. You could kill things and take their stuff, you could sneak past things and take their stuff, you could sleep things and take their stuff, and only one of those methods had anything to do with rolling initiative.  Not that this was great or perfect or wonderful design, just that it provided more robust support than 4e's system does for doing things other than fighting. Combat takes too much mindshare, IMO, because individual encounters take too much mindshare. I need my D&D to be a game about the adventure, not about the encounter, and for that, I need noncombat systems capable of robust, long-term, varied, dramatic, tension-filled interaction, repeatedly. Neither the SC system or the Rituals system do that. They weren't really designed to do that. They were designed to give people a brief and easy answer to some of the noncombat problems they might face, and then to get them shuffled back into the stream of combat encounters. They work pretty OK for that. They do not work pretty OK as the focus of a game. They fail, because of all the reasons mentioned above.</li> </ol></blockquote>

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