New rituals!

[On Puget Sound]

Heroic tier rituals.

A nice 9 pages of new rituals, plus feats that allow ritualcasters to (among other bennies) cast some rituals without spending money. I like this!

 

[KidSnide]

I think creating a strong set of ritual types and allowing characters to specialize in casting those types is a strong step in the right direction.

-KS

 

[Incenjucar]

I'm not especially comfortable with making Arcana increasingly the only skill a wizard ever needs to do anything, but it's great seeing the new quick-cast ritual scrolls and finally the death of "Rituals are being removed from the game!" claims.

 

[RangerWickett]

I dig the article. And the art. Do they have a gallery somewhere, preferably with smart tags so you can search them?

But hey, now with a pair of feats I can sorta multiclass any character into spellcaster, for the type of magic that matters.

I need some sort of magic crossbow that can cast the portal jump ritual. Yes, wrap the ritual scroll around the bolt, and fire it where you want the portal to show up. Excellent.

 

[Stalker0]

Overall I am very impressed with the design evolution of these rituals. It looks like they are actively trying to fix some of the common issues.

1) Casting Time: Most of the rituals are 1 minute, unless its one where you would expect to be a doing a "BIG" ritual. Also, you have the option to do some of them as standard actions for reduced benefit.

2) Cost: The costs are much more reasonable (no more 50 gp for a 1 level ritual!), and they often use healing surges to either pad the cost or replace it entirely.

Overall, I think healing surges are a good push for the ritual cost, because it scales well with level, they always are meaningful in a way, and ensures that only so many rituals of that type can be cast per day.

3) Effect: Most of the rituals reflect old school spells, and does it in a way that feels old school, but still has 4e balance. You can get resistance to energy, but not near immunity. You can cast an alarm spell....but a sneaky thief can still get by it. You can put down explosive runes, that will hurt by not cripple a reasonable challenge to the party.


The only issue I saw.....scrying durations are still too ridiculously short.

 

[Incenjucar]

I really like using healing surges as a cost. It keeps things from being used constantly, and makes them more meaningful, without them damaging the long-term math that players rely on to build their characters.

 

[Ryujin]

It's great to see some of the iconic spells making a comeback, as rituals. Feats to specialize in casting certain rituals, by eliminating cost on a limited basis, is also a welcome addition.

 

[Klaus]

I love the feats that allow a spellcaster to replace a ritual-casting skill (like Arcana, Religion or Nature) for other skills, like Endurance, Intimidate or Diplomacy. Makes the character feel like he's really using his magic in a direct manner.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I really like using healing surges as a cost. It keeps things from being used constantly, and makes them more meaningful, without them damaging the long-term math that players rely on to build their characters.

There are some issues here though. Higher level divinations and wards for instance are QUITE powerful and would almost never be cast in an adventuring situation, which means effectively they're free. Just as a trivial example a character who knows Glyph of Warding and has the corresponding Warding Mastery ritual can simply fill their base of operations with limitless numbers of glyphs at a rate of one per day. They could do the same with many considerably more powerful existing rituals.

Permanent duration rituals need to ALWAYS have a material cost, and rituals that are highly useful outside of adventuring situations probably should as well. In no case should divinations ever be free, certainly not any which can be used strategically.

There will have to be a bunch of cleaning up of this material, some of it is borked as it stands, but the concept is pretty good. I'm also a bit unsure as to why they chose to duplicate the functions of some existing rituals. I think it is kind of a bad idea to have better and crappier versions of the same thing. If a ritual needs updating then update it instead of leaving bad options lying around that people will pay good money for.

Overall this is cool though as a first cut. I guess we'll see how it works out.

 

[D'karr]

Am I missing something?

The rituals that can be "circumvented" (Alarm) have a DC that makes no sense when taken in context with the ritual.

DC = 10+ Skill Check modifier

For example, Alarm is a 1st level ritual. And requires no check. So a 1st level wizard's Alarm ritual at most will have a DC 15 (10 + Int Mod (+5)) to circumvent. Doesn't that seem like an extremely trivial DC?

A first level rogue trained in Stealth with maxed DEX will beat that DC on a roll of 5.

Am I reading this correctly?