D&D 5E Ritual casting - Is 10 min a fair price for a spell slot?

[Harzel]

Casting a spell as a ritual takes 10 minutes + the normal casting time of the spell. As I started my 5e campaign (I missed the other eds. that had ritual casting) I assumed (obviously without thinking about it very hard) that the design intent was to provide, for some spells (mainly utility type) the option of trading time for saving a spell slot. In order for this to be meaningful, though, 10 minutes has to be a resource that is significant for the PCs.

My experience so far is that the vast majority of the time, the actual effect is that casting the spell is just free. This is a consequence of course of the fact that time pressure in my campaign is usually pretty light, or at least the time spans of concern are not short enough to make one or two 10 minute delays feel like a real cost. So it seems like this is another issue like the resting rules where there is a built-in presumption about pacing.

Were I to broach the possibility of changing this, I am pretty sure I would get significant push-back from the player who plays a wizard in my campaign. So before going there, I thought I would ask about experience and/or opinions from others here.

Do you think that the design intent was more or less what I have described? How does it work (or not) in your games? Do you see it as a problem? Have you houseruled it to something other than 10 minutes?

 

[Rya.Reisender]

I mainly see ritual casting benefits that players can think of interesting ideas out-of-combat without being forced to rest (to regain spell slots) to actually go for them, while still having to use spell slots for the same effects during combat.

To make spells useless for combat, they could also just take 30 seconds and nobody would use them.

The 10 minutes can still have some significance. In the official APs there are plenty areas where a random encounter can happen every 10-120 minutes. So yeah there can definitely be situations where the group has to fight because they spent so much time waiting for a ritual being cast that enemies reached them in the meantime.

 

[Shiroiken]

I have no issues with the 10 minute rule, but have considered increasing it to 1 hour. This would allow the rest of the party to Short Rest while the caster perform the ritual. The caster would lose out on the benefit of the Short Rest, making it less desirable.

 

[Cap'n Kobold]

I've generally not found it much of an issue: the spells that can actually be cast as rituals are pretty limited, and have durational or other limitations that often limit their power.

10 mins when not in an urgent situation is not a lot of resources, but in general the payoff isn't excessive.

 

[Rya.Reisender]

Casting time of an hour seems like it would make ritual casting useless to me. Warlock wouldn't cast rituals at all anymore, because short rest recovers all their spell slots, so any ritual-based Warlock builds would already become mostly useless. And half of the time you couldn't even finish casting because you get attacked beforehand (and unlike a conc spell that could be kept over a short rest, the ritual spell definitely has to be cancelled). Also nobody would bother ritual casting lower spells if they took this long.

 

[CapnZapp]

Casting a spell as a ritual takes 10 minutes + the normal casting time of the spell. As I started my 5e campaign (I missed the other eds. that had ritual casting) I assumed (obviously without thinking about it very hard) that the design intent was to provide, for some spells (mainly utility type) the option of trading time for saving a spell slot. In order for this to be meaningful, though, 10 minutes has to be a resource that is significant for the PCs.

No, the idea is that spells cast out of combat gives the campaign qualities such as "problem-solving", "atmosphere", "out-of-the-box thinking" and increases role-playing potential.

It's supposed to be its own reward.

There is no cost intended - since D&D is a heavily combat-oriented game, a cost of zero when the spell doesn't help your combats, only background atmosphere and role-playing, seems appropriate.

The "10 minutes" is just a figure plucked from the air, meant to make sure there is no combat usage.

As has been said, it could have been 30 seconds (5 rounds) with pretty much the same effects. Only much more obvious, which is why I suspect a longer, more "organic" time frame was chosen.

That is, ten minutes is long enough no player will try to count out the rounds, emphatically separating rituals from "combat time".


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[Li Shenron]

I do not houserule it.

However I do have the feeling sometimes that the option of casting some spells "for free" (no slot cost) was not really necessary.

To me it was a lot more important the fact that Rituals gave Wizards the option of not having to prepare a spell that is seldom useful, and still be able to cast it on the rare occasion when you really need it, at which time I would be totally happy to spend my slot for it!

IIRC that is how it actually worked for everyone during the playtest, then they restricted this to Wizards only, so any non-Wizard spellcaster actually has to prepare the ritual in order to be able to cast it, but they might get some "always prepared" spells in other way (domains, Land Druids...) although most of them aren't actually that kind of rarely-useful spells.

As for the spellcasting time increase, I don't think there is much difference between +1 minute or +10 minutes, they are both meant to prevent usage in combat, but very rarely make a practical difference in an adventure. I think they went with the latter only because there are still a bunch of spells in the PHB which for some reason already take a few minutes to cast, so +10 minutes makes it feel like you're paying a significant price (truth is, you aren't), but eventually I think there are also a couple of 1-hour casting time spells for which casting them as ritual is a no-brainer, and that's not very good.

 

[Bolares]

I feel the 10 minutes is arbitrary... it's there just as a way of the designer point out this should be used out of combat... but if you feel it should be more time, make your players aware of it and change it.

 

[Horwath]

I'm thinking of reducing it to 1 minute.

Ritual means no combat application. Most of the time.

Any combat that you can afford to be out for 10 rounds is no real combat. And in mass battles I can imagine wizards trying to pull out 1 minute casts if they want to conserve energy.

That is also cool mini quest for adventurers in mass battles. Get to the enemy wizard in 10 rounds.

 

[Rya.Reisender]

Well, the 10 minutes are not completely arbitrary. It needs to be time between 18 seconds and 30 minutes to be reasonably applicable. Less might make it useful for combat, which it shouldn't be and more would make players prefer doing a rest instead in many cases.

Another thing to consider is that at least the recommendations for times out of combat are e.g. "1 minute per round when exploring dungeons". Reducing casting time to 1 minute would give it a different feeling because you don't have to wait for finishing the cast. I think a good alternative time would be 2 minutes. Then the player casting has to pass one round in which you can ask the other players what they want to do in the meantime. This will give it some feeling of duration which it wouldn't have otherwise.

There are a few more things to consider. Like for example the duration of ritual casting determines how many alarms you can set up.