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

[UngeheuerLich]

Hmmh. I think that some spells should have had an extra cost. Tiny hut is a bit too powerful imho.

 

[iamntbatman]

I think the ten minutes is just fine. Makes ritual casting spammable in situations where there's no time pressure as ten minutes is essentially nothing in terms of a day, but not usable at all in combat and probably not useful in most high-energy situations. For example, in the homebrew campaign I've been playing, there are lots of localized languages for different tribes/city states/etc. We've houseruled that we can have basic conversations skills in these languages up to our Int mod (but full fluency is still determined by backgrounds/races). Still it seemed like it was worth picking up Comprehend Languages on my bard, as he's essentially the friendly party face (we've got an intimidating, deceptive tiefling warlock for the bad cop side of the routine). Takes nothing to stop for ten minutes to cast it before an important meeting, but still is a limitation if we suddenly find ourselves in a situation where it would really be helpful to know what some NPC's are saying at that very moment. Shortening the casting time to say one minute would keep it as a non-combat sort of tool, but would make it more usable in non-combat situations where time is of the essence. Increasing the time beyond ten minutes would start to get into "ok, it's a pain for us to stop and wait 30 minutes every time we might talk to a guy who might speak a language we don't know" territory. I think the same reasoning would apply to lots of other ritual spells.

 

[Rhenny]

Yes. 10 minutes is fine. Last night in our Phandelver campaign we came upon a marble double door with strange lettering. My Bladesinger started to read the comprehend languages ritual. Before she could finish two other party members were surprised by wandering stirge. My Bladesinger stopped the ritual to help get the blood suckers off her companions. After killing the stirges, the party did not want to spend any more time waiting so the monk just opened the doors.

DMs can make it hard or easy to cast rituals depending on the situation. It hardly matters how long it takes. And, if it took any longer than 10 minutes, my Bladesinger would never even try to use while adventuring in unknown territory.

 

[Harzel]

Yes. 10 minutes is fine. Last night in our Phandelver campaign we came upon a marble double door with strange lettering. My Bladesinger started to read the comprehend languages ritual. Before she could finish two other party members were surprised by wandering stirge. My Bladesinger stopped the ritual to help get the blood suckers off her companions. After killing the stirges, the party did not want to spend any more time waiting so the monk just opened the doors.

DMs can make it hard or easy to cast rituals depending on the situation. It hardly matters how long it takes. And, if it took any longer than 10 minutes, my Bladesinger would never even try to use while adventuring in unknown territory.

As a DM, unless I am playing an intelligent opponent who knows the PCs, I don't and do not want to change, on an ad hoc basis, how the world behaves specifically to target PC capabilities. I know others do, and that's fine; it's just not the way I want to play the game.

OTOH, I do want the PCs to have interesting decisions to make. The door is quite a nice example: a) just open it; b) expend a spell slot to cast CL rapidly; c) spend time to do the ritual. Provided that the time is, in context, significant. Which brings us back to sort of where the thread started, as I have observed that in my campaign 10 minutes does not very often matter.