Ritual Spells - do they need to be a separate category?

[Blue]

But using magic to overcome an obstacle is only as uninteresting as you want it to be. Personally, if someone levitated me up a cliff face, I would find it far more exciting than you seem to indicate

Hey, I'm a master tracker, here's a master negotiator, over there is a master locksmith. Plus we have a master athlete, and a ...

We're all standing over here because the casters can take spells to do everything we have invested in, and do it for no cost. Not just for one of us, but for all of us.

No, free unlimited magical solutions are *always* boring. The occasional magical solution can be exciting.

 

[Riley37]

I'm currently playing a Sorcerer-Warlock. Any spell he can cast, he can cast again after an hour's rest.
The difference between healing with a long rest, and casting healing spells five times with short-rest recharges, is that you can only Long Rest once per day.

There are many magic systems which don't have "max spells cast per day" as a limiting factor. Mage uses Paradox: the more often and the more blatantly you bend reality, there are increasing odds that reality will snap back, and give you a Time Out from casting further spells until it's calmed down and cooled off. (Possibly with other consequences too.) Shadowrun uses Drain: spellcasting can hurt, like exhaustion or wounds.

Harry Potter is fun to read but it's not a good model for "what would wizards do, if they had PC levels of ambition and creativity, plus zero-cost spell-casting." I mean, he gets a device which can roll back time three hours, and he only uses it to spend more time doing homework. He doesn't realize that any time he loses a game of Quiddich, he can turn back to the beginning of the game, and *start the game already knowing where the Snitch is*. Wizards have gold coins and silver coins, even though they can transmute silver into gold. Wizards didn't eradicate smallpox - they left that to Muggles; every death from smallpox from the 1870s to the 1970s, is a death Dumbledore could have averted. The list goes on and on.

 

[Riley37]

Ritual casting of Wish, six times an hour, all day long. What could go wrong?

 

[TheSword]

I don’t dislike the idea. Never liked the fact that as a spellcaster you have to foresee every problem before you reach it. You could try the following limiting factors.

- Add a cost in HP/Con/Int
- Spend an Inspiration point
- Spend a material component with a GP cost = level x nGP
- limit to once per short rest
- Make it ten minutes if on your prepared list or an hour if not.
- require an Arcana check
And/or
- have some risky wild magic table/problems for spells that aren’t already rituals.

To be honest this is probably how I would run High Mages in an Elf Campaign.

As a side note time is a relevant limitating factor if it would be easier for the party to just climb the cliff with a rope and save time.

 

[TaranTheWanderer]

I think rituals be cool if you could cast a spell as a ritual to change its parameters. I wish they’d included something like that. Like, casting a spell as a ritual to effect more people or to increase a duration. Even if it still cost a slot, I think that would be cool.

 

[Dausuul]

Thinking about it some more... what if you just threw in a material component cost? Something pretty substantial, like 100 gp times the square of the spell level (so up to 8,100 gp for a 9th-level spell).

It's thematically appropriate to have ritual magic cost money, and it would provide a nice money sink for all that gold that high-level PCs tend to rack up.

 

[cbwjm]

I do think the game could do with more rituals. I remember in 2e wanting to be able to use ritual like spells because of reading novels where components had to be collected and to stop the big bad wizard you needed to disrupt the rituals. When 4e changed everything, one of the things I liked most was that they had all of these rituals that you could learn and you just needed to know a skill to use them (or maybe you didn't. Been a while since I've looked at them). I thought it was a really cool system.