D&D 5E Ritual Tag: When to use?

[doctorhook]

I actually had a pretty detailed look at the cleric spell list recently, including which spells are rituals and which aren't. My observations:

1. In 5E, slots above 5th are a very precious thing that should almost never be given freely given like they would be with rituals.
2. Ritual spells are never able to be cast at a higher level, otherwise the caster would always choose to cast the ritual at the highest possible level.
3. There are numerous "almost-ritual" spells that would probably be rituals if the base casting time had been less than 10 minutes.
4. There is a secret category of spell: the kind that can be made permanent with repeated casting. Off-hand, I can't recall if any of these are ritual spells, but it's worth noting that they're not necessarily tagged as anything.

If you want to add more rituals to your game consider that the casting time makes them unsuitable for combat (100 rounds to cast!). Since they don't use spell slots, rituals should never provide a direct combat benefit (e.g.: fly is too combat-valuable to be a ritual, but water walk isn't). Finally, consider if they spell you're inventing actually needs to be a ritual; it might just need a long casting time.

EDIT: Damn it, [MENTION=20323]Quickleaf[/MENTION]! You ninja'd me and wrote a more thorough post. Well played, son.

 

[doctorhook]

Ritual spells are heavily clustered toward the lower levels, too. No spell above 6th level has the tag, and precious few above 3rd. (Weirdly, no 4th level spells have it, though a few 5th and 6th level ones do.)

Divination is a 4th level spell that can be cast as a ritual.

How do you suppose this would work: Any spell without the ritual tag can be cast as a ritual, but it's treated as one spell level higher. You must be able to cast spells of that level before you can cast it as a ritual.

As written, that's got a ton of problems: casting a ritual "at a higher level" would make it more powerful, not less, which is why rituals are never able to be cast at a higher level (given the option, the caster would always choose to do so). I suspect that you meant "cast at base-level using a higher-level slot", which also wouldn't work: rituals don't use spell slots, so no one would choose to cast a spell with a higher slot and longer casting time but the base-level effect. (Remember that some ritual-casting classes still have to prepare their rituals.)