Rituals Designs

[I'm A Banana]

If fighters and rogues can get "martial practices," they can mimic many of the underwhelming abilities of rituals, anyway.

Like creating an item from the GP you would buy it with! It's a grand alchemy that, instead of transmuting lead into gold, transmutes gold into largely useless adventuring equipment.

The problem with that is one of the bigger problems with rituals in general, in that 90% of them are really not very effective as-written.

I do, though, think there's something to the idea that the effects of rituals shouldn't be reserved just for magic characters.

Let's take raise dead. Should a non-divine character ever be able to use it?

Well, maybe not raise dead specifically. But maybe an effect that we'll call Miraculous Recovery, which they can do with the Endurance skill, on themselves, if they "die" in combat. Or an effect called Field Surgery that allows them to use the Heal skill in a similar way.

See, restoring life to the recently-unconscious shouldn't be just-a-cleric-thing, even if raise dead is just a cleric thing.

Similarly, scrying might be just-a-wizard-thing, but there should be no reason a rogue can't use Spying to find out pretty much the same thing that a wizard using Scrying could find out, with perhaps slightly different mechanics, and almost certainly using the Perception or Stealth skill instead of Arcana.

Lets not even charge a feat to access this part of the rules. Lets just assume that people automatically get rituals based on the skills they have trained. Maybe every few levels, they get to choose from a list.

So your Fighter might get Marathon Run for Athletics (not as fast as a teleport, but just as safe!), Miraculous Recovery for Endurance (a personal raise dead!), and Peircing Gaze for Perception (it's a lot like true seeing!).

The difference would be in the means and method, but the in-game effect would largely be the same, everyone can do it, and we don't have the problem of "needing" any one class, skill, role, or power source to accomplish the mechanical result of getting Jack's character back in the game, or seeing through the gnome's illusions, or getting to the other end of the Great Continent without having to roll for random encounters every night.

 

[S'mon]

So aside from spell names (failing to preserve the classic flavor of the game), spell effects (dropping any spell that was complicated), and preserving class identity (Fighter's casting Raise Dead), the ritual system was a resounding success. That's a pretty brutal self-assessment.

Funny, I actually like & prefer all the design changes! Takes all sorts, eh? I always hated that warriors could never use magic, that only Clerics could Raise Dead, and a lot of other D&Disms that 4e discarded. I am also very glad they dropped Clone. The one thing I don't like is that low level rituals are too expensive for low level PCs.

 

[Nemesis Destiny]

I like those ideas, [MENTION=2067]Kamikaze Midget[/MENTION]

That's food for thought...

And I completely agree with [MENTION=463]S'mon[/MENTION]. If you like the older edition restrictions, it's easy enough to add them back into your game. It's much harder to convince others to disregard them when they're the default.

I hope they keep this in mind for future revisions. Provide the framework to impose restrictions, but have the 'default' include very few, if any, of them.

 

[Alaxk Knight of Galt]

Funny, I actually like & prefer all the design changes! Takes all sorts, eh? I always hated that warriors could never use magic, that only Clerics could Raise Dead, and a lot of other D&Disms that 4e discarded. I am also very glad they dropped Clone. The one thing I don't like is that low level rituals are too expensive for low level PCs.

Yeah, I don't begrudge anyone for liking Rituals in their current state. They just aren't my cup of tea

I do like the Martial Healer (aka Warlord). I think that was a great change and hope non-divine healing survives in future editions. I also think Rituals were a great idea poorly implemented. It's one of the reasons I tend to bash them (the idea was brilliant, the execution sorely lacking, at least for my taste).

 

[Saagael]

Snippity snip

I would XP you for this but must spread the love around before I can do that. This is exactly what I'd love to do with rituals if my players bothered with it.

 

[Ryujin]

For those who don't want non-spell casting characters to get Rituals consider the Elric series of books. Does anyone remember a scene in which he cast an immediate spell? He was just a fighter with Arcana and Religion skills, the Ritualist feat, a crappy STR and CON, and an artifact to make up for his physical shortcomings, in 4e terms.

 

[I'm A Banana]

I would XP you for this but must spread the love around before I can do that. This is exactly what I'd love to do with rituals if my players bothered with it.

FWIW, I have some horribly malformed ideas on why 90% of rituals are ineffective piffle in the first place.

I think it boils down to Baker's point #3: that there shouldn't be "embedded effects" so that you don't NEED clone to do a backup-self. Rituals are unnecessary, and designed to be unnecessary. No one wants to be stuck in a situation where, if you don't have phantom steed (or whatever), you're boned.

I think we need to find a happy medium between that place and where we are now, with superfluous rituals that no one ever has reason to use muffling up the place.

There should be effects, broadly, that are "ritual-specific effects," things that only rituals are able to accomplish. If you include "martial practices" in the ritual category, it doesn't leave any characters out.

I've got a partial list, but I'm sure there are others. Rituals should be the only things capable of..

• Raising the Dead or other big healing effects (remove disease, remove curse)
• Killing outright, or other big harmful effects (inflict disease, curse)
• Safe long-distance travel (flight, teleport, plane walk)
• Significant divination (scrying, true sight, speak with dead)
• Significant charm/domination (charm person, dominate)
• Significant creation (summoning, item crafting, steed-conjuring)
• ...probably other things...

I have a sneaking suspicion that the things rituals should be capable of in my book lines up well with the three non-combat roles of PCs (Explorer -- travel, Face -- charm, and Sage -- divination), and ways of accomplishing these things more easily than with skill checks. As long as rituals are not reserved only for spellcasters (fighters and rogues can get in the mix with martial practices), so that we can ensure that every character could do any of these things if they had to (much like any character can deal damage), I think we may have a winner.

I do think one of the reasons rituals are under-utilized probably has to do with skill challenges, and how abstract and quickly those things can solve any problem. No longer is charming an NPC important, when any character who has trained Bluff and upped Charisma and taken a background and maybe has a skill power and maybe has a friendly half-elf nearby can pretty much press the win button on any social interaction anyway. Getting SC's to work nicely with rituals is a bit of a challenge, but I've got a few horrible ideas for it (like making rituals into SC's!).

 

[S'mon]

Here's my 4e Rituals house rule:

Rituals
I'm going to rule that PCs can learn Rituals without the Ritual Caster feat, as long as they are trained in at least one of the key skills (Arcana, Religion, Nature, or Heal). If you have both the Ritual Caster feat and are trained in a key skill, you can take a +2 bonus on the skill roll.

 

[Crazy Jerome]

I've got a partial list, but I'm sure there are others. Rituals should be the only things capable of..

• Raising the Dead or other big healing effects (remove disease, remove curse)
• Killing outright, or other big harmful effects (inflict disease, curse)
• Safe long-distance travel (flight, teleport, plane walk)
• Significant divination (scrying, true sight, speak with dead)
• Significant charm/domination (charm person, dominate)
• Significant creation (summoning, item crafting, steed-conjuring)
• ...probably other things...

I have a sneaking suspicion that the things rituals should be capable of in my book lines up well with the three non-combat roles of PCs (Explorer -- travel, Face -- charm, and Sage -- divination), and ways of accomplishing these things more easily than with skill checks. As long as rituals are not reserved only for spellcasters (fighters and rogues can get in the mix with martial practices), so that we can ensure that every character could do any of these things if they had to (much like any character can deal damage), I think we may have a winner.

Nice post! I need to spread XP.

One of those other things, or maybe a comprehensive version of all that you list, I think might be that rituals should be able to do the stuff that might be of questionable game balance or outright broken, but you want to include them anyway for flavor and/or times when they aren't a problem. I think I've said this before, but rituals (and at least some categories of magic items) are two areas where they should not try that hard to balance. Making the core of the classes/skills/powers balanced gives them freedom to say that rituals and most items are not. Then put that back on the DM, who can watch that stuff, secure in the knowledge that the core character abilities are a balanced baseline.

And if I'm correct, that is all the more reason to make sure that every character gets at least some access to rituals mechanically, at least as an option. Though one of the reasons to include items in that category is to not make it all or nothing. Then, to get across the continent in a hurry you need at least one of: an appropriate ritual, an item that does that, or a plot device (e.g. magical gate).

I would like to see the costs of rituals changed, and much more varied. For example, things like "detect secret doors" should be time intensive but cost little in the gold value in material components and/or require only a one-time focus purchase. But the big guns might require the sacrificing of magic items (not magic item dust, and no change!). For some in between, I'd like to see ones linked to classes of magic items. For example, if you know the ritual and have a magical sword of at least +2 or greater, and spend the time, you can perform this thing that enhances your martial ability. But if someone takes the sword away, you can't do it.

For that matter, I wouldn't mind seeing the goofy components introduced back into rituals, but kept rigorously out of the powers. Some of the cheaper ones can be flagged as such, and thus handwaved by groups that don't want to track lead dust and candle drippings.

 

[Saagael]

For that matter, I wouldn't mind seeing the goofy components introduced back into rituals, but kept rigorously out of the powers. Some of the cheaper ones can be flagged as such, and thus handwaved by groups that don't want to track lead dust and candle drippings.

I don't know about anyone else, but my players love keeping goofy components from slain foes, from dragon teeth to a drider's carapace. For this reason, I've added those "goofy components" as part of craft and enchant magic item rituals/practices, and reduced the gold cost significantly if they do this, and its great fun to see what the players can cook up with different monstrous body parts.

This is something I will expand upon much greater in future campaigns, as it seems the players find this form of micromanagement to be actually fun.