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Message: <blockquote data-quote="ender_wiggin" data-source="post: 5763445" data-attributes="member: 21629">Exactly. I will share what we do.I threw out more or less all the existing rituals and worked with players on a one-on-one basis to design custom "special abilities" for each character (which includes but is not limited to rituals). This makes characters feel unique (as nobody playing RAW D&D can ever mechanically mimic them), and allows me to have a finer hand in shaping the capabilities of the party. The downside is that it takes somewhat more time than just relegating this to a book, but I've tried to boiled down what I'm doing to some loose rules in order to make things standardized.#1: Nothing done here may have any direct impact on combat mechanics. 4E is an extremely rules-heavy system whose rules focus 95% on combat. It is a complete package, and anything added to the combat rules is unlikely to make my game much better.#2: What replaces the ritual design space comes in a variety of narrative flavors but usually falls into one of several categories: (1) Arcanist/Divinist learns and casts rituals (2) A character owns an artifact that does cool things, (3) A character builds a following, (4) Something unique [Morningstar of Ell's ability (from Sagiro's story hour) to navigate Ava Dormo is a good example of what would in theory fall into this category]#3: What can these abilities do? KM's post from a few posts up gives a good list, and I'll just quickly reiterate: (1) Travel across long distances or across otherwise impossible terrain, (2) Divination, (3) Communication across distances or with unusual entities, (4) Conjuration/Creation of cool things, (5) Skill replacement. An example of the last category is my version of the ritual Knock, which allows an arcanist to use his Arcana skill one time to replace Thievery for the purpose of opening a lock. Alternatively, a cleric that has built a following can call on his disciples to investigate something for him - he may use Religion in place of Streetwise. I leave it up to the player to justify the mechanics with narration. Most of my players extraordinarily creative and frequently surprise me with the cool stuff they come up, but if somebody is new or having trouble I will take the time to throw a few suggestions their way. For the most part, however, the onus of coming up what rituals actually do is up to them.#4: How do I give my PCs these abilities in-game? My method is to have downtime between adventures, and have time as a resource for learning things and exploring other in-game stuff. In heroic tier, the basic unit of off-time is one week (in paragon the month, in epic the season). Each week of off-time, the player may declare that his character spends time learning whatever ability. I ask the PCs to roll a relevant skill, and if they pass a moderate DC, I count that a success. Usually four successes are required to learn something new. Sometimes I complicate their learning by making them talk to a specific NPC or travel to a specific city.#5: What is the cost associated with using these abilities? I actually don't keep track of money in my game; I like to focus on the story and bookkeeping is too cumbersome for me. I tend to use healing surges and time as the two resources that fuel these abilities: the former for short-form abilities (a ritual that be cast in 1 hour) and the latter for long-form (calling on one's following). My homebrew is set up so that using surges makes narrative sense. I imagine other DMs can use more traditional costs for this method.Hopefully that made some semblance of sense, but I'll clarify in case there are big holes in my explanation as to how this could possibly work. Comments welcome.</blockquote>

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