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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 5376120" data-attributes="member: 82106">Well, see here's why I think at least 1 and 3 aren't really great ideas (though they COULD work for some specific rituals, bards for instance already have free rituals).1) Once you make a ritual free then there's NOTHING stopping the character from spamming it like crazy. This is fine for rituals you really can only get any use out of in fairly specific circumstances, but even those can be problems in specific situations that the game designers can't really anticipate. Animal Messenger is usually pretty trivial for instance. If you make it free though using it without limit could present an issue for a given story line. For rituals like Knock and Arcane Lock making them freebies kneecaps rogues and is just a bad idea. Thus many rituals have a rather trivial cost. It is not enough to make it too expensive to use when you need it, but it does mean it is cheaper to just buy the rogue a set of lockpicks and be done with it.3) This is also problematic. Again it could work for a few cases, but basically those would be rituals you really generally aren't going to find all that useful in combat, which makes it fairly redundant. Again, it is a lot like the old issue with the wizard being the go-to guy for practically every problem. I'd be happy with some rituals that worked that way or some kind of feat or whatever that allowed certain specific rituals to be cast this way. As a general rule I don't think it works too well though.2) I remember WELL the 1e AD&D days of material spell components. What an accounting nightmare. This rule was pretty much the first thing everyone ignored in 1e and in fact I cannot actually recall personally ever playing in a 1e game where this rule was inforced. It is just far too much of a pain in the butt. I think the existing component rule was at least a decent attempt to both provide some level of component requirement and yet make it as simple as possible to administer. Even so I personally find it a pain to track. Remember, any given ritual can have specific rules and many of them do have 'focus' items or other conditions. Unusual DM provided rituals can always have other types of restrictions too, but these are generally story elements and not player resources.I think any of the above suggestions can work for specific situations and be used optionally depending on the desires of the group. I'm not sure they are things I'd want to see written in as general rules that always apply.What I've found is that yes players will tend to horde anything. OTOH when the situation clearly calls for use of consumable resources they will come out. The DM may want to make sure to highlight a few opportunities. It seems like once the players have gotten into the habit of using consumables and rituals they'll pay more attention to them. It also helps to make them the only really easily available option for some things. When permanent heal boosting items are hard to come by for instance and potions of resistance and regeneration and such are readily available then the players will pretty much get into the groove of relying on those instead of just being decked out with the Medic's Weapon, the Healer's Brooch, Healer's Sash, and a Belt of Sacrifice, etc. The same can be said for other things. If the player's can't just forge a flaming sword whenever they need one (thank you Essentials changes) then the Alchemist's Fire actually starts to seem like a pretty cool thing. So I think the main issue with 4e's consumables is that it has been so far SO easy to get permanent items that solve the same problems that consumables rarely seemed vital. In a game with more restricted access to the magic smörgåsbord this problem is reduced. It will be interesting to see with the new magic item rules what impact that has on rituals as well. It seems like there is now less motive for PCs to store up gold since the items they can make or purchase are now pretty limited. We may find that creating potions and casting rituals takes on a bit more significance.</blockquote>

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