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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 5880379" data-attributes="member: 996">Rituals were a nice idea - you take the old out-of-combat spells that more often got made into scrolls than prepared, and separate them from class spells so players don't have to choose between being effective in combat or having a cool seldom-used spell on tap, and give them a per-casting cost to keep them from being systematically abused (like, oh, Fabricate in 3e).But, it turned out that groups often just didn't use them at all, for three reasons:  1) rituals took a long time to cast, the quickest requiring you to take the equivalent of multiple short rests, 2) they cost a lot learn, when you already had the option of buying magic items magic items, instead and 3) by the time the per-casting component cost was reasonable, the ritual was well below your level, that meant that at 1st level, no ritual was economical to cast, even if you got some for free for being a Cleric or Wizard, so players just got in the habit of not using them.Component costs are high for a ritual of our own level, but rituals are more meant to take the place of lower-level spells that you might have put on scrolls in earlier editions, it's good that your party has advanced some in level (and hopefully wealth) before being introduced to rituals, as 1st level ritual components are probably in their price range.The only house rule I implemented for rituals was to change the casting time.  Time tends to flow around encounters, short rests, and extended rests - there's none of the exacting rules on how long it takes to search a 10x10 room or sneak down a  60' long corridor or whatever, like there were in AD&D, so there's very little exact time keeping to deal with.  Rituals, though, have exact (and long) casting times, making them seem inconvenient.  What I did was to change the casting time of rituals that took less than an hour to "You can use this ritual as part of a short rest" and longer ones to "You can use this ritual as part of an extended rest," and, if it had ever come up I'd have had 8+ hour rituals basically take "a day" to cast.  Essentials classes get plenty of goodies in place of the Ritual Caster Feat, so I wouldn't worry about that.  A variation I considered, in order to make rituals feel more like class spells, was to limit Religion rituals to Clerics (and Divine classes), Nature rituals to Rangers (and Primal classes), Arcane rituals to Wizards (and other archanists), and Heal rituals to leaders.  You omit the Ritual Caster feat, and instead allow rituals for those trained in the skill and of an appropriate class, as above.  So a Warpriest could cast Divine & Heal rituals, while a Hunter could cast nature rituals, a Mage arcana rituals, and Sentinel nature & heal rituals.  Another tip I'd have for introducing rituals is to place them as treasure.  Ritual books, components and scrolls can all be placed as treasure (and unwanted magic items can be rendered for Residuum, the universal component).  Scrolls are a particularly nice introduction as you don't need Ritual Caster to use them, and can use a higher-level ritual on a scroll.  So you can 'try out' a ritual before letting the players get access to it permanently or give them access to a ritual that's necessary for the plot but not otherwise something they might want to have or you might want to include. (The odd thing about scrolls is they still require components, so I've seen some DMs always include the components with the scroll, and I see no reason not to go old-school and say the components are baked in - in which case include a single casting cost in the price of the scroll).</blockquote>

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