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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6576439" data-attributes="member: 42582">My default approach, then, in dealing with this in a 4e game, would be to impose no penalty. The game is predicated on the assumption that rituals and the material components to pay for them are a player resource. The game expects that players will expend these resources to build their characters as they think is appropriate.The function of the ritual casting times seems to be to provide some colour, and to somewhat ration them relative to the combat and the rest economies of the game (eg no ritual taking 10 minutes can be used during combat; if a ritual takes an hour then performing it is giving the GM a licence to change the fictional situation quite different from taking a (5-minute) short rest). There is no robust support for using time itself as a type of resource, with rituals one of the things that can be done with it. (A contrast would be systems that allow trading of time spent healing, earning money working, researching spells, enchanting items, etc: 1st ed AD&D had elements of this, and so do non-D&D games like Runequest and Burning Wheel.)It might be interesting, in the same way that playing Russian roulette is interesting! But unless the goal of play is to have the players gamble against the GM's predetermined backstory, I'm not sure that it's very satisfying.If the goal of play is to have the players gamble in this way, then manipulating the backstory to shape outcomes would be invalidating of the choices that the game frames for the players, and hence illusionistic. But this isn't the way that I approach RPGing.To me, this just seems to undermine the integrity of the "gambling on the GM's backstory" approach. If the outcome is dependent on so much of the GM's opinions about the fiction - prior knowledge of the setting plus rolling dice - then I'm not sure it's even a fair gamble. Or, at least, the players aren't gambling against the GM's predetermined backstory anymore - they're gambling against the way that the GM interprets and interpolates (via dice, fiat or both) these elements of backstory.That seems even less interesting to me - it's one thing to explore the GM's backstory (which might be interesting, if done well) but another thing to explore the GM's 'random lunch-queue' table (that doesn't sound as interesting to me: "Why did we fail to rescue the prisoners?" "Because the GM rolled a 1 rather than 100 to work out how easily we were able to make our way through the marketplace on our way to the cultists's hide out").Do the players get to see the GM's tables in advance, so they at least know what they're gambling against when they decide to stop and make a magic item? Otherwise it looks like Russian Roulette without even being told how many chambers are in the cylinder.</blockquote>

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