Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Crazy Jerome" data-source="post: 5579525" data-attributes="member: 54877">I think that rituals can be a bit wasted, but not because of the core idea behind them. Rather, I think that 4E didn't push them hard enough (and probably didn't test them enough). I think there should have been about 3-5 times as many rituals (and a lot less powers), in more categories. Again, it is not that I dislike crafting and other such things having a mechanical basis, but rather I dislike having them in the same pool as Sneak and Diplomacy. In fact, it wouldn't have bothered me one bit if they had made rituals for every skill. Then they could have more easily scope/renamed some of the skills to cover a wider variety of core activities. Dungeoneering becomes "Craft" (anything), Nature covers exploration everywhere (including dungeons), and so on. The core skills do what adventurers would do--e.g. build a raft to cross a river. Then "rituals" tied to Craft and so on allow more specialized activities. I don't reject the points of those who say leave such things out of the ruleset entirely. It is a trade off. But I guess I chafe a bit at spending so much time to develop a system with clear mechanical categories, and then not following through completely on the implications: 1. Skills - things everyone can do at least a little, and you get better at them by generally experiencing things--sometimes a lot better. (You can't hang around for 30 levels and be totally clueless about bluffing.) 2. Feats - more exotic things, often niche, that you can either do or not (within the limits of mechanically representation, of course--e.g. armor proficiency). 3. Powers - special things that you can do that directly pertain to conflict, often combat, and often limited (for several reasons). 4. Rituals - things that anyone with some initial investment can learn, but learned individually, and depending on other prerequisites (i.e. sufficient skill, a feat, etc.), and that can take time and/or materials to repeat. The really sad thing is that massive proliferation of rituals, especially if expanded in scope, is the one place where massive lists of things, with flavor text, even themed--could have been added to the game without much risk of bloat. That would have opened up a lot of room for magic items doing ritual-like things, too, which is yet another big chuck with little risk for bloat. This wouldn't have even caused much trouble for those who wanted some areas open to everyone. Everyone knows how to do X? Fine, give them the ritual for free. Done. They teach it in every village where the characters grew up. It isn't even a problem in the online character program.</blockquote>

Verification