What do you think is wrong with rituals?

[Nichwee]

In my group we make pretty good use of rituals.

Both my wizard and the party cleric keep components on us, and Phantom Steed has been a godsend (as we are doing a big-scale campaign and Speed 20 Flying Horses that don't tire are a great way to travel long distances for 70gp a day for upto 8 peeps).

I also have a bunch of smaller rituals we have used semi-regularly, such as Leomand's Secret Chest, Sending, Make Whole (helped win over a sailor who we wanted info from when I offered to speed up repairs on his ship), and a few divinations.

Basically, rituals are nice for RP moments and expresing the way your character does things, as well as being able to help solve odd problems or let a group get some idea of what to do - if you use the divination/info manipulation ones.

 

[Peraion Graufalke]

From my experience there's nothing really wrong with rituals. I'd like them to have reduced casting times, but it's no big deal, just a personal preference that can be house-ruled.

As a player I'm making extensive use of them if I'm playing a caster type character, and they've helped our groups immensely. I think it also helps that our campaigns have strong exploration and mystery themes.

As a DM I've made it a habit to hand out rituals and ritual components as treasure, partly in response to message board complaints about problems with rituals p ) and partly because I (and my players) like them.

I've always been under the impression that rituals were a tack-on to 4th edition after some playtester mentioned that the game was missing non-combat type magic. If this is true then it explains why the game functions just fine without them.

I don't share that impression. IMO the ritual system has a Sword & Sorcery-flavor that reminds me of the Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser stories. 4e running just fine without rituals at all can be seen as a feature, not a bug, e.g. if you want to run no-magic/all-martial campaigns. For me, it's a feature; YMMV.

 

[Prestidigitalis]

It's not a problem with rituals per se, but the DM does need to monitor carefully the use of rituals and take that into account in distributing treasure. It's a little unfair if your 8th level character only has two magic items (level 6 and 3) because you spent all of your loot on rituals and components required by the plot. [Please don't hate me if you read this, my faithful DMs.]

 

[Jack99]

We have been using rituals a lot. At least every game session, and often multiple ones per session. I still though we could improve on them, and thus houseruled all rituals with a casting time in minutes to be in rounds instead. Casting such ritual is a standard action that has to be sustained each round and the caster is considered dazed while doing so. Gives some interesting possibilities.

 

[jimmifett]

In home games, Rituals get a lot of use.

In LFR, they are hardly used at all.
We did use phantom steed once in lfr. Worked out awesome. We barely made the check to get flying steeds, cut off a huge amount of travel time, and used them along as we could in a forest encounter until they were popped by the bad guys. Made for a total change of tactics for the DM as we zipped around the forest map with ridiculous movement and flight. There a lot of LFR DMs, sadly, that would not be able to handle that. Ours was.

 

[tyrlaan]

I seriously dig this thread because so many folks are chiming in to "defend" rituals. Incidentally, I'm throwing my 2cp in to back them up "as is" as well. For example, the group I'm in just spent an entire session (more or less) using Object Reading to learn TONS of useful information about what the heck is going on behind the scenes.

Though since the OP wants opinions on what's wrong with them, I'd say the following:

• Power balance seems to be off. Sometimes the level of a given ritual just makes me scratch my head. Admittedly, rituals can be tougher to gauge then a power, but still.
• CB support is sub-par. There's effectively no reason to print out rituals through the CB. Sure, I can see the description of what the ritual does, but I have no info on component cost, casting time, or duration - three relatively critical tidbits of data.
• Not enough use of the ritual design space. Martial Practices was a great idea weakly executed. There's tons you can do here. Hopefully we'll see more innovation in this area in the future.

 

[Ravenshroud]

We have been using rituals a lot. At least every game session, and often multiple ones per session. I still though we could improve on them, and thus houseruled all rituals with a casting time in minutes to be in rounds instead. Casting such ritual is a standard action that has to be sustained each round and the caster is considered dazed while doing so. Gives some interesting possibilities.

Great houserule!

Leomund's chest and tenser's floating disk are incredible. I personally love using unseen servant with my NPCs to show players the possibilities. It is a hoot for my gnomish arcanist NPC to tell his servant to do things and the players think he is talking to them and start to act, which really annoys the gnome.

I also make it so players can't rest in some areas without Banish Vermin.
Make valuable treasure too heavy or encumbering to carry so they need a chest or disk.

As everyone has given testament to here. It is not the rituals that are weak per se, but the DMs creative use of them. That is NOT to say Wizards couldn't do a better job with them.

 

[MrMyth]

In the game I run, the most powerful rituals crop up regularly, potentially even in abusive ways, while the rest are ignored, except when I give out specific ritual scrolls as treasure in the hope the party will eventually find a use for it.

It is a shame, but in some ways, the limitations placed on rituals in 4E have been as much bane as boon. In the past, casters both loaded up on all the big 'problem-solving' spells... but also could afford to take a few less important ones, just in the hope they will be handy or fun to use.

These days, the effort to hunt down those lesser rituals, and the time and money it takes to cast them, can discourage their use. But the ones that are obvious winners (such as Leomund's Secret Chest, Eagle's Flight, Comrade's Succor) still get relied upon.

Now, in a group I am playing in, my dwarven invoker just went hunting for a pile of rituals once we got to a place I could buy them. Focusing largely on low-level interesting nature and investigation rituals - things like Lower Water, Inquisitive's Eyes, Object Reading, Beast Growth, etc. And the DM said I could find them... but not until after the current adventure.

Since we were going into a sunken ruin, chasing after someone who was right ahead of us setting up all sorts of traps and puzzles. She realized that several of those rituals would make it trivial to explore the dungeon and bypass the puzzles. 4E worked really hard to cut down how much spells can just bypass the adventure, but even now, even with just random low-level flavorful rituals... you need to be careful, cause if the DM doesn't see them coming, one well-placed ritual can make the entire adventure fall apart.

Anyway... all in all, I agree with the comment that the concept of Rituals is great, but the execution leaves a bit to be desired.

 

[Tortoise]

It would definitely benefit the game, especially with regard to rituals, if the adventures being published had more effort spent placing them and giving them a use.

If/when I get back into DMing, I plan to make an effort to include the under-utilized aspects of the game, rituals chief among them.

The idea Jack99 mentioned about changing the casting times makes great sense and would do wonders for enhancing play. I'll definitely be mentioning this to the group's current DM and will use it in my game if I DM again. This is the kind of thing that WoTC should make official errata for rituals. I can easily see this combined with a skill challenge during a combat.

 

[AllisterH]

Personally...I think the biggest problem is "HOW they are organized".

The cost is a non-issue as only a couple of rituals I know actually have costs that scale with level so pretty much every ritual eventually becomes cheap to cast.