What do you think is wrong with rituals?

[wedgeski]

Rituals as-is work very well in my group, but then I spray them around all over the place and regularly allow ritual casters to "harvest" components from the world around them. For example, just sealed off that arcane portal? Well, there's a couple-hundred gold worth of arcane components that you can recover from the glyphs.

As it has turned out, one player is pretty much "the ritual guy", but that doesn't seem to be a problem for either her or the rest of the group. GP costs for ritual components, if necessary, are taken from the party stash.

I also enjoy building new rituals which illuminate the adventures and/or the game world. In one session, the party had to decipher and enact a ritual which allowed them to tunnel through a plane of worms to the bad-guy's recluse. That ritual has now become a standard means of transport for them... despite the fact that something living in that plane appears to take great interest in them every time they pass through it. So, mechanical, plot, flavour, and adventure hook all in one. Bargain.

 

[Mengu]

In one of our games we had a wizard who used rituals a bit. We got some mileage out of it, but nothing to write home about. We found them to be pretty bland, expensive, not powerful, and out of the box, they don't even work that well as plot devices.

Some rituals are so conditional, they might come into play once or twice in an adventurer's career, and it hardly seems worth the effort, especially when the DM is not likely to say "you're stuck guys, sorry can't continue without that one obscure ritual, turn around, go home."

I largely ignore rituals for PC's. NPC's on the other hand can do all sorts of crazy things with rituals. I don't have to worry about cost, level, time limits, balance, etc. From summoning demons, to animating the dead, conjuring fog cover, and invoking earthquakes, rituals certainly have a place in my games, just not the way they were written.

 

[UngainlyTitan]

My gripes with rituals are (as mentioned up thread) they do not apprear by default in the CB and when printed do not include component cost.
The next is that they take to long to cast. I think, aside from some major rituals like Raise Dead or some healing stuff most of the rituals should be castable in a minute or so.
The reason for this is that it should be worthwhile to cast rituals in unsecure situations. This allows the scenario where the party have to cast a ritual as a plot point but it is not immediately fatal to the ritual if combat occurs.
To facilitate this I would go for caster needs a standard action to begin and complete a ritual but can keep it going in the meantime by a minor action.
So the caster(s) are more like immobilised than dazed in combat.
Also I think that WoTC should make ritual use as part of the plots in some adventure.

I also think primed rituals are a good idea and combining with alchemy would be interesting.

That said, I really like the concept of rituals and as a player I have used them and some of my players have used them for purely "Look we can do magic"

I also would like to see rules for ritual research. I would certainly allow the old 3e spell research rules to allow the players create new rituals.

 

[fuzzlewump]

Magical items should have had a once per day ritual to use for free. That'd make magical items a bit more interesting and you'd see much more ritual use.

In a good scenario where the PCs can actually fail they'll feel more inclined to use them. If failing the stealth challenge just means an extra encounter or a harder encounter then why bother spending the ooc time and ic money?

 

[Tony Vargas]

Oh, I finally remembered one other thing rituals need: Keywords.

Keywords would let them interact with rules, items, powers and utilities that affect magic. Not that I can think of any beyond Dispel Magic off the top of my head, but, there might be others.

 

[TarionzCousin]

I totally agree. I think the ritual cost was put in as a nerf to make sure skills such as Thievery were the way to go. I guess too many peoplie complained that a wand with the Knock spell made the rogue unneeded in older editions.

Our rogue only shows up half of the time. It would be nice if someone knew the "Knock" ritual. Is there also a ritual for "Find Traps"?

It WOULD really help if there was something like a 'book of ritual magic' too. Maybe we'll get that since the Essentials line looks like it isn't including rituals as a core thing. A new book that collected all the existing rituals and filled in a few missing ones, plus maybe addressed other interesting ways players can leverage them would put it more in focus.

I would buy a book of "official" rituals. Just having the book in hand would help players become more familiar with them and use them more often.

1) Some of them are way too expensive. I'll use wizard's curtain as an example. All it does is create a curtain to give you some privacy, why does it have to cost so much gold?

What if, instead of gold, rituals required Healing Surges to be spent? Not just by the caster, of course--get some use out of the Defenders' multiple surges. It would also be more inclusive as the group could share out the "costs."

 

[Ryujin]

What if, instead of gold, rituals required Healing Surges to be spent? Not just by the caster, of course--get some use out of the Defenders' multiple surges. It would also be more inclusive as the group could share out the "costs."

Some rituals, like Knock, already use this mechanic. Since my character had relatively few healing surges I would have our Fighter 'assist' in the ritual, then use his surges.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Magical items should have had a once per day ritual to use for free. That'd make magical items a bit more interesting and you'd see much more ritual use.

In a good scenario where the PCs can actually fail they'll feel more inclined to use them. If failing the stealth challenge just means an extra encounter or a harder encounter then why bother spending the ooc time and ic money?

Because you would rather not fight? I mean any choice of paths in a story arc has the same considerations, it has little or nothing to do with rituals per-se. Remember, most rituals make things easier or give other advantages, there are very few "this must happen" type rituals that have checks that are absolute pass/fail. In fact very few rituals are really pass/fail at all. That's deliberate. In the few cases where you really can fail the cost is only paid on success generally speaking.

Mostly rituals are more like consumables than anything else. You can use them to give you an advantage or as a way to do something you might not be able to do otherwise, but if they're 'story rituals' then there's either A) no reason for them to follow specific ritual casting rules or B) the DM should be providing access to them in the form of a scroll or something.

 

[ferratus]

There are a few reasons why I think that rituals haven't caught on.

1) Rituals aren't on power cards. People decide what they are going to do in 4e by looking at their power cards, not their character sheets. I've handed out plenty of rituals, but since they aren't on their cards my players forget about them. I've taken to printing out their rituals that I hand out as treasure for them, which seems to help somewhat.

2) Players are used to only two actions in D&D, skill check and attack. If they can't attack it, its a skill check. If it isn't a skill check, you attack it. They aren't used to rituals being another option.

3) Players hate spending resources. Residuum, reagents and healing surges are precious in 4e, and the players hoard them. They will consider almost any other course of action besides spending either, even when it will serve them better in the long run.

4) Rituals aren't in the treasure tables. Whenever I've been a player in 4e, the DM has never handed out rituals. Why? Quite simply because they aren't in the treasure tables. They hand out treasure out by the book.

 

[UngainlyTitan]

What if, instead of gold, rituals required Healing Surges to be spent? Not just by the caster, of course--get some use out of the Defenders' multiple surges. It would also be more inclusive as the group could share out the "costs."

Martial Practices work that way, I do think its a cool way to do it.