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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Salamandyr" data-source="post: 5086140" data-attributes="member: 40233">Right now I think the only thing actually "broken" in 4e is stacking save penalties, which they have addressed-by changing many of the most common items used so it's "lockdown" is harder to achieve.  Pretty much one more pass through with a nerfbat would fix that problem once and for all.  Until then, it's pretty easy to houserule that saves of 16 or better always save.On rituals though, I don't think the problem is with them per se...it's with Wizards' sort of panicked removal of all flavor text from their rulebooks.  I think they believe we would add our own "flavor" to the idea of ritual materials...the gold we spend on rituals being used for eye of newt, toe of frog, silver dust for pentagrams, virgin's tears and so forth.  And the time period (usually 10 minutes) being less a hard and fast rule as rather a "period of time longer than a short rest but shorter than an extended rest" as the player writing out mystic symbols, chanting, burning incense candles, etc...you know, magic stuff.  It seemed to me the first time D&D had included a mechanic similar to our classic fairy tale approach to magic.  But the way I've seen most people describe it is..."you spend money and something happens"  Sure, technically, that's all that goes on.  The fun is around the description.I think Wizards wanted to keep ritual materials vague, so we didn't have to worry about exactly how much fiend blood or toad hairs we have on hand (ok, I'd cast Arcane Lock, but I'm out of of harlot's warts) and they didn't want to thrust a particular flavor on us; so they came up with "magic dust" residuum, and let you buy "ritual materials", and then left the fun and interesting stuff about rituals to our imaginations...which led to people thinking the fun and interesting stuff about rituals didn't exist.So the solution for 5e?  Do what 3rd did, include descriptions of the material components of rituals, but let you have a "ritual pouch" that is assumed to have anything you need as long you have invested enough gold to stock it.  The character sheet would say ritual materials-500 gp.  But the Knock ritual could say "the ritual requires 10 gp of ritual ink made from an octopus, and a small silver key worth 50 gp (that is destroyed in the casting).  Runes of opening are painted around the lock while the caster chants the name of famous thieves over and over for 10 minutes"</blockquote>

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