WotC sayz "People don't use rituals much" - O RLY?

[AbdulAlhazred]

I'm not mad about your terms (), but division of resources would be fine by me. The problem I forsee is that several folk seem to dislike it when they have to bother their little heads about another resource to manage...

I think that extra resources, considered carefully as to whether they are character-specific or can be shared by the party and preferably accentuating the role of milestones and the number of challenges tackled before an extended rest, could work well if well designed.

I think added resources are OK, if they serve a very clear purpose and particularly if they can obviate the need for some existing resource or some annoying rule or restriction.

 

[Windjammer]

I didn't take the time to read all of the replies.

You should have. Someone else also present at the seminar provided the exact same information upthread, and I XP'ed them for that. Mind you, I quoted the tweet source, and if the tweet is incorrect, then I should mind my own sources better in the future.

We know two things for sure, though.

1. Rituals were originally in Mordenkainen's Emporium. They were removed.
2. Rituals are going to get attention in the future, though what exactly is happening to them remains to be seen.

I see the removal of content as not well balanced by a vague promise of attending to problems which were pointed out to the designers as early as in 2008.

The other thing in the OP I stand by is this. 2011 saw the removal of a lot of D&D product, a shockingly small remaining product catalogue, and a man at the helm of D&D design who produced now ostensible design ten months before he was made lead manager of D&D. It's highly unfair to castigate Mearls by himself. I'm frankly appalled that nearly all the product that gets released this year is done by freelancers (Gloomwrought, Heroes of Shadow, Threats of Nentir Vale, ...), and hardly ANY in house effort goes into the actual writing of product anymore. What are Rich Baker, James Wyatt, and Bruce Cordell writing these days for 4E? Why is everything we 4E fans should care for outsourced?

This strongly reminds me of the times when 3.5 was on its way out, with the second (and frankly, mostly subpar) batch of 'Complete' splats written by freelancers, while WotC designers were busily putting their efforts to The Next Big Thing.

I understand that this situation benefits freelancers like yourself, and I've only heard got things about Threats of the Nentir Vale. But I've personally abstained from buying WotC product until I see in house design effort more clearly again, and frankly, some faith in and enthusiasm for one's own product coming from WotC.

 

[I'm A Banana]

Adjusting the time cost will be trickier though - you don't want to create instantaneous scry-buff-teleport issues again - and you don't want to create potential for abuse in other ways either.

I've done what you've done with Surges being the main cost (though I didn't think to make a scaling system!), but to solve the time problem, I tied them to rests.

When you take a short rest, you can do a ritual with a "Short Rest" casting time. When you take an extended rest, you can do a ritual with an "Extended Rest" casting time. I determine what is what based on whether I think it's something you should do once per day (fire-and-forget, or something that is potentially powerful), or perhaps a few times per day (less powerful, more maintained effects).

It's a little unsatisfying having to price them with Surges, though. I'd prefer there to be some other renewable resource I could have them spend, but Surges are one of the only things that exist outside of an encounter in 4e, so they're what gets used.

 

[Scribble]

What are Rich Baker, James Wyatt, and Bruce Cordell writing these days for 4E? Why is everything we 4E fans should care for outsourced?

My guess is they're doing more of a project management role, and double checking all the freelance work (in addition to the stuff going into the magazines) to make sure it fits in with the design.

People have been giving them a lot of slack about quality of various things, so I'm guessing they're going into overtime making sure everything that comes out in the future is in line.

 

[Caerin]

I'd like to see more attention paid to rituals. I've been in three long-term 4E games since its release. Rituals weren't a big part of any of them, particularly because of the parcel system, as addressed earlier in this thread. It wasn't until we were high paragon that we really started using the lower to mid-level rituals, and that was almost exclusively for traveling.

Some settings also don't seem to lend themselves to rituals very well; in the Dark Sun game, my char has had a heck of a time trying to learn arcane rituals at all. That's certainly how the DM is interpreting the setting to a large extent, but it seems like a reasonable interpretation. Even in the previous game in a home world, though, the party rarely wanted to contribute to rituals or ritual reagents.

 

[VannATLC]

It's a little unsatisfying having to price them with Surges, though. I'd prefer there to be some other renewable resource I could have them spend, but Surges are one of the only things that exist outside of an encounter in 4e, so they're what gets used.

One of the very first things I did with 4e, was scrap 'Healing Surges'

I melded action points, healing surges, and the magic item 'once-per-day' into a
Vitality pool, which was influenced by mile-stones, rests, statistics and some potent magics.

I levelled out the starting surges by class, to reduce the spread, and allowed a few other stats to affect surge numbers, then added some skill-utlities to replensish a surge on an easy check, and 2 on a hard. (but you can't go for both.)

It worked fairly well, in my opinion.. And I eventually tied these into ritual casting, alongside halving the casting time of most rituals. Mind you, I ignore parcels, spent far too much time building as balanced an economy as possible, and restricted magic item purchase to relatively low-level items. (And made it a common-magic world.. so lots of low-level magic, but very few people have the control/discipline to master lots of magics.

I also built a lot of multi-person rituals, which were really quite powerful, mostly focused on weather-forming and crop-growth, and construction.

On the whole, I agree completely that rituals do not work out of the box, but I generally forgave them, because combat seemed to work so well.

 

[Tony Vargas]

How does this not amount to a great combo of self fulfilling prophecy and closed feedback loop?

To explain, IF rituals are removed from the revamped Players handbooks then OF COURSE new players won't use them. Heck, no one at D&D Encounters will use them, because there only characters without rituals are legitimate to play.

There seems to be a lot of that. The same goes for 'under supported' classes. Well, no one's playing the under-supported Runepriest/Seeker/whatever, so of course it's not being supported.

It seems like WotC really only listens to complaints from people who hate 4e on a visceral level or love it unconditionally, never to constructive criticism that might actually help them improve the game.

 

[Shemeska]

What are Rich Baker, James Wyatt, and Bruce Cordell writing these days for 4E?

Well for the latter two, presumably they're making board games and other D&D-associated stuff, since they both moved over to the 'new business d&d group' earlier this year.

Mind you, my initial thought was that the team was chopped in half for one half of them to make a new edition, except they're been churning out a number of board games and other stuff now, which puts that theory to bed in my mind.

Of course this is unfortunate because I really truly like Cordell's early work and with him no longer apparently working directly on ttrpg stuff -even if for an edition I don't play- it's less and less likely that we'll see him put out any gems like 'Guide to the Ethereal' or 'Gates of Firestorm Peak' again any time soon. The pool of people working directly on D&D over at WotC has got to be seriously small at this point compared to anytime in the recent past.

 

[Hadrian the Builder]

I don't see that rituals get used much in my group either, even with encouragement and components thrown at them. Even the travel rituals get forgotten unless I remind them. When we played 3.5, the players used magic all the time to shorten the road or overcome obstacles.

I’m still not clear on what the designers intended to accomplish with their changes to the spell system.. Clearly, they’ve made a distinction between combat spells and non-combat spell, but what’s the point?

Look at the difference between knock in 4e vs. knock in 3.5: in 4e, Knock costs 35gp and 1 healing surge to cast, plus 10 minutes, and you cant; use it in combat. Your fighter could BEAT the door down faster. In 3.5, it cost nothing to cast (except maybe a spell slot, or 25 gp for a scroll) and a standard action.

Knock is obviously not a combat spell (unless you’re a door, I suppose), but why shouldn’t it be cast in combat? The problem with rituals isn’t JUST their cost, it’s that their utility is hampered. Rituals feel like a sidebar to the game.

Here’s my idea of a grand revamping: Return to Vancian magic…sort of. Combat powers seem to work fine, or at least, I don’t see my wizard players complaining a lot. Give ritual casters more for their feat. For example, if you take the feat, you can cast rituals AND you get a spell progression (err ritual progression). Everyday you prepare rituals, just as you used to prepare spells in a previous edition. And you get to cast them for free. Eg. At 3rd level you get 1 2nd level spell, 2 1st level spells and 4 cantrips. Reduce the casting times to combat scale (1 standard action typically). And then LET THE PLAYERS CHOOSE what the most effective action will be. If you want to take it a step further, problem rituals could have both a combat definition and a non-combat definition (see Snare for an example), if there are concerns about balance. And classes that get the ritual feat could be initially limited to their theme-appropriate rituals, so that druids and rangers get access to nature rituals, wizards to arcane and divine casters to religion.

 

[Balesir]

Here’s my idea of a grand revamping: Return to Vancian magic…sort of. Combat powers seem to work fine, or at least, I don’t see my wizard players complaining a lot. Give ritual casters more for their feat. For example, if you take the feat, you can cast rituals AND you get a spell progression (err ritual progression). Everyday you prepare rituals, just as you used to prepare spells in a previous edition. And you get to cast them for free. Eg. At 3rd level you get 1 2nd level spell, 2 1st level spells and 4 cantrips. Reduce the casting times to combat scale (1 standard action typically). And then LET THE PLAYERS CHOOSE what the most effective action will be.

Then, using your example of knock, why would Thievery ever be used to pick locks to open doors? With the travel rituals, why would anyone ever buy a horse? Or even a riding dragon?

Rituals are not yet "right", but the basic idea of stopping the casters doing everybody else's job better than they could was a basically sound one, IMV.