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

[WalterKovacs]

So you can look at a 100% of characters on the online Character Builder designed for D&D Encounters, and still not draw a valid conclusion about how widespread ritual magic is. It would be like concluding that people don't like to play clerics, or invest in expensive magic items and metal weapons, after an Encounters season of Dark Sun only.

Of course, that would involve deliberately misreading a small portion of available data and reaching an improper conclusion. "There are no epic tier characters designed for D&D Encounters! Oh noes!". Considering that part of what the character builder does, the first thing it does in fact when designing a new character, is allow you to seperate it into what kind of campaign setting it is designed for. So, they can easily look at all the non-Encounter characters to look at Ritual use. Yes, some Encounter characters may have been built outside of the 'correct' method, but characters in the builder can have rituals. They can have martial practices, etc, etc, etc. I highly doubt that the people using the collated data and thinking:

"None of the people that can't use rituals are using rituals ... people must not like rituals!"

And the second part of my post is about backing up one's promises with words. WotC has said time and again that they'd support epic level play, that they are aware of the issue and what not. And then they come out with a release schedule which pegs 3 out of 3 campaign settings this year in heroic tier play. And to see re-pricing extant rituals as a way of "supporting rituals", let alone an adequate way thereof, admittedly requires more charity or optimism than I can muster.

I don't really recall the time after time. They were asked many times, and then they said that, because they screwed up Epic play originally (not in those words), they aren't just going to throw out epic 'support' that probably wouldn't be useful since the problem to epic content being crap isn't more crap. They did promise support in Dungeon magazine.

As for rituals ... what is something that needs to be done by a ritual that isn't already possible? Would people start jumping up and buying existing rituals if only there was a new ritual? People aren't using existing rituals ... repricing them is a way to possibly support rituals, by getting people to actually use them. What "support" in the magic item book would do that? Some item that let's you get rituals easier, cast them quicker and cheaper, etc? They already did do some of that support. There are skill powers, feats, items, paragon paths and epic destinies that can make rituals quicker to cast, cheaper to cast, various means of getting access to rituals (and cast some for free), and often give a side effect to make the feat useful even when not used as a means of getting rituals.

Rituals are a long term investment that solves short term crises, and thus becomes a cumbersome swiss army knife. In some cases, you can use them proactively, especially the ones that speed up travel and allow you to skip doing travel stuff. Of course, this depends on a situation where:

(a) The DM/campaign/adventure actually treats travel as something that matters, be it because of time limits, skill challengers/encounters during travel, and other associated costs

(b) The party is fine with spending money to skip over these things. Some parties would be perfectly fine with getting another 5 or 6 encounters under their belt getting to the BBEG and maybe leveling up before they have to fight him.

So, the DM has to both be making travel interesting by having it be important, but also making it slightly tedious, annoying and bookkeepy such that the players spend gold on not having to bother with it.

In other cases, it's just a 'tax' to get to a place you couldn't otherwise. A bridge you can't cross until you get to the right level, then you can pay to go back and forth across it.

Stuff like Resurection depends on whether players want to come back, or rather make new characters. The various remove affliction/disease things are something you don't know you'll need until it's too late. The various item creation/destruction/transfer are a means of "shopping" out of town, but require components, so most of your cash is only useful ... when you get to town, and large quantities of residuum or arcane components would probably be just as hard to come by as magic items of the same value. So, outside of creating your own residuum, you have to hope the DM is dumping lots of residuum into the party treasure otherwise you still have to wait to get back to town to "buy" new magic items.

Scrying, and related stuff is a mixed bag ... it's hard to know whether or not it will be useful at the time you'd first be buying the rituals, so it's up to knowing your DM.

In fact, that's probably one of the biggest issues with rituals: Potential buyer's remorse. You have to pay to get them initially, and likely invest in having the resources to use them later. So, you are trying to estimate their worth often long before you use them, spending money that could be used on magic items you know you will be using fight after fight, or at the very least, will be able to use, for free, a few times and can always get some of your money back on. There is a good chance that most rituals will end up as 'too awesome to use', or something like it, as any ritual components will be saved since they may be MORE useful later, so unless you absolutely have to, you'd avoid spening them now. Like if the party had a potion that say, gave 100hp for a single surge whe someone drank it ... they would probably try to never use it until someone could actually get 100hp of use out of it, and even then, they probably would only use it if, on top of that, they were out of any other options. Since rituals can do so many things ... the 'potential' value of material components (which can always be traded for cash and then for magic items, or used with enchant to 'level up' an item) is so high, that many will avoid using them most of the time.

I would think that martial practices, since many were free and only used surges, a renewable resource, that they might see more play. However, I think that feat cost probably got in the way. Most ritual casters have it because they get it as a class feature, or perhaps got it as part of multiclassing (might as well get a skill thrown in for free), or dragonmark, etc ... but you have to take a feat to get 'into' martial practices, and then buy them, etc.

Alchemy is similarly underused.

All have a variety of costs to learn and cast, and different ways to get in (alchemy being able to sub in for rituals, although often at a cost, since you give up class features granting free rituals) but all follow a similar formula, and all are underused. I don't think it's support that is the issue, although the 'best' supported (rituals) is the one that is most often seen, if only because it's the default option given to a number of classes. A bigger redesign than just "more stuff" is probably needed.

 

[Nemesis Destiny]

My own experience with Rituals in the game basically supports the prevailing opinion that as presented, they're just not worth it. So my group has experimented with ways of changing that.

Rituals cost money to buy, and the caster must maintain (one-time purchase) a "ritual kit" equal to the casting cost of the most expensive ritual they know, but beyond that, ritual use only costs healing surges to cast. We've scaled the surge cost to level, so that a ritual sufficiently below your character level eventually becomes free to cast. This has proven quite successful - characters in our games use rituals ALL the time.

The biggest issue has been the fact that they still take too long to use in many cases. Why would a group spend 10 minutes casting a convenience ritual when they could accomplish the same thing in half the time with a minor inconvenience? The only answer I can come up with is that it keeps the pace of the game up. In this example scenario, the party needed to cross a river to continue pursuit of their enemy, so the mage cast Lower Water to allow them to cross, but that took 10 minutes. In character, it would likely have been faster to wade across or something, but in game, that would have taken a lot of player back-and-forth ("DM, may I?" type stuff), but the ritual? That took 10 seconds ("I cast Lower Water so we can cross the swift-flowing river without risk.") Done.

So from our experience, the timing needs work, in addition to the ridiculous costs. We all felt that they should still cost something, and liked the aesthetic of components and foci. 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.

 

[Ryujin]

While there is a sliver of truth, in what the OP says, my experience as a DM tells me that players tend to not use rituals.

When I was a player, I made extensive use of rituals. There was not a single session in which I took part, where I didn't use at least one ritual. Some were for mere window dressing as in how my character could crawl through a sewer but come out without a spot of dirt on him, or the Derro corpse that carried his sundries. Others had real mechanical benefits to the party; finding that incredibly well hidden secret panel, pulling in rumours from thin air, travelling to places in half the time, Laying down a barrier against trailing undead, or boost Bluff to ridiculous levels in order to pull off a necessary lie.

Now, with our regular DM being unable to make it, I've taken over. The players not only don't make regular use of rituals, they make virtually no use of them. This, despite my inclusion of them as part of treasure, on occasion. The Cleric didn't even have Cure Disease for clean-up, after going toe-to-toe with Slaads. They aren't even on their RADAR.

 

[cignus_pfaccari]

In our group of about 5-6 people, about 2 people really grok rituals. I'm not one of them. I dutifully kept up with them on my cleric (and found a few nice ones, like that "make a temple for the night*" one in Divine Power), but didn't really like them.

It's partly because as a cleric, I'd always do worse than the party's wizard, because with a very few exceptions, they all ran off of Int-based skills, and so the only ones that I was able to shine on were the curative types.

It's also because, frankly, as presented, they take a lot more record-keeping than other aspects of the game, so you have to have the books to reference them when doing them, and that's one thing that 4e kind of discourages, what with power cards and such.

Hrm, the two people in my group who like rituals used to be big 3/.5e caster players...when I played casters (spontaneous only), I would do spreadsheets with my spells and their effects/range/costs etc, so I wouldn't have to reference the book.

* - "You walk in, and you hear Norwegian church-burning death metal playing softly in the background."
"...WHAT THE HELL deity do you worship?"

Brad

 

[Incenjucar]

The group I play in uses rituals quite often - we actually have three ritual casters - and it's been of tremendous use. We've even FAKED rituals in order to scare thieves off. However, our DM likes to try new things quite often, like impending mass battles where you can tweak the terrain ahead of time, so we've had the benefit of a lot of encounter variety to work with.

 

[GMforPowergamers]

I have the same problem with rituels as I use to with divination...some players use it, and use it well meaning you must take it into account at all times, and some players wont use it, and if you plan on it the game falls apart...

the biggest problem is when PCs switch between the two.


Example: Gee I Droped the name of the big bad, and almost no info...just that Felgar the Dark was looking for the same item as the players... so a PC wizard uses a week long casting of legend lore...and finds out that felgar is a powerful necromancer who once createded and entire necroplis with the help of evil artafact A, and that he was defeated by the palidens of King Max... so then he takes that info and does some resarch and other players check around (rp time) then with a little more info does a 2 day long legend lore spell... then a littlee more rp and another spell or two and less then a month after all I did was drop a name...my PCs know 90% of the plot and are ready for anything comeing...real time it took about 2 hours counting jokes and potty breaks.

now in 4e you would replace legend lore with contact mystic sage.

that is good divination use... How ever I have also seen PCs have info handed to them, and still not use anything (rituels, divinations, items).

counter example: In my last 4e game the PCs had a invoker who could for free once per day do hand of fate... was paragon level, and had about 2 dozen rituels that they had found... he used hand of fate twice... he used the mount/summon steed one once, and he contacted mystic sages to ask about an orc once... in over a year of play. And no one understood the plot at all. When I suggested useing hand of fate, I was told they didn't want to deal with it...

 

[OnlineDM]

I was at the panel that comment came from. My detailed write-up is here.

The specific notes I have about rituals are:

Q: Emporium – any rituals? Q: Don’t think so. Mearls: People aren’t using rituals at low level, and at high level they’re too cheap. Mearls would like to introduce scaling rituals (more money, more power). Also faster to cast rituals (1-5 minutes – still outside of battle).

They WANT people to use rituals more. They want to do more stuff to make rituals more appealing - more cost-effective at low level without being trivially cheap at high level. We'll have to see what they come up with, but they're working on it. That's a good thing, right?

As for the rest of the OP's post, Mike Mearls is a manager now, not an "individual contributor" in the parlance of my own office. His job is to tell the people who work for him what they should be working on, what new directions they're going in, etc. His job is not to sit and write feats - that's what the people who work for him are doing. He lays out the plan and tweaks the results. Other people do the nitty-gritty design work.

This is what a good manger is supposed to do.

 

[Ramius613]

I actually read the notes from a blog, and what WotC actually said, was that people didn't use rituals at low levels, and that they weren't properly priced for higher levels. They were looking into a different way of pricing them, for example, bigger effects cost more resources. They were also looking at reducing casting times to like 1-5 minutes.

As to the rest of what the OP said, tldr.

 

[Mapache]

In my game, I don't bother keeping track of gold, and rituals only cost time to use, no permanent resources of any sort. That almost gets them used regularly. I think any cost beyond that makes people not want to use them.

 

[Dice4Hire]

In my groups, the top ritual is Comprehend languages, which has probably been cast 60% of the times any ritual has been cast. We just do not use rituals that much.

I think the main reason is that we really do not need the ritual, to get info or effects we can get elsewhere, or too many rituals are in the handwaving part of how we play. The costs aree also in the handwaving area. WE just plain do not track gold in our home games.

I would like to see rituals mroe like skill powers, substituting for daily or encounter powers so as to use the already established economy, not making a secondary one that is pretty iffy, i.e gold.