Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Rocket your D&D 5E and Level Up: Advanced 5E games into space! Alpha Star Magazine Is Launching... Right Now!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 5660375" data-attributes="member: 82106">I'm entirely in agreement with you on your assessment of rituals. In fact the system is so close to dead on overall that it is a pretty nice testament to how well the whole system was designed. OTOH the fact does remain. Most players of characters with ritual casting don't go out of their way to use it. I think if you were to survey all the players out there somehow you'd find it is less neglected than some people would imagine, but it hasn't become a mainstay kind of subsystem that any but a tiny fraction of players rely on consistently.The thing is if you actually build a character optimized to be an excellent ritualist you can do quite a lot with that. HOWEVER you will still need to be able to function in combat, where your rituals don't help you directly. Beyond that they require an actual effort. You have to keep thinking about them. You don't just get them automatically. Powers show up and you HAVE to choose one. Even if you ignore it you have it on your sheet and it is taking up a limited slot. With rituals you can just sort of forget and nobody will really notice that much. The benefits are somewhat intangible as well, and tend to actually be at odds with the philosophy of the game at present (use a ritual to bypass an encounter or short circuit a challenge, well you probably just missed some XP and treasure). The more subtle problem though is sunk costs. When a character buys a magic item it is actually unlikely to be as cost-effective as a ritual, assuming you have ritual casting capability. At least this is pretty much true of 'non-big-three' items. The thing is if you buy an item, you have the item. When you buy a ritual you have a ritual, true, but then you buy a casting of the ritual and that money is gone. You probably gained more than the amortized use costs for an item, but human psychology is such that if character A buys an item for 1000gp and player B buys a ritual for 500gp and casts it a couple times at 100gp a pop while A never even uses his item A will feel like he's 'got his money's worth' because he still has something to hold onto and might use someday. Player B OTOH will feel like he's a couple 100gp to the bad. Yes those couple of castings may have done marvels in the game, but the default assumption is you survive, and no matter what you do as long as you live you get the same finite amounts of treasure and items, so there's really nothing tangible to show for the outlay. A has a magic item, B has a ritual, but he's got 'nothing' for the cost of casting it.The real issue is thus that WotC can't 'fix' the ritual system because it is both at the same time not broken and broken. You can't fix what isn't broken, and yet you need to fix what is broken. The effective response has been to just leave the whole system in limbo and kind of just make the problem go away. Frankly I don't have a solution to offer either. The best I've suggested is looking very hard at the parcel system, because costs are root of the issue and that is all about available funds vs outlayed funds. From the general lack of comments on that I've seen I'll have to assume that my opinion there is either largely not shared or the whole issue is too unclear for much to be said about it.</blockquote>

Verification