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View Full Version : (4E) No wealth-campaign, ritual fix



Decoy Lockbox
2009-07-14, 07:54 PM
So I'm about to start a no-wealth campaign. It takes place in a setting similar to "ice age" in the magic: the gathering storyline; magical nuclear winter has basically turned the world into a frostbitten post apocalyptic winterscape. The only things of value are food and iron. There is no money to speak of, with everything functioning via barter. My problem is that I need a fix for rituals, since their cast prices are measured in money. Does anyone have any experience with something like this? My plan was to divide ritual cast costs by a factor of 10 or so, then give ritual casters a number of "ritual points" per day, based on character level, that they could use to cast, in addition to getting a minor ritual (like animal messenger, tenser's disk, etc) 1/day for free. This is course gives someone with the ritual caster feat a great deal of versatility for the cost of a single feat, but given the fact that ritual scrolls will be hard to find in this setting, I feel it won't cause too many problems.

AgentPaper
2009-07-14, 08:05 PM
Consider this stolen.

With permission, of course. :smallwink:

Also, it sounds like you might want to use something like my Styles and Techniques item variant. (see bottom of my sig)

mikeejimbo
2009-07-14, 09:24 PM
Well remember that by default, the rituals don't cost gold to cast, they cost incense, herbs, or alchemical items. You can call 1 gold of these 1 "unit", and then decide that, for example, a chain mail shirt is usually traded for 40 units of them.

Gralamin
2009-07-14, 09:54 PM
Yours is a nice simple fix.

There is a rather more elaborate fix I came up with for Rituals in general, though I haven't had to stat out any high level rituals with it yet. You can find it here (http://docs.google.com/View?id=dhk4sg3r_3dhkkz3hj) if your interested.

Apalala
2009-07-15, 05:32 AM
You could always have the party come into some magical components. Parts of defeated monsters make a good source.

Decoy Lockbox
2009-07-15, 10:21 AM
Consider this stolen.

With permission, of course. :smallwink:

Also, it sounds like you might want to use something like my Styles and Techniques item variant. (see bottom of my sig)

Stealing the setting or the ritual fix? Either way, I'm cool with it, as long as you get back to me on how well it worked/didn't work. I read your styles and techniques a while ago, but it wasn't finished at that point (is it finished now?). My fix was to give pc's a "character/badassery" bonus to their nads/ac/attack at levels 1, 6, 11, etc to compensate for lack of items. Also, they get extra utility powers at every odd level past 1 (lvl 3, 5, 7, etc) to compensate for lack of utility items. Also, I'm letting them pick encounter powers as a "linked slot", i.e they pick two level 3 encounter powers to know, but can only deploy one of them per encounter -- their usages are linked. I feel that this increases both character versatility and character creation fun.


Well remember that by default, the rituals don't cost gold to cast, they cost incense, herbs, or alchemical items. You can call 1 gold of these 1 "unit", and then decide that, for example, a chain mail shirt is usually traded for 40 units of them.

This is definatley doable, but I've never liked the whole components thing. In most games I play in, our DMs let us use gold as components, and basically turn our wizard into a ritual vending machine, because keeping track of components was too onerous. The other problem is that mages/druids/etc are supposed to be somwhat rare in this setting, making components not very worthwhile to stock up on for merchants. Why hold on to wierd mistletoe when you could just trade it for food (or spend your mistletoe collection time hunting elk)?


Yours is a nice simple fix.

There is a rather more elaborate fix I came up with for Rituals in general, though I haven't had to stat out any high level rituals with it yet. You can find it here (http://docs.google.com/View?id=dhk4sg3r_3dhkkz3hj) if your interested.

I'll give your fix a look over after work. The problem with my fix is that I don't know if its balanced or even workable. But I take it you've already considered something like this?


You could always have the party come into some magical components. Parts of defeated monsters make a good source.

Actually, this is pretty cool. I guess I could do a combo ritual point/monster body part system, where most rituals use points, but some need extra stuff like basilisk eyes, mammoth tusks, yuan-ti blood, etc.

PairO'Dice Lost
2009-07-15, 11:13 AM
This is definatley doable, but I've never liked the whole components thing. In most games I play in, our DMs let us use gold as components, and basically turn our wizard into a ritual vending machine, because keeping track of components was too onerous.

[...]

Actually, this is pretty cool. I guess I could do a combo ritual point/monster body part system, where most rituals use points, but some need extra stuff like basilisk eyes, mammoth tusks, yuan-ti blood, etc.

You could simply combine the two and give out ritual points when an encounter would normally give gold--sure, in character you're harvesting basilisk eyes, mammoth tusks, and yuan-ti blood for components, but it just results in a single number on the player's sheet instead of component lists.

Yakk
2009-07-15, 11:26 AM
Ritual level Ritual Components
1 10
2 15
3 20
4 25
5 30
6 40
7 60
8 90
9 120
10 150

The above is for Heroic level rituals.

Paragon and Epic uses a similar table, but it takes 20 Heroic components to make a 1 Paragon component, and 20 Paragon to make Epic.

Generally, a party should get about 5 times an even-level ritual's worth of components over that level. They can be harvested from corpses, or found as other kinds of treasure.

(Note the above is a rounded version of the 4e magic item price system.)