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View Full Version : Advice on a house rule [4e rituals]



Sinon
2009-10-24, 09:06 PM
I'm considering the eliminating the cost of components for rituals in my up-coming campaign. I'd appreciate hearing what you have to say on this. I've a particular interest in hearing about how my players are going to screw me if I do this.

In advance, thank you.

House Rules:
1) Rituals:
Rationale:
No one wants to use them because they cost too much for what they deliver, which is basically flavor. Plus, one set of classes bears all the costs.

Solution:
Rituals have no component cost. You still have to have components, for flavor, but no real cost. All costs for ritual focuses still apply. You still have to buy the rituals to add them to your ritual book.

For some balance, you must be trained in the related skill to cast the ritual. (I am considering a check.)

The Enchant Item ritual is excluded from the above. (No making or upgrading items for free.)

But all ritual casters have that ritual.

Disenchant Item loses a lot of importance.

Some rituals, like Raise Dead, might require some additional, quest-related, components.

I think this is going to add more magic (in a good way) to my game. From a balance standpoint, no DM really cares if the party has enough rations to make it to the Mountains of Doom. So why worry if the wizard has enough reagents to cast Create Campsite each night?

In fact, we might have fun with a little side quest for the components.

With rituals like divinations, I, as a DM, want the players to choose them so I have a way to impart certain information. By making them free, to cast, I am not forcing the player of the cleric to pay for what are in fact my objectives,

lesser_minion
2009-10-24, 09:30 PM
If you're careful about it, I don't see any reason for this to be a problem.

You haven't actually removed any limiting factor on ritual use, because the components are still needed and you have even more justification for ruling that components aren't available - if the players can't buy components, why would they always be able to find them?

Enchant Item would actually be a special case - you could leave it with 'free' components, but you would have to bear in mind that the PCs have made a new and interesting magic item when handing out treasure.

The end result is that you haven't introduced any sort of imbalance to the game, although you might want to work out how frequently you want rituals to be used.

Tiki Snakes
2009-10-24, 09:31 PM
Just remember, if you make rituals nice enough, they will start actually using them.

And secretly, there's quite a bit of utility to be had from them, if you actually remember to try! Be prepared to be wrong-footed now and then, but it shouldn't cause any major problems. :)

[edit] - Yeah, leave enchant magic item costed, same for any significant cost ritual, like the raise dead ones, I suspect.

Disenchant remains useful, for providing residuum for enchanting magic items instead of random use.

Ellisthion
2009-10-24, 09:55 PM
I would recommend reducing the casting time of rituals by a factor of 10. Eg: 10 minutes -> 1 minute.

Why? Firstly, because the huge casting time discourages people from using them, but mainly because 10 minutes is basically impossible in combat (100 rounds), but 1 minute (10 rounds) is actually possible. This means you could realistically have the characters fighting to stop a ritual or holding out until a ritual casts.

Shardan
2009-10-24, 09:56 PM
I agree in part, but be sure to put your foot down if your players start 'using rituals in place of real work' as certain detect rituals may do. You could also consider a wonderous item that replenishes x amt of components every day.
Scale it up at paragon level or make it autoscale for the players level. gives them free components, but prevents them from overusing it.

FoE
2009-10-24, 10:04 PM
It's not the component cost that's a problem with rituals; it's the time factor for the more inconsequential spells. I sort of like to keep a long duration time for the bigger spells, however.

Decoy Lockbox
2009-10-25, 01:10 AM
I'm running a no-wealth game set during the Winter War, so I had to do some fixing to make rituals work (since no money = no components); I also wanted to make rituals more usable.

What I did was to assign anyone with the ritual caster feat a daily allotment of "ritual casting points" equal to the trimmed mean cost of a ritual of their level divided by 10 (trimmed mean means you removes values that are very low or very high). So lets say that average ritual for a level 10 character costs 400 gold to cast. Then, that character has 40 daily ritual points. Casting a ritual consumes (no surprises) it's component cost / 10 ritual points. So in this system ritual casters can cast one big ritual per day or a number of smaller ones.

I also changed casting times to make them more usable. Rituals which take one hour or less to cast have their casting times reduced to 1 minutes (i.e. 10 rounds). All rituals with casting time > 1 hour are unchanged. For example, the party is trapped in a house surrounded by demons. They are battered, bloody and totally outgunned. If they want to teleport out of there via the linked portal ritual (say, to a friendly archmage's sanctum), they would have to hold the demons off for 10 minutes, or 100 rounds of combat. In my system, they would only have to hold the demons off for 10 rounds, while the wizard spends 13 ritual points and casts the spell.

Item creation rituals still cost money, as it wouldn't make sense if they didn't.

The Raise Dead ritual is probably best left costing money to use, but I was tinkering with a more story-based method in which the caster blows all his ritual points, causing the party to journey to the realm of death and compete with death (or the raven queen/resident death god, depending on the mythology of your setting) himself in some sort of contest (fiddle playing, chess, etc) in order to free their fallen friend's soul. I was considering there being some sort of roulette wheel involved (represented by a d20), with the various contests as 2-19, natural one being "may trade your soul for the deceased" and natural 20 being "dead guy goes free...one time offer only!"

Needless to say, this isn't really balanced, I think the idea might be interesting enough (as well as traditional) to toy with.

Long story short, ritual points instead of cash as expendable resource encourages ritual use while arguably preventing overuse, shortened ritual time makes many of them usable under pressure / in combat situations.


From a balance standpoint, no DM really cares if the party has enough rations to make it to the Mountains of Doom. So why worry if the wizard has enough reagents to cast Create Campsite each night?

Since my game has a post apocalyptic setting, food in my game is a scarce resource, and is the universal item used in the barter system. Under those circumstances, rituals which create food had to be banned to essentially prevent players from manufacturing wealth out of thin air.

Kaun
2009-10-25, 03:51 AM
hmmm just because there is no set form of currency doesn't mean you can't have ritual components just change the gp value to a weight value or some other form of measurement. You might find it adds drama to your game if your players are forced to trade there last rations and some items so they can get the components for a teleport spell. I also often have my party stumble across ritual components in places where they would rightly be like casters lairs or sometimes when navigating through the wilds they come across a small growth of a plant valued for spell casting and that kind of thing.

Personally i think having a daily allotment of "ritual points" is a bad idea because the players will start using rituals needlessly just because they know the points will go to waste if they don't and before you know it your getting hand of fated for every minor decision that needs to be made.

Thajocoth
2009-10-25, 04:31 AM
I think this is going to add more magic (in a good way) to my game. From a balance standpoint, no DM really cares if the party has enough rations to make it to the Mountains of Doom. So why worry if the wizard has enough reagents to cast Create Campsite each night?

I actually let ritual caster in my game use gp directly instead of managing components separately. Also, camping in my game is along the lines of: "Ok, so guys decide to camp?" "Yeah" "Ok, six hours later..."

My ritual "fix" was to add an item that speeds up the casting of rituals. While holding it, a caster could start casting a ritual as a standard action 1/encounter. As a move action, they could rub the stone to advance the casting of the ritual by 1 minute at-will. There's a -2 penalty to any d20 roles to determine the effectiveness of the ritual per person that rubbed the stone. (The stone is essentially casting the ritual from the caster's stats and eating the caster's money, but the stone can be passed around.)

Aron Times
2009-10-25, 07:15 AM
The best way to handle rituals is to share the cost with the entire party. If everyone benefits from a Linked Portal, everyone should pay for it. Also, if you enchant a magic item, shouldn't the person who commissioned it be the one to pay for it?

This brings down the cost of rituals to a manageable 1/5.

Kurald Galain
2009-10-25, 05:31 PM
Rationale:
No one wants to use them because they cost too much for what they deliver, which is basically flavor. Plus, one set of classes bears all the costs.
Overall, note that there are three potential problems with rituals: (1) that they cost a lot of gold; (2) that they cost a lot of time to cast at times when this may be impractical; and (3) that they have so many limitations that they don't actually do anything useful.

Not all of these three apply to every ritual, but many rituals suffer from all three of them.

#1, the gold cost, is merely the most obvious problem. Your proposal does solve it, but it is also solved by using rituals six to ten levels below your character level. Regardless, this leaves the other two problems, which are more fundamental.

As an example of #2, the Arcane Barrier ritual (akin to wall of force) is primarily useful when you're being chased by something. However, because its long casting time, it cannot be used when you're being chased by something. Reducing its cost to zero doesn't make the ritual any more useful.

For an example of #3, Commune With Nature is supposed to help you find things in a wide area. That's its fluff. The problem is that its crunch, instead, gives you up to five yes/no questions about a small area. If you're in the middle of the Forest of Trees, you'd be hard-pressed to find the location of the Cavern of Plot from just five yes/no questions.