Jaeda
2020-03-03, 12:47 PM
Actually, in 5e you do have to have the spell prepared to cast it as a ritual. Wizards have a special feature that lets them cast rituals from their spellbooks without having the spell prepared.
The qualifier on what counts for a ritual spell has some kind of weird effects. It means that some spells that probably should be rituals, like augury, identify, and knock aren't because their durations are instantaneous, and some spells that probably shouldn't be rituals, like summon monster, delayed blast fireball, and improved invisibility are. I think it would be better to assemble a list of ritual spells because any rule is likely to have both glaring omissions and oddball inclusions.
I'm also not sure why you increase the duration to 24 hours. This basically gives you the effect of the persistent spell feat without using up a spell slot, which is definitely abusable by pretty much any spell with a duration measured in rounds. It is also inconsistent with both 4e and 5e which use the normal duration. I'm going to disagree with you on having buff spells be rituals; if you want all-day buff spells you should take persistent spell instead.
I also find it amusing that you mention the expensive components as something that you disliked about rituals from 4e but then chose to include them anyway (and more expensive then most 4e rituals).
You should probably think about what you want the feel of ritual magic to be like. In both 4e and 5e, almost all of the rituals are utility spells rather than combat spells and are supposed to be the types of things that a traditional folklore mage would do rather than a modern battle mage. This is a fluffy reason to include material components but also foci since these rituals usually had a bunch of props and reagents. Leaving them as generic components robs them of the feel of actually doing a ritual, which is one of the main reasons that I think the 4e rituals were maligned (the others being that there was no way to cast them faster and that overall there weren't very many of them). If you have a curated list, you can add a focus and reagent to each ritual to help them feel different. The reagents don't have to be hard to acquire, but a speak with dead ritual and a teleport ritual should feel different.
It's also worth considering what the tradeoffs you want to include are. If it is a 1/day can avoid having to use a spell slot, I'm not sure that I would really ever take the feat without the extended duration (allowing you to essentially cheat a metamagic spell above what you can normally cast), but allowing them to use it as much as they want just makes casters more powerful then they already are since once you can spare 10 minutes you can usually spare 20. You could split the difference and make it Int-mod times per day. Alternately, you could make it something that everyone gets (or at least several of the classes get) but then reduce their power in another way, such as by reducing the maximum number of spell slots of each level that they get.
The qualifier on what counts for a ritual spell has some kind of weird effects. It means that some spells that probably should be rituals, like augury, identify, and knock aren't because their durations are instantaneous, and some spells that probably shouldn't be rituals, like summon monster, delayed blast fireball, and improved invisibility are. I think it would be better to assemble a list of ritual spells because any rule is likely to have both glaring omissions and oddball inclusions.
I'm also not sure why you increase the duration to 24 hours. This basically gives you the effect of the persistent spell feat without using up a spell slot, which is definitely abusable by pretty much any spell with a duration measured in rounds. It is also inconsistent with both 4e and 5e which use the normal duration. I'm going to disagree with you on having buff spells be rituals; if you want all-day buff spells you should take persistent spell instead.
I also find it amusing that you mention the expensive components as something that you disliked about rituals from 4e but then chose to include them anyway (and more expensive then most 4e rituals).
You should probably think about what you want the feel of ritual magic to be like. In both 4e and 5e, almost all of the rituals are utility spells rather than combat spells and are supposed to be the types of things that a traditional folklore mage would do rather than a modern battle mage. This is a fluffy reason to include material components but also foci since these rituals usually had a bunch of props and reagents. Leaving them as generic components robs them of the feel of actually doing a ritual, which is one of the main reasons that I think the 4e rituals were maligned (the others being that there was no way to cast them faster and that overall there weren't very many of them). If you have a curated list, you can add a focus and reagent to each ritual to help them feel different. The reagents don't have to be hard to acquire, but a speak with dead ritual and a teleport ritual should feel different.
It's also worth considering what the tradeoffs you want to include are. If it is a 1/day can avoid having to use a spell slot, I'm not sure that I would really ever take the feat without the extended duration (allowing you to essentially cheat a metamagic spell above what you can normally cast), but allowing them to use it as much as they want just makes casters more powerful then they already are since once you can spare 10 minutes you can usually spare 20. You could split the difference and make it Int-mod times per day. Alternately, you could make it something that everyone gets (or at least several of the classes get) but then reduce their power in another way, such as by reducing the maximum number of spell slots of each level that they get.