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View Full Version : Question: How would you adapt Ritual Casting into the third edition of DnD?



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.

Vaern
2020-03-03, 04:34 PM
I would just give casters the "ritual casting" ability, no prerequisites or feat tax for it.

Casting time would be increased to a minimum of 10 minutes, as your version listed. Or maybe 5 minutes plus an additional 5 per spell level (making cantrip rituals available at half the casting time of first level rituals).

Spells castable as ritual would have to be hand-picked, rather than determined by qualities of the spell like the spell's duration. For example, Identify could easily be considered a ritual, but it has a duration of instantaneous.

Rituals would have no additional costs, and the spell would function as-is. Rituals are meant to give you better access to utility spells, but at the cost of increased casting time making them impractical to use in combat situations. The versatility of having them available at any time is a powerful enough bonus that they don't need to have their duration increased or anything like that, while the casting time is a big enough drawback that additional casting costs shouldn't be necessary.

Wizards would be able to cast ritual spells straight from their spellbooks like in 5th edition. I'm not sure how this would work in 3rd... I'd probably say that casting a ritual would work like a cleric spontaneously casting a cure or inflict spell - they just lose a prepared spell and use its slot to cast the ritual. Either that or they would have to leave a spell slot empty in preparation of using it to cast a ritual spell.

Spontaneous casters simply burn an unused spell slot. Prepared casters use the same rules for wizards casting ritual spells, whether that be sacrificing a prepared spell or having to leave a spell slot open to use a ritual.

Casters other than wizards can record rituals in a ritual book, functionally identical to recording spells in a spellbook. If a sorcerer has a scroll of a spell that can be used as a ritual, he can inscribe it in his ritual book at a cost of 100 gp per page, 1 page per spell level.

A divine caster who "knows" all of their spells still needs to record a ritual in their ritual book to use it as a ritual. If the spell is prepared it can be recorded without needing a scroll, though the spell slot is expended in the process. Recording a ritual in this way still costs the usual 100 gp per spell level.
I know this last bit might seem a bit redundant, making clerics "learn" spells that they already know, but it's mostly for balancing purposes. It's basically a tax for the extra versatility that ritual casting provides. If they didn't need to record their spells as rituals and were simply given full access to their spells known list like wizards they'd end up with half their class spell list available for spontaneous casting at any given time, albeit at an increased casting time.


As for the "big" rituals with grand and powerful effects, I think there is a prestige class and maybe a few feats that involve casting spells with multiple casters, but mechanically they aren't very impressive. Particularly powerful rituals like you're looking for are probably better left as story decisions than a set-in-stone mechanic that players are free to pick up in any given campaign.

Jaeda
2020-03-03, 08:53 PM
Being able to cast a spell without expending a spell slot is the advantage. I do agree that for most of the spells you would want to cast as rituals, the extra casting time is not a sufficient cost to offset saving spell slots. Also, upon further reflection, the tweaks to 5e's magic system (fewer spell slots, way fewer spells prepared, and the semi-prepared casting) make ritual magic much better suited to it than to 3e.

I do agree that 4e could have used some system to be able to cast some rituals faster and maybe without the material components. Something like you can prepare a number of rituals with 10min casting times and with total level is no more than your own. You can cast these rituals in 1 round/minute by spending a healing surge instead of the material components. Possibly with a -5 on the dice roll or something to represent the spell being less powerful when not being cast as a ritual.

If you are wanting long, complex process with special ingredients that allows for powerful effects, then you might want to adapt the incantations from Unearthed Arcana, which are sort of a precursor to 4e rituals. Each of them has a single specific and powerful effect, like Call Forth the Dweller, which calls an extra-dimensional being which answers questions, but only about doors, or Fires of Dis which calls forth a pit fiend and simultaneously teleports the caster to hell, which can give lower level characters access to higher level magic in limited quantities. Each of them also requires expensive components, significant (1+ hour) casting time, chances of failure, as well as carrying side effects. Unfortunately, there are only three of them in the book.

You might create incantations / rituals that allow access to spells above what would normally be available, possibly in a limited or modified format. In exchange, this would require material components that require preparation (not just money), require one or more skill checks, and have a penalty for failure (and probably for success too).

Morphic tide
2020-03-03, 10:42 PM
One thought is to base them on Incantations (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/variant/magic/incantations.htm), using skill investment to limit which whitelisted spells can be used as Rituals. Perhaps have it as one skill for each list at DC 10+3xSL for unprepared spells, then a skill associated with each School of spell and use DC 7+2xSL for that and prepared spells. Reliable, but not perfectly so without genuinely investing in the skills. For gold cost, I'd have that primarily on a material focus cost, so it's a one-time investment to permit the Ritualized spell.

Alternatively, just fix Incantations to be something worth using by the typical Adventuring party, as they're literally the exact same mechanical niche of blatant outright magic without using spellslots.

Eldan
2020-03-04, 10:28 AM
One thought is to base them on Incantations (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/variant/magic/incantations.htm), using skill investment to limit which whitelisted spells can be used as Rituals. Perhaps have it as one skill for each list at DC 10+3xSL for unprepared spells, then a skill associated with each School of spell and use DC 7+2xSL for that and prepared spells. Reliable, but not perfectly so without genuinely investing in the skills. For gold cost, I'd have that primarily on a material focus cost, so it's a one-time investment to permit the Ritualized spell.

Alternatively, just fix Incantations to be something worth using by the typical Adventuring party, as they're literally the exact same mechanical niche of blatant outright magic without using spellslots.

I can help there:
https://forums.giantitp.com/showthread.php?560822-The-Key-of-Kings-Eldan-s-Grimoire-of-Incantations

My unfinished (and pretty abandoned by now) project of turning utility spells into incantations.