So, Rituals (Part Two)

Back in October, I posted a discussion of what I saw as the problems with rituals as they exist in 4e. At the time I promised a follow-up article detailing how I propose to fix those problems.

I haven't forgotten that promise. It's just taken a little longer to find the time to really look at rituals and think about the options.

I should note right now that this discussion is based on pre-Essentials math and game assumptions. I don't own or have access to the Essentials books and obviously I don't have a crystal ball to tell me how rituals might be implented (if at all) in Essentials in the future. I've worked with what I have.

As mentioned in the previous post, I identified four weaknesses in the 4e ritual system: rituals take too long to cast, they are too expensive (both to master and to cast), they unfairly focuse those expenses on the ritual casters and they are generally ineffective compared to what a PC could achieve without the use of rituals.

I also identified three strengths of the system: they create a different resource pool for adventuring parties, they open new design space for player-created effects and they allow specialised parties to make up for missing roles or skills.

When thinking about how to address the weaknesses without compromising the strengths, I also realised that it was important to arrive at a managable change. This post is after all really just a proposed houserule, and I have no interest in creating a houserule that takes up 5 to 10 pages. There are 30+ rituals in the first Players Handbook alone, and any proposed "fix" that requires individually assessing and evaluating each ritual is not going to work. In other words, keep it simple stupid.

With that in mind, I propose:

A new Ritual Caster feat

Part of the expense of the 4e ritual system comes from the relatively high cost of mastering rituals. That in turn leads to a viscious cycle where the ritual caster doesn't know enough rituals for them to be useful frequently, which means rituals get no spotlight, which means the caster doesn't want to to learn any new ones and so on.

Third edition D&D and the power system of 4e offers a pretty easy solution here: spells known. In 3rd edition, spellcasters learned additional spells at given levels, and the spellcaster's level determined the highest level of spell they could learn. Importantly, though, the character learned those spells and was allowed to scribe them into their spellbook without cost. There doesn't seem to be any reason why that can't be applied here.

The real question then becomes how many rituals do ritual casters learn and how often do they learn new ones? One per level strikes me as too generous. It would make rituals too ubiquitous and decrease character variety. I was next tempted to grant a free ritual at every level at which you learn a new encounter power (making 9 overall), but that seems to be a little too restrictive. A suitable middle ground seems to be that you master one free ritual at every level at which you gain a feat (making 18 overall).

As is the standard rule, a ritual caster can only master rituals of their level or lower.

New component costs

It's unfortunately true that when you tie magic items and rituals to the same resource (gold pieces), one or the other is going to get neglected. Given player's generally well-understood magpie tendencies, it's rituals that suffer. One way of addressing that is to lower the cost of the components, thus making ritual use more attractive.

There's obviously a lot of room here for guesswork, and I was initially minded to tie component cost to a proportion of the cost of an equivalent-level magic item (I was originally looking at 5%), but when I compared those figures, I found that many PHB1 rituals in fact cost less than 5%.

As a draft solution, I propose instead that we halve the component cost of any ritual that already has a set component cost. That will include raise dead and it's elder brethren, which I personally am not inclined to cheapen, but in the interest of keeping this system simple, I feel that the complication that would flow from having an exception outweighs my personal preference. This change does not apply to the item enchantment rituals, because they do not have set components costs. Those rituals are pretty clearly tied to 4e assumptions about character wealth, so changing them requires more work than any good house rule should.

New casting times

Probably the biggest problem with 4e rituals is that they take too long. I previously mentioned Comprehend Languages and Detect Secret Doors as egregious examples, but the problem is pretty widespread.

Unfortunately, the problem is not uniform. Not every ritual has a casting time that is too long, nor is it possible to simple say "halve it" and trust that you're not going to run into problems. Instead, you need an easy to remember system that nevertheless maintains some room for design space. I propose a 4 tier system of casting times:

• Rituals that affect only the caster have a 5 round casting time.
• Rituals that affect the party or an object have a 1 minute casting time.
• Rituals that affect a small area or multiple objects have a 5 minute casting time.
• Rituals that affect a large area have a 10 minute casting time.

Comprehend languages and Detect Secret Doors are both personal rituals, so under the new system would have a casting time of 5 rounds. Arcane Lock affects a single door, so would have a casting time of 1 minute. Magic circle affects a small area, so would have a casting time of 5 minutes. Linked Portal affects a large area (the distance between the PC's present location and the intended destination) so would have a casting time of 10 minutes.

Ritual casters can also spend healing surges to speed their ritual use, representing them struggling with the magical energies that are harnessed by a hurriedly completed ritual. For each healing surge that the caster or a participant in the ritual sacrifices, the casting time moves down by one tier and the caster takes a -2 penalty on any skill check associated with the ritual. It's not possible to reduce a ritual to a casting time of less than 5 rounds.

One aspect of this proposal that I particularly like is that 5 rounds is a short enough time period that ritual casting in combat becomes possible, in turn opening up staples such as fighting desperate rearguard actions while the party wizard hastily prepares a ritual to allow the party to escape. But questions remain as to exactly what a ritual caster can do in a combat while preparing a ritual.

I propose that a ritual caster and any character seeking to aid the ritual must sacrifice a standard action per round to maintain a ritual and must remain within 5 squares of the ritual site (such as the magic circle or the door to be arcane locked) if it has one. If at the end of the ritual caster's turn they have not spent a standard action to sustain the ritual or are outside the ritual area, the ritual fails. The ritual caster may continue to use their other actions as normal, and may spend action points if they have them to take standard actions.

And that's my thoughts on how to fix 4e rituals. It's relatively simple, and hopefully it fixes a lot of the weaknesses I identified. Let me know what you think.