Action Points and Rituals

[Azigen]

Having to cast a ritual in combat is an interesting and evocative idea. Something, such as s summoning a monster to aid you, could be done for dramatic effect by either the players or the BBEG.

However, they simply take too long. Most encounters wouldnt last long enough for you to feasibly play this out (unless it was a siege).

So does anyone have any idea how one might use action points to influence casting times ala the Artificer from Eberron?

I mean I can see this beautiful scene where the pcs have to defend the ritual caster from a horde of monsters while he finished the spell. But how would you actually go about it?

[Antioch]

I think the better route is to just make summoning powers. My thoughts on this take two primary paths.
Option 1 is to make an actual class themed around summoning. Having watched Naruto, I would not limit it to summong just monsters, but objects and even terrain. Basically, a more catch-all conjuring character.
Option 2 is a bit easier, and should allow for some good playtesting before dividing things into its own class, and thats to make some summoning powers for the wizard and/or warlock. The cleric gets around seven, I think, and these make some great guidelines on what you should expect anyone to see.

One summoning concept that I had is that you can use a minor action to summon a creature, and then you have a collection of powers with the Creature keyword, or whatever, that make it attack, move, buff itself (or you), and other stuff like that. A lot like how it worked in later Final Fantasy games (especially FFXI).
I'd also kicked around the idea of having a character that could summon a monster that attacks, and can keep attacking if you can sustain it (meaning that there would be a limit to what you could do). That, or just have them appear, attack, and then vanish, which was like how it worked in Folklore.

You could allow action points to accelerate rituals, but they are generally not useful in combat, which is what action points are generally a resource for. Otherwise, players could use action points to knock out a ritual and then just rest up a bit to get it right back (ie, no loss at all).
I think a better idea is to make a skill challenge (Incomplete Ritual) that can be completed by using the Arcana skill, Religion skill, and perhaps even healing surges to charge it. This would allow action points to be more applicable to the situation because a character can use it to make another skill check and try to wrap things up. Kind of like how you can disrupt the ritual at the end of Keep on the Shadowfell by engaging in a skill challenge.

[Azigen]

Antioch wrote:

Kind of like how you can disrupt the ritual at the end of Keep on the Shadowfell by engaging in a skill challenge.

See that is where the inspiration came from. Great ideas. I will ponder it.

[Antioch]

Happy to help out. Why cant more 4th Edition threads be like this? :-D

[JSL]

I think you can rig something like this using a series of short engagements broken by some non-combat action to speed the ritual time away. As I write this, I'm even imagining ways to accomplish a 12 hour ritual while keeping a combat-like intensity to the game (even though the PCs may spend at most 10 minutes of that 12 hour period in combat mode).

Consider that even though individual skirmishes are short and sharp, battles take days or even weeks to fight. Wars generally take years. Some take decades. Even in the busiest, most intense engagement, there are significant periods of downtime. No one (except perhaps a construct or undead) fights 24/7.

To make this work, the environment is going to play a larger part in the encounter than the monsters. Create an encounter area with natural chokepoints and fallback positions for the defending PCs to use. Make it clear that they are facing "overwhelming" odds so that they gravitate towards defense. Play out the development slowly; e.g., the monsters don't just storm the gates, but they bring up siege engines, poke and prod at various defenses, try a feint, etc. This opens up avenues for roleplaying, strategizing, and even some skill challenges as the PCs work to organize a defense. Allow the PCs to engineer an effective defense with traps, barred doors, murder holes, whatever they want. Now by the time the monsters finally attack in full the ritual may be substantially complete. Or it may not, and the PCs have to find a way to stem the tide more permanently - perhaps collapsing a passage, killing an enemy leader, etc - to buy a large chunk of time. Finally, as the ritual nears completion, the monsters make their climatic assault and the PCs make their last stand.

If you want to get really elaborate, the whole thing may be like a big skill challenge where combat results, skill checks, and miscellaneous actions all aggregate to some form of Victory Points. Then the conditions of the final battle are somehow tied to the Victory Point total. Perhaps each VP the monsters earn grants them more or tougher monsters; perhaps the PCs have a chance to set traps or reduce the remaining ritual time (now in rounds) based on how many VPs they have.

[Grimcleaver]

I really, really like JSL's ideas. Seriously, that's golden goodness right there. If I were running a game, that's totally how I would run it.

That said, I am intrigued by the possiblity of maybe doing rituals as non-combat encounters. Base the difficulty on the level of the ritual. Everybody chips in with their knowledge and skills to make the ritual go. Every time they fail, something starts to go wrong and magical instabilities lash everyone for some damage. Then at the end it either goes off awesomely or something bad happens.

It could be cool to even come up with a list or table for what exactly the results are of failing at various different rituals. A botched summoning, for example, could be a fun bit of roleplay and combat all by itself. I could forsee similar fun antics associated with other sorts of rituals too...hmmm.