Ever since I bought Occult Adventures I've been drooling over the idea of rituals in general. Imagine this. Every arcane spell is now a ritual, with accompanying drawbacks and failure effects for their use, adding flavor to an otherwise stale magic system while simultaneously allowing anyone to participate. I can even imagine it existing along side magic as it is now. But my problem is, the system doesn't provide nearly enough of a rules foundation to work with.
I'd like it if I could create 0-level Rituals. Or rituals that can conceivably be used in a combat round, such as a ritualized disintegrate or fireball. BBEG's need to be able to fire death beams that while ludicrously effective also sap his power!
I'd like to know if anyone else has noticed the untapped potential of Occult Rituals? How would you alter the system to enable it's wider use?
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If I were to approach this, I would divide the spell lists into two: Combat spells and Rituals. They would initially be divided by casting time. Then, I would pick and choose spells and place them from the Combat list to the Ritual list, to expand it.
From there, I would assign skills to each School of magic, as well as to different Bloodlines, Domains (or Gods), etc, to serve as the base set by which Rituals could be performed.
Lastly, I would introduce scaling into the Aid Another rules that allowed assistant casters to provide better than a +2 to casting - probably scaling an additional +1 per 5 ranks in the ritual skill.
Just to start.
I plan on having lower level rituals in my game so commoners and adepts can do magical stuff. Though you'd have to be very careful what backlash you give them (I'd limit them to leaving the caster exhausted for nearly all of them just to diminish risk of commoners dying left and right).
You'd probably have to give classes a bonus to skill checks involved in performing rituals relating to that classes theme so they can meet the DC's of 28 easier.
I'd also have level zero rituals take at least five minutes.
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I think the OPs idea is that Rituals make sense from level 1 through level 20 - with things like Backlash and DCs scaling appropriately.
Which, is a totally cool idea precisely because there is so much potential here.
To further this, what if the number of participants was restricted by the level of the Ritual? We'll call this X. X would serve as an upper bound for the skill check, as the caster could only count on X "Aid" +2s to realize the Ritual's DC.
Then, we could say that other people could certainly join the Ritual Circle, but only the top X Aid checks are counted towards the caster's final skill check.
Ritual DC and Backlash
Level of Ritual - DC - Backlash CR
0 - 20 - 1
1 - 21 - 3
2 - 23 - 6
3 - 26 - 9
4 - 30 - 12
5 - 35 - 15
6 - 41 - 18
7 - 48 - 21
8 - 56 - 24
9 - 65 - 27