Can we have 4E style rituals?


Skills, Feats, Equipment & Spells


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Can we have 4E style rituals, instead of the wonky ones we have here that are all a minimum of 8 hours to cast with multiple casters? They were literally the best part of the entire system.

Unseen Servant, Alarm, and on and on and on shouldn't have to compete for your slots with actual useful / life-saving spells. They can just be short 1-10 minute rituals instead. And you can still set them up to scale / heighten pretty easily.

This would go an enormous distance to making up for the much more limited spell slots.


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Pathfinder Rulebook, Starfinder Roleplaying Game Subscriber

Yes, please. That was one of my favorite parts of 4e.


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I am in agreement, as long as the janky, 'Use the ritual skill in place of another skill, except it takes 10 mins and costs money' type of ritual don't get ported over too :)


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I agreeI agree that rituals should be much expanded, but they also need revision.
1) Rituals should be usable in both exploration and downtime modes. I would suggest converting anything in the spell-list with a casting time >= 1 minute to a ritual ; for example, Teleport.
2) Some of these spells need to have both ritual and normal spell versions; for example, Water Breathing. As a spell, it's silly: you can't cast it to save a man overboard, as it has a 1 minute casting time. The spell version could be a normal 2 or 3 action spell, up to 5 targets, but only 1 (or 10) minute duration, so you can rescue a man overboard/fight the squid attacking your ship. Whereas the long duration ritual version would allow you to explore the Saughagin cave complex...
3) They really need to revise the rituals themselves. A) Too many secondary casters: Look a planar binding (and it's occult and primal equivalents) - needs 4 secondary casters. So much for the trope of a crazy magician and his apprentice in a tower studying the fabric of reality and summoning strange beings for information and services, they need to have 3 friends. B) The Skill checks are nuts. Severe at twice the rituals level for the primary, high difficulty at twice the ritual's level for secondary caster. To continue with Planar Binding as an example, that's at a minimum a DC 32 for the primary, and DC30 for the secondary casters. Assume a 12th level secondary caster, with a +6 stat bonus, Master in the skill +2, an item bonus of +2, for a +22 (ie pretty much a maxed skill for the level). The secondary caster still fails 35% of the time. Which makes the primary caster’s job very difficult indeed.
The point of secondary casters is that they are minions, not protagonists. IMO secondary caster DCs should be High difficulty at the ritual’s level, not twice the ritual’s level.
4) They need feat support - say something like this general feat, Ritual Mastery: When participating in a ritual as either a primary or secondary caster, you make your skill check at +2. If you are primary caster, the secondary casters make their checks at +1.


I feel like the new rituals are one of my favourite parts about the entire playtest. Minor rituals could be fine, but I would be really sad to see the new system poof away.

I'm just enamoured with the new ones and after running a 5e campaign for 2 years they feel like a breath of fresh air. It feels like grand, dangerous magic and I love that.


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I think rituals can be a lot of things. I don't know if I need to see the current system done away with and replaced with a 4e feeling one--I feel like they could potentially coexist.

I do like the idea of buying a certain amount of gold worth of ritual components--candles, a cloth embroidered with powerful sigils, various crystals, a bottle of fresh honeycomb, a stone knife with an antler handle. Much like with alchemical reagents and wizards' components I feel like it's this various magical "stuff" that I enjoy to just an absurd degree. I don't know that I need much mechanically beyond a certain amount of "stuff" bought and carried around--and replaced periodically. I'd treat it pretty much the same way as rations (you don't necessarily need to know if it's black beer bread and dried fish and apples or hardtack or ant eggs and live grubs--you just have a bag of it and are free to describe it as much or little as GM and player tastes desire).

That said, I would like whatever costs are involved with ritual magic to be reasonable (I'd say cheaper than a potion of a similar level--cheap enough to take into consideration the rituals' extra skill checks and time requirements)

Is it weird that I wouldn't hate to see scrolls rolled into this new system? That a scroll is basically a follow-along ritual with instructions on how to perform it that allows you a bonus on the arcana/religion/nature rolls such that someone with assurance could pull them off without rolling.

I dunno. Something like that.

TLDR: I support the addition of 4e style rituals. Great idea.


Grimcleaver wrote:


Is it weird that I wouldn't hate to see scrolls rolled into this new system? That a scroll is basically a follow-along ritual with instructions on how to perform it that allows you a bonus on the arcana/religion/nature rolls such that someone with assurance could pull them off without rolling.

Personally I think I'm worn out slightly with minor rituals, but I wouldn't necessarily care as much if they coexisted with playtest rituals.

That said, I actually do really like the idea of that being what a scroll is.


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Oh, the current style and PF2 style can definitely coexist. The multi-hour, multi-caster rituals would be reserved for Big Ticket magic, like raising the dead or hallowing a church or transporting a building to another plane or other such feats of mystic puissance. Meanwhile, most bread and butter utility magic should be much shorter casts, easily handled by one person.

I do actually love flavorful material components and spell foci too, despite my opposition to them having to be tracked and used for actual D&D style 2-4 second spellcasting. Where they fit perfectly is with ritual magic. :)


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Fuzzypaws wrote:
I do actually love flavorful material components and spell foci too, despite my opposition to them having to be tracked and used for actual D&D style 2-4 second spellcasting...

Yeah, there is a weird disconnect for me in that every illustration of magic in the artwork looks like Doctor Strange, with big glowing spellcircles floating in front of the spellcaster's hands as they float in the air, eyes blazing, hair whipped by an unseen wind--and then in the rules of the game it's like some kind of Japanese reality TV show, with the poor wizard having to eat spider eggs or smear bat guano on themselves while waving a feather around.

I love the IDEA of arcane spell components. The actual listed components and how they get used have never really worked for me.


Grimcleaver wrote:
Fuzzypaws wrote:
I do actually love flavorful material components and spell foci too, despite my opposition to them having to be tracked and used for actual D&D style 2-4 second spellcasting...

Yeah, there is a weird disconnect for me in that every illustration of magic in the artwork looks like Doctor Strange, with big glowing spellcircles floating in front of the spellcaster's hands as they float in the air, eyes blazing, hair whipped by an unseen wind--and then in the rules of the game it's like some kind of Japanese reality TV show, with the poor wizard having to eat spider eggs or smear bat guano on themselves while waving a feather around.

I love the IDEA of arcane spell components. The actual listed components and how they get used have never really worked for me.

I mean, it's non something I say often, but I think Shadowrun handled material reagents (material components) well. It notes that they vary by magical tradition but tend to be something relevant (so e.g. a psionic magician probably uses objects charged with emotional importance, the hermetic mage uses bits of rocks and actual chemicals, and the shaman uses sacred animal bones or whatever) and gave a couple of examples.

Otherwise I like how the playtest has done it, cutting out specific items most of the time. I also sort of like how stuff like the new action economy, metamagic, and Magic Missile, Heal, and Harm sort of make the components feel more flavourful IMO as well as more tangible -if only because they feel less arbitrary to me. Also off topic but I sorta love the wizard arcane focus -being able to use my book or my shoe or sword as a magical battery actually sort of makes me want to play a wizard, and normally I don't care for them in the slightest.


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Elleth wrote:
Also off topic but I sorta love the wizard arcane focus -being able to use my book or my shoe or sword as a magical battery actually sort of makes me want to play a wizard, and normally I don't care for them in the slightest.

A favorite of mine back in my Pathfinder Society days was a evoker of mine who shot force missiles out of his bonded crossbow. That was neat.

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