Can Rituals Be Stopped Before Completion?


Playing the Game


As per the rules for rituals, your secondary casters make their secondary skill checks before the primary skill check. Failure penalizes the primary skill check.

Are these secondary skill checks supposed to be Secret, so the players don't know something went wrong until they're making the final primary skill check? Otherwise, why go through with a ritual with a penalty when you can restart and avoid the penalty (as many times as is necessary)? Are these skill checks (both the secondary checks and the primary check) not supposed to be done until after the full investment of casting time, such that that serves as the potential limiting factor against "try until guaranteed success on secondary checks"?


1 person marked this as a favorite.

Since there are penalties for failing the casting, I would not allow aborting the ritual.

Now as I went looking through the rules for rituals again, I don't know how many skill checks you have to make to cast a ritual.

"All rituals require Material, Somatic, and Verbal Casting actions throughout their casting time."

So making skill checks each round?

"Consecrate
Casting time: 3 days"

Uh... Probably not each round then.

So, if the characters are wanting to abort the ritual, I would probably apply the crit fail result. Maybe tone it down a bit, but I certainly wouldn't use just the regular fail result.


2 people marked this as a favorite.

Rituals have a financial cost on top of their time cost. I think applying the standard (not critical) fail effect and loss of reagants is a sufficient penalty for aborting a ritual.

Making it the regular fail instead of critical fail also means a ritual caster might be more willing to listen in those instances where heroes / loved ones / etc try to talk someone out of their ill advised actions, instead of just jumping straight to beating you up.

Community / Forums / Archive / Pathfinder / Playtests & Prerelease Discussions / Pathfinder Playtest / Player Rules / Playing the Game / Can Rituals Be Stopped Before Completion? All Messageboards

Want to post a reply? Sign in.
Recent threads in Playing the Game