How do you find secondary casters to help with rituals? What are the options?
Hire them? Or is it expected you use other party members? How do you get rituals to work if the party doesn't have the necessary skills?
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Hire them? Or is it expected you use other party members?
I'm pretty sure the expectation is for the party to help you. Getting a good NPC is a good idea I suppose, but situationally dependant. Familiars (and maybe some Animal Companions) can be a real book though.
How do you get rituals to work if the party doesn't have the necessary skills?
Poorly, sadly.
I've mentally placed rituals in the same space as PF1 teamwork feats. Great if you have party members who will work with them, or you have a class (ritualist) that allows you to benefit from them solo.
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Rituals are very much in the realm of story shaping abilities. Rituals are also essentially all uncommon, so GM permission was needed to obtain them in the first place.
The combination of those two things leads me to believe that if you want to pull off rituals well you should talk to your GM to make it happen. Support from a mages guild, circle of adherents, assistance from the clergy, or whatever can all make rituals work really well.
Rituals aren't designed to be a thing that a player just decides to use and cast at will, like common spells. They require buy-in from other people and integration into the narrative to make them work.
Hmmm. That isn't very cool. Rituals were very usable in 5E. In PF2 they are mostly a waste of time given how few party members have the skills to use them as a group. They put quite a few in modules, but the number of secondary casters make them difficult to use at best. So no one pays them much mind when we get them.
So how can the familiar help with rituals?
Heropoints and fortune effects can be applied. No downtime tag, no exploration tag either or I would say use follow the expert.
Some groups may lack the relevant skills, and that is fine imo (mine doesn't have anyone with more than trained in religion for instance) but in general it should be doable. Especially as outside of stuff like resurrection, the DCs are static or have static sets of values.
Heropoints and fortune effects can be applied.
Nope.
As with other downtime activities, fortune and misfortune effects can't modify your checks for the ritual, nor can bonuses or penalties that aren't active throughout the process.
And hero points are a fortune effect when used on rolls.
Admittedly the intro to Rituals does say that while they're usually a downtime activity, they can be done in exploration if you have the time and appetite for risk. I'm not sure if that makes it not a downtime activity when done that way, nor if so whether you can then apply fortune effects (noting the lead clause of my quote above).
So how can the familiar help with rituals?Secondary casters aren’t required to have the relevant proficiency level of skill, just to make the check.
Familiars can attempt skill checks using your level as their modifier.
That will help for what I'm looking to do. That might make it more doable.
Depending on what you're looking to do, and of course on your GM, you may be able to get a lot of juice out of this bit:
The GM can adjust the DCs of rituals, add or change primary or secondary checks, or even waive requirements to fit specific circumstances. For example, performing a ritual in a location where ley lines converge on the night of a new moon might make a normally difficult ritual drastically easier.
If you just want to do a ritual once or twice, you can afford to quest around a bit to find optimal conditions (GM permitting). If you want rituals to be one of your character's main things, not so much.
Personally, I house rule that you can use hero points for rituals as a narrative currency. They are hard enough to pull off, frankly. They cost a lot of money too so the costs of failure are high. Especially on things like Ressurection that lead to needing to roll new characters.
I don't allow things like Halfling luck to apply, because that feels like more of a monetary ability.
That aside, they are pretty doable if you have diverse skill set in your party and/or make any interesting NPC friends.