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Ritual flavor are traditionally inflexible. Just remember how many stories around an specific ritual that needs each step to be strictly followed. Entire adventures could be made centered in make or prevent a ritual just trying to do or break their steps.
Rituals usually are way stronger than spells and are very complex. Flexibilize a ritual is something like just a dedicated resarcher/praticant could do because it's needed to understand every minute of the ritual. That's why we have the ritualist archetype.
How about mutual chars trust this only a question about their interests if they converge the alignment don't matter. Good chars could follow a ritual for good interests or to help the others, neutral chars could do also for their personal interests or just for money, evil chars could for each own interest too or for some evil dedication.
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I like rituals feeling ritualistic. You need multiple people to help do the hudo that you do. I'm reading Plague War, a 40k book, and having a greater demon hop skip from one planet to another took a couple hundred people chanting in a circle. 4 buddies helping each other out is a fairly small ask, in comparison.
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Erm, aren't Wish and its cross tradition sibling spells capable of copying the effects of Ritual "spells" with 2 actions...?
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Ritualist Dedication lets you get Flexible Ritualist, which allows you to lower your secondary casters by 1, which makes things quite a bit easier.
That said, you really shouldn't be worried about meeting the requisite number of friends if you're actually a nice person. Most teams would gladly assist in a commune spell that aids their quest, even if it's the neutral good cleric getting help from the lawful evil assassin. The only times you should be having an issue is if you're, say, trying to make yourself a horde of undead or other similar thing.
Even in these cases, or in events where you need a skill your party can't supply, if you befriend npcs, you should have a library of people who might help you.
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Also, the Rituals as they are now kinda enforce the narrative of a group of four friends who trust each other and are always willing to help each other...
Yup. That's kinda the point. That is the default expectation for the game.
what if you are playing an awkward alliance between a fanatic LG priest, a paranoid, ambitious LE necromancer and a crazy CN gnome sorcerer? while they may work together to defeat a common enemy, would they trust and help each other in their personal pet project? Would the necromancer trust the others to help him create a Demiplane and store there his Clone? Would the priest trust the others to do anything unless its absolutely necessary...?
Then you need to work together at your table to come up with a variant rule set that will better suit your needs for your game.
But that variant rule set isn't something that should be permanently changed and applied to everyone else's games.
My impression of the intention for Rituals is that it allows the GM to say "You can do this cool thing, but...." and structure conditions on it, or sub-quests to complete rather than simply having a spellcaster or cleric say "I have the gold/components, and I can cast the spell. Cool, this guy's alive again. Poof, no need to thank me"
This all sounds like stuff that should be hashed out at your table or maybe your GM's just not interested in letting you do what you want to do.
The one ritual that feels off to me is Create Undead, because needing a buddy feels weird for a necromancer. But I suppose it could be a minion of some kind.
The other thing to consider when performing a ritual, if that ritual is able to be performed by one person, and takes as much time as it does, what does the rest of the party do? Having rituals require multiple casters both supports the most common aspects of ritual performance and also allows the rest of the party to be engaged in whatever ritual is being cast rather than having to sit on their hands or require the GM to split them up into different activities.
Depending on the ritual and the context I could see waiting being the tense part. If you are trying to ressurect your friends but you yourself don't have the skill. The wait, the tension could be a compelling narrative point. As if your character is essentially in the waiting room of an E.R after a tragic accident.
Now i'm not in favor of removing the secondary casters, but there is interesting RP to be had in *waiting* and the space in between actions.
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The one ritual that feels off to me is Create Undead, because needing a buddy feels weird for a necromancer. But I suppose it could be a minion of some kind.
In my head, solo necros typically take flexible ritualist.
Narratively, I like most rituals like this needing partners since it also provides a really solid space for wizard/apprentices
As I said, characters of opposing alignments will work together to defeat a common foe or fix a problem that affects them all… but, what if you have a selfish goal that the others will probable not approve of? Would you help somebody who may become an enemy in the future to create a Clone and put it in a safe Demiplane, attended by Simulacrums…?
What if you DO want to create a horde of undead…?
There should be a way to play that kind of stories…
Take flexible ritualist, you can them make undead on your own.
That said, Many NPCs have access to skills far beyond their level (the barrister is a level 1 Combatant, but level 4 in the courtroom, for example)
Rituals are uncommon, meaning you need to work with the GM anyways. Assuming you're at a table that assumes a GM thats willing to work with you, getting assistants that are much lower level than you, but very capable in a single skill or two won't be hard; you just need to invest in your social skills. If you have a GM thats unwilling to work with you, you're either playing a character thats inappropriate for the tone of the campaign, or your GM is just adversarial, and in both cases, you wont ever have that undead horde, or farm of clones that render you almost immortal.
If you want to play evil, it's wise to understand that successful evil people are also typically shrewd, charming, and resourceful, and have many people who prop up their power
You can easily cast most rituals alone.
Others have pointed out Flexible Ritualist, but practically, most spellcasters, alchemists or really anyone else can easily perform a solo ritual with their Skilled Familiar. Or a 3-person ritual if they have both.