Heroic Tier Rituals

So...rituals. Well, also ritual feats. Rituals have been a tricky thing in my games, despite my including them--both in book and scroll form--with the specific intent to give my players an edge, components to use them, and reducing the casting time on a lot of them.

Who knows, maybe new Ritual Feats will give them the last bit of incentive they need? You need Ritual Caster as well as some rituals to pick them up, but they let you use your skills in flexible ways and eliminate the cost of using a ritual once per day. For example, Binding Mastery lets you use Arcana or Religion in place of Diplomacy and Intimidate against unnatural creatures, as well as a bonus. I like the flavor behind this, using your knowledge of binding magic to threaten or bargain with the fey or a devil. Warding Mastery is also pretty nice, giving you a bonus on Perception to find traps and hazards and checks to disable them (as well as casting warding rituals).

The new rituals include classics like Alarm, Hold Portal, and Explosive Runes. Most have castings times of only 1 minute, though Hold Portal clocks in at an outstanding one standard action. Frankly I wish more rituals had shorter casting times, if only to give them more utility when time is a factor. I mean, in a lot of cases the players did not use one simply because they did not have the time, but to me charging them each time is punishment enough. Speaking of casting costs, a lot require healing surges in lieu of cash, or a small amount of cash in addition to your surges.

I also like this, as it represents a caster exhausting herself from using magic (as well as giving the wizard a way to use healing surges). A pretty good article. I am going to reduce more rituals to a minute or less casting time and see what happens. I might also let them burn healing surges more often (perhaps at an exchange rate).