I have been putting some thought into Ritual to try to give it some more structure in play – personally, I find it to be too open-ended and squishy to really feel good to me. I need a hard edge or two to spur creativity and give it some life. If you feel similarly, please take a look. I’d love to get some feedback. #Wizard #Move
I have been putting some thought into Ritual to try to give it some more structure in play – personally, I find it…
I have been putting some thought into Ritual to try to give it some more structure in play – personally, I find it…
I can tell you about an interesting ritual my satyr wizard once performed. The party had come to a broken down lighthouse which, through a casting of detect magic and a great discern realities roll, my wizard learned it was a depowered artifact. Inside, the lighthouse keeper had been tied up by harpies (that the party had dealt with outside) that tortured him everyday. Because he had failed his duty, he was cursed Prometheus-style to be immortal and regenerating daily. My wizard’s ritual involved pulling the curse from the keeper and infusing it into the artifact lighthouse. He was aided by party members working healing mojo on the wounded keeper while my wizard worked until the next sunrise untangling the curse. The DM called for a stamina roll that I got a 10+ result on to stay awake through the night. The ritual was completed and powered the lighthouse back on while the structure rebuilt itself to a pristine state. It was awesome and I think I impressed the DM by having the idea to do it in the first place.
I like that requirement! It seems like the sort of thing that the rest of the party could be usefully tempted to roll Aid for, also.
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I’m back to say that I read this thoroughly on my train home last night, and I love it. It’s all great in terms of ideas. What wasn’t totally clear to me was when the words “difficulty” and “complexity” were used, I wasn’t 100% sure when to employ them.
^This won’t stop me stealing all of it, though.
Matt Horam, that’s a fair point. I have been unwilling to try to nail down exactly what I mean by “difficulty” since I’m not trying to create a point-buy system here –in some fashion everything here is still as handwavy as the base Ritual, only with a lot more words. I think they’re useful to me, though, because even though I’m not sure exactly what a “step of difficulty” means, I think I have a rough understanding, and it’s still more useful to write out a list of the kinds of things that contribute to difficulty than to leave the only instruction as “the GM will pick one to four of the following.” If you have any ideas how to lay out a framework more crisply I’d love to hear them.
Ultimately I think it should be fiction first, and you’ll determine things about your campaign world when you decide what kinds of effects are “easy” and what kind are “hard”. The important thing is for the DM and the player to be on the same page about which is which and how the scale goes.