Ritual Casting. The name says it all. Mighty rituals and cool abilities, a way to make up for having so few spell slots in relation to older editions. A nice 4e mechanic that held over, an interesting feat to take, and...
WAIT A MINUTE! THERE'S ONLY A COUPLE OF RITUAL SPELLS IN THIS WHOLE BOOK! At least...that's what the spreadsheet I'm looking at shows so I hope I'm not misreading it. And that's spread across every class!
Has anyone worked with Ritual Casting much in 5e yet? I had planned on picking it up for my sorceress all this time, but when I saw just how tiny my spell selection was it gave me a doubletake as I was expecting many/a lot of utility spells to fill that niche. But at a max level of 5, is Ritual Casting underpowered? Just not fleshed out? A good idea that didn't get quite finished cooking?
Does anyone else add other spells to Ritual Casting, or have any other neat tweaks that might make this a useful ability?
In the groups I play in, ritual casting is mostly only used to cast detect magic or identify.
pukunui wrote:
pukunui wrote:
Artifact wrote:
Rituals could do so much more and only have a shell of an implementatoin in 4E and 5E, with 5E being weaker overall. It would be a great way to bridge non-casters with casting ability. In the same sense martial practices could bridge martial ability with non-martial classes. For example, rituals could help replenish a ring of spell storing, so you could have armor and weapons that need to be maintained by a martial character (certain level) or it would loose some of it's special properties.
As has been pointed out, we don't even have a DMG a yet. There are spell creation rules in there.
Also, sorcerers have the smallest ritual selection (tied with warlocks). Wizards have 15 ritual spells. Several excellent choices in there.
i think that Rituals will happen sooner or later.
it's just elaboration of the spell's or prayer's formula, which can be just roleplayed then built upon into more complete 'ritual'.
So it seems most people replying are just using them as-presented. I love your idea, Uchawi, and that's a really interesting take on it that I hadn't considered. I spoke with my DM about various ideas, but we didn't settle on anything yet. It's just such a high cost for the ability for it to do next to nothing that it seems almost a vestigial idea/artifact that didn't get pruned, or somehow got overlooked or something. I like the Demon Summoning (Regular Summoning?) usage ideas too.
I know they didn't get much more usage in 4e either, but they were still a solid contender imo than they are now. I think transliterating almost all of those would be a good first start, and with the DM having spell creation rules that shouldn't be hard. Maybe any non-instantaneous spell could be ritualized (and even some of them, with restrictions). I can see making something like...polymorph a ritual but only if used for tiny, normal animals - giving it that old-style "Wizard becomes a raven!" flavor without it being used for "Wizard becomes a Babau!" or something similar.
Anyway, thank you everyone for your ideas and comments. 
I use rituals with the rules of incarnatios from 3.5 Unearthe Arcana because I want my warlocks to can craft talismans and another single-use magic items or to recharge wands staffs and rods.