Shadowrun
Shadowrun Play => Gamemasters' Lounge => Topic started by: inca1980 on <02-13-12/0030:43>
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I hear very little discussion of Ritual Magic on the forums. I personally have never used it and never had players use it in a game. Does anyone else have experience with it? If so please relate your stories of cool or completely botched uses of ritual magic because I'd love to hear them!
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In 99.99% of all runs, you will never have a need to even consider using ritual magic. It takes too long, the chance of failure is too high unless you actually have a strong link to the subject, and so on. There isn't really much use for it, from a runner perspective.
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Yeah, I'd say it's pretty much relegated to only being useful in VERY long running campaigns.
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Or in very specific situations. A bounty hunting/recovery campaign, for instance, would be an ideal situation for someone with ritual spellcasting and some detect spells. Wetwork campaigns are another one that could use it. However, outside of those situations, rituals are much like Arcana and Enchanting. Nice, but not worth the points, for the most part.
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I have it one 1 for my character but purely for background stuff so he can get together with his buddies at the lodge and make a little magic. I don't think I will ever use it in-game.
Rasmus
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A player in my group used it to track a target who got snatched by a rival shadowrun team. That was good.
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If you don't know the target or have something really personal the penalties to the roll becomes bad really fast.
But I guess it could work it just never has been an issue in our group but I will think of finding a way to use for one of the times I will have to be a master.
Rasmus
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giving your ally spirit the Ritual Spellcasting skill doubles your ritual team size. However I haven't seen it being used so far. And can't think of a viable char.
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giving your ally spirit the Ritual Spellcasting skill doubles your ritual team size. However I haven't seen it being used so far. And can't think of a viable char.
Also, after about Force 6 or so, it would be a better idea to have them lead the ritual, since they'll have more dice than you. ;)
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Or in very specific situations. A bounty hunting/recovery campaign, for instance, would be an ideal situation for someone with ritual spellcasting and some detect spells. Wetwork campaigns are another one that could use it. However, outside of those situations, rituals are much like Arcana and Enchanting. Nice, but not worth the points, for the most part.
Given that Arcana seems to be the skill that would correlate to the 3.5 D&D Spellcraft skill, there are GMs out there who would question how you have any magical skill over 1 or 2 without it.
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Heh. I've made level 20 magic users that had no ranks in Spellcraft before, Guns. It depends on what you focus on. (In that case, I was playing a Warlock that could get a Bluff check in the low 100s pre-epic.)
As far as Arcana goes, however, the parallel doesn't fly. Arcana is used for designing new formulas, be they spell, focus, or ally spirit formulas. That's it. Nothing to do with the actual use of the formula. You don't even have to be Awakened to do it. There is absolutely no connection between Arcana and level of magical skill. You can be a very proficient magician using formulas you purchased from others.
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I know it's possible, but in the eyes of some GMs it isn't, and they would aggro you for having nothing in the skill but a 6 Spellcasting. Not saying it's right (I disagree with such aggro as a general rule myself), but I am saying it can happen.
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Yes, there are plenty of DMs who should turn in their DM screen. But rulings should not be based on the crap DMs.
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Yeah, but I find it best to keep skills like that in mind and take them just in case I run into to one of those.
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Yeah, I'm not enough of a masochist to play with one of those.
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Get Runner's Toolkit.
Beat those GM's to death with the GM Screen inside of it.
Show them how a REAL GM plays. ;D
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After I run a few runs with the mage/ritualist character I created, and after playing around with the magic rules a bit more, I want to work on writing a custom ruleset for Ritual Magic, to fix it up for a Shadowrunner type of playstyle.
As was pointed out too earlier, it takes far too long to cast Ritual magic, and the same time to cast a powerful or weak spell. Another problem is that while you can cast high force spells this way with multiple casters to get more hits, you much each resist normal drain as if you were casting the spell, severely limiting the extent of your spells. I plan to make a system that essentially uses these factors to determine casting time and difficulty, following this sort of path:
1. A low base time for the ritual, calculated from your magic and initiation score. Being more initiated will make things go faster, even if you haven't re-capped your magic. You have to roll your Ritual Magic test against a threshold to determine the rest of the time.
2. The Ritual Magic threshold will be calculated with the Force of the spell and type of the spell taken into account. Combat spells, for instance, will have a higher threshold modifier then Detection spells.
3. You may add additional spells to a Ritual casting to form a compound ritual. There will be a short bit in the rules on how to calculate DVs and how to add thresholds together to get a final Ritual threshold.
3b. I'll probably also work in other modifiers to the Ritual for various effects. By making it tougher to cast, you could reduce additional drain, for instance.
4. You begin the ritual, expending the required ritual goods. You then begin the assisted Ritual test, rolling to beat the threshold of the Ritual, you may use Centering and any other metamagics to lessen the drain. Technically these must be done before hand, but presumably, you'd work these into the 'ritual commencement' stunt, before settling into your 'charging the ritual to beat the threshold' stunt.
5. Detection tests apply as normal to the target. May adjust them accordingly as needed. Again, different spell types will probably be easier to detect.
5. After you beat the threshold, you make the appropriate spell tests (using assisted casting if appropriate), and resist the combined Ritual Drain, with Overcasting applying as normal to make drain physical.
It's still just an idea, and things need to be hammered out, but making the threshold and timing for Ritual Magics be additive instead of subtractive allows more complex and varied Rituals to be created, and means that doing a very simple will be appropriately easier and faster to perform, without making overcast uber-combat spells terribly easy to sling.
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Get Runner's Toolkit.
Beat those GM's to death with the GM Screen inside of it.
Show them how a REAL GM plays. ;D
not heavy enough. though i have some lead sheets from an x-ray kit i can use.
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Get Runner's Toolkit.
Beat those GM's to death with the GM Screen inside of it.
Show them how a REAL GM plays. ;D
not heavy enough. though i have some lead sheets from an x-ray kit i can use.
Or to prevent the group's Pally from detecting evil on you. :P
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unfortunately, i'm a bit larger than my gm screen, so that still works, but in my favor, smiting the evil that is the gm leads to character death, or is it deaf?
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I've had my team use it twice so far. Once to find some missing hell hound pups that the owner had blood samples drawn but couldn't use magic herself. Granted it was outside of combat, but it saved the party days worth of legwork. The second time was for psychological warfare with a target they needed to discredit but not kill. Ritual sorcery while he was asleep to get a Phantasm spell on him, sustained it for hours while he was at work. Most of the time, the mage did nothing with it, but when called in by the infiltration specialist that was watching him, he would see the ghost of the wife he killed. The only catch with that last one was making sure the security mage was busy dealing with a pack of mischievous bound watcher spirits on the other side of the compound.
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The second time was for psychological warfare with a target they needed to discredit but not kill. Ritual sorcery while he was asleep to get a Phantasm spell on him, sustained it for hours while he was at work. Most of the time, the mage did nothing with it, but when called in by the infiltration specialist that was watching him, he would see the ghost of the wife he killed. The only catch with that last one was making sure the security mage was busy dealing with a pack of mischievous bound watcher spirits on the other side of the compound.
Evil ;D
Rasmus