Source
r/dndnext•
pendia

What spells break the game if all spells are rituals?

So I was thinking about giving a few utility spells the ritual tag (e.g. zone of truth, speak with dead), and I thought - what if every spell was a ritual? This is only for normal casters, so ignore things like the ritual casting feat.

There's certainly a lot of spells which don't get a lot of use for this. As an example, fireball - maybe it's useful in a siege or something, but you aren't going to spend 10 minutes to cast fireball in a normal combat.

Healing is one thing that might be overpowered. However, it does take 10 minutes, and if you have 10 minutes you probably also have time for a short rest, so its not super OP.

Long lasting self buffs, e.g. Mage armour and Aid, benefit pretty heavily from being rituals. This is especially concerning with higher level spells - mind blank and foresight would be pretty insane if you could cast them on the whole team and still have your level 8/9 slot up.

And wish becomes pretty insane, but wish gonna wish.

What else can you think of that would be OP if it was a ritual? What spells get better fairly with this?

Posted Aug 23, 2019, 7:42 AM UTC

1566
Arobin08•

Animate Dead would become very powerful if it could be cast for no spell slots

48
pendiaOP•

True enough - if you spent 16 hours every day ritual casting animate dead, you'd be able to control 87 undead. That's a little bit unrealistic, but an army of 40 is still something that isn't to be trifled with.

10
Lemerney2•

I’d be more concerned about how you found 40 corpses without anyone noticing.

10
pendiaOP•

I don't know what game you're playing, but if finding corpses is a problem you ain't playing the DnD I know.

More seriously, battlefields and graveyards.

34
Lemerney2•

Battlefields I can see, but I’d imagine a graveyard would have some kind of gravekeeper/city watch presence.

1
FogeltheVogelCircle of Spores•

You make them.

5
SmartAlec105Ask about my "melee" rogue•

Good thing I convinced my DM to let me take “weapons” as a tool proficiency. I roll to craft corpses.

7
HATA111Swords Bard•

That's what the Barbarian is for after all.

3
CoidzorWhere's mah ale?•

Most adventurers don't really care about what comes along and deals with the bodies after they've looted them.

Hell, with 5th edition's caveat that most monster gear is worthless and can't be sold, they're even leaving perfectly good weapons and armor along with the bodies.

1
FluffyCookie•

If you want to make all spells possible to cast as rituals you could have rituals still take up a spell slot, but have it upcasted one level for free.

I have no idea what the consequences for this would be.

1
Chrismclegless•

The biggest issue we had doing this in our homebrew system was healing. It just breaks it. Admittedly healing in 5e is a lot weaker generally so maybe not as much of an issue.

It's certainly a massive buff to all casters who can use it. Armour has been the most commonly used one for us, but anything where you have prep time the wizard becomes more useful with illusions, buffs, etc.

24
FrognosticatorWhere all the wight women at?•

This isn’t exclusive to 5E. Healing magic has always been pretty weak sauce in DnD, relative to the amount of damage the PCs can absorb/dish out. That’s intentional. It helps maintain a sense of danger, and simultaneously keeps the game moving forward.

But being able to cast something like Mass Cure Wounds, or Heal, as rituals would just completely break the system.

13
i_tyrant•

Well, yes and no, it's definitely been downtuned in 5e compared to previous editions.

While the adage "it's better to kill your enemy than waste turns on healing while they hit you more" has always existed, there used to be lots of ways to improve your healing capability to make it a viable combat option - as well as ways to crack it out and make it too good to the point of being OP.

5e removed pretty much all of those, it's rarely efficient to heal in combat (even for optimized builds) unless you're a) bringing someone back from 0 hp or b) fighting one of the very few monsters who do something nasty when they drop someone.

6
CoidzorWhere's mah ale?•

But being able to cast something like Mass Cure Wounds, or Heal, as rituals would just completely break the system.

There's a lot more reasons to end the adventuring day than just not being full on hp.

Though it would certainly lead to vastly favoring classes that recharge most or all of their stuff on a Short Rest.

3
SovietOmega•

Imagine a giant mobile war machine that inside it is a 10 minute long line of enslaved wizard who shuffle along in a circle perform ritual fireballs all day long, firing it out an opening. Every round this thing can aim a fireball at an enemy castle who would need its own army of slave wizards to ritually raise some kind of defense.

Maybe a bit implausible, but if magic is temporally unlimited, that would absolutely shape the world in fundamentally different ways than is presented in the standard kind of vaguely medieval setting that is the norm for a dnd campaign. Kinda like how interchangeable parts reshaped the world's ability to manufacture goods, a wizard that could cast all manner of spells repeatedly all day would be highly sought after, but also would cheapen the 'cost' of spells. It would be a magic revolution, and would probably destroy civilization. Make this a part of your game, but have it be the civilization that came before, you know, the one that made all the dungeons and magic treasure, that experimented with this type of magic.

18
WillyTheHatefulGoat•

I'd say employ the wizards instead of enslaving them. Its x men logic. Imprisoning powerful people with the power to become gods always ends poorly.

In fact you could easily have that be the reason why the civilization collapsed.

18
Jenos•

To be fair, this would require 100 wizards. If 100 wizards stood in a line and all cast a non-ritual fireball at the same time, what could withstand that?

10
TigerDude33Warlock•

would probably destroy civilization.

it's not like the D&D civilization is particularly impressive as it is.

2
CoidzorWhere's mah ale?•

Civilizations getting destroyed as a regular enough occurrence is rather par for the course for a lot of D&D settings.

8
Omnijewel•

Utility, divination and movement-related spells would turn every dungeon into a cakewalk if they were rituals. Misty Step, Fly, Gaseous Form, Pass Without Trace, Spider Climb, Dimension Door, The various detects, finds and locates, see invisibility, clairvoyance, true seeing etc. etc.

Generally speaking, these sorts of spells allow you to bypass a skill check, trap, or some other hazard at the expense of a limited resource. To make rituals would allow you to bypass almost any danger you might face for free, given enough time of course.

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pendiaOP•

I wouldn't say a cakewalk - often these spells help the caster and not the party. Sometimes having misty step is all that you need, e.g. getting up a cliff so you can drop a rope or w/e. But I've seen plenty of traps/situations where someone teleporting out has just left the rest of the party more screwed.

And I find that those divination spells are generally underused - if players could cast them without feeling like they might be wasting a spell, they might play more tactically, considering their options.

But yes, that is a good point. You'd need to adapt dungeons to not just be trivial if these spells are used. Monsters hunting the party (so that the time used by rituals is a cost), planning for their usage (fly can only be cast on one person since it can't be upcast, so having challenges where its ok if one person has the challenge trivialised), etc.

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Omnijewel•

Yeah, that's essentially what this idea comes down to. It doesn't break the game in the sense that certain things may be overpowered, but rather it breaks the game because you now have to redesign everything from the ground up in order to adapt.

2
KulaanDoDinok•

A lot of Divination spells ARE rituals.

3
j0y0•

summoning spells that last an hour would also be pretty powerful.

6
Fairin_the_Drakitty•

i would spend so much time creating my demiplane cause this would ruin the planet

covering the world in permanent illusions...

the whole would would not need food anymore as magic sustains everyone. farmers would be out of a job, trade would grind to a halt as Fabricate could make stuff everywhere without significant effort.

travel would be non issue with teleporting every where

the world would eventually devolve into a hellish landscape as nations vs nation battles start using demons summoned against each other as cannon fodder.

Druids causing mass havoc trying to maintain the balance (looking at you storm of vengeance - range = sight)

creative ways to keep people dead would start poping up for sure

Gemstone miners would possibly be the only real job left as all them diamonds need to be wished up (at risk to the caster)

the end result would be utter catastrophe and antimagic fields would start cropping up and dominating cityscapes, and mines for diamonds / rubies ect.

magic would end up being heavily regulated to specific area's for governmental purposes only

4
pendiaOP•

There's only a few permanent spells, and they tend to be fairly high level. If high level casters are fairly rare, then so would their effects. And those effects that do exist - well, sounds like a quest for some adventurers to me ;)

Do consider that fabricate can't make intricate objects easily - in fact, it almost sounds like an industrial revolution.

Mages of all kinds would definitely have strong employment options. They'd be a bit like highly skilled engineers IRL - the biggest businesses would pay ludicrous amounts for them, and there just wouldn't be enough.

I don't know why demon summoning would be happening though - what spell do you think would cause the problem here?

It would definitely make things a lot more 'high fantasy', and could cause devastation on a wide scale, but I don't know if I agree it would definitely cause the apocalypse.

Certainly an interesting idea for a world though.

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Pixelated_Piracy•

I think making all spells Ritual Spells but actually requiring them to be cast that way, and having NO instant casting besides maybe from a Sorcerer spending points, could be a very very interesting (but potentially not fun for most groups) setting idea

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DumbMuscle•

This breaks combat spells completely. It would be possible to make a good RPG system that worked this way, but you wouldn't want to start from dnd.

Maybe, if you allow free casting of cantrips, and some mechanic where you can pre-cast higher level combat spells in a short rest, it could work - but again, it's going to be better with its own magic system rather than starting from the 5e one.

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pendiaOP•

some mechanic where you can pre-cast higher level combat spells

Did you just re-invent vancian spell casting?

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DumbMuscle•

Yeah, pretty much, but on a per-encounter basis rather than per day, which removes some of my issues with it.

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Pixelated_Piracy•

oh it would take some serious work and probably wouldnt work out of the box at all for a typical game. especially for anyone that wants to BE a spell caster ha

5e has a good enough chassis in my opinion where you could make a more Sword & Sorcery Conan style game out of it with minimal changes

the post just made me wish the Ritual Rules were more integrated and robust. like possibly allowing rituals to enhance spells if cast that way instead of just making them "free" on slots. etc

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DumbMuscle•

Thinking it through a little more...

Just remove warlocks. By the time you've changed them enough to work, you no longer have a warlock.

Wizards get the choice of either being able to add power to their rituals via spending resources, or being able to pre-cast and store spells for later instant release.

Eldritch Knight and Arcane Trickster don't get anything special (maybe allow the trickster to have permanent mage hand up)

Sorcerer stays as it is - no ritual casting, but can still cast normally.

Paladin combat buffs now only count their duration while in combat (so you can pre-cast during a rest). Divine smite is limited uses per day, rather than using spell slots.

Rangers get hunters mark cast normally, everything else is a ritual.

Bards... Cantrips can be cast normally, healing spells are limited in some other way. Maybe give the option of a very limited number of songs which act like spells do in normal 5e.

Clerics/druids are much the same as bards, but without the songs.

Half the spell list just became useless, but it maybe works?

3
Pixelated_Piracy•

ah but the neat thing is how hard would it be to re- invigorate those spells!

you made a neat little system mash that quick that seems pretty viable if people want to try it.

changing spells wouldnt be toooo hard especially if you said combat magic could be "held" to be cast later maybe? held how long and how many? who knows but lots of options!

again mostly just a neat idea and my affection for 5e being a nice system that can handle basic and some more than basic changes

1
DrakoVongolaWarlock: Because deals with devils never go wrong, right?•

You've now made casters completely useless.

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Pixelated_Piracy•

except ... youre not exactly "getting" the point and maybe need to re-read the the concept and broaden your fantasy expectations and ideas

either way, why bother to comment? youre not full of secret genius insight. just downvote like a good troll

0
DrakoVongolaWarlock: Because deals with devils never go wrong, right?•

Not my fault your ideas aren't balanced. This would ruin casters

1
ReveilledSA•

I think this is a really interesting idea, I wonder if OP ritual spells could be balanced with more consumable material components. Maybe give every spell a material component when cast in a ritual (with current ritual spells lacking M components getting free ones), and then decide cost based on power.

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pendiaOP•

That's a good idea - making ritual healing spells a compromise between time (with which you could take a short/long rest) and money (with which you could buy health potions).

Maybe you use animate dead to make an army, but now you have a high upkeep army. In desperation, you raid the nearby village... and you've made the next BBEG.

1
milkmandanimal•

Yes. Completely and utterly. Suddenly, every spellcaster is using their spell slots only for combat stuff, and the out-of-combat spells are basically completely free with a ten-minute delay. Martial characters would sit around twiddling their thumbs while a Wizard or Cleric could take care of everything without any worry about expending resources.

Warlocks would love this. Hex or Armor of Agathys running 24/7, just take a break before every combat to do it again.

3
CountPeter•

The prime material is pulled into the abyss, as any demon cultist with enough patience summons demons endlessly.

Before that would happen, I think the gods might make another spellplague.

2
GravyeonBell•

At level 11, things would get insane. You normally can't cast more than one 6th level spell in a day until you reach level 19. If all spells are rituals, Wizards and Bards with magical secrets could constantly have Tenser's Transformation up and always be the most powerful melee characters in the party. A druid could put up a nearly impenetrable Druid Grove on every rest, basically a super-sized Leomund's Tiny Hut that probably kills anything that finds the party.

2
RobyrtCleric•

Let's consider only 3rd level full caster spells, on your assumption that high-level casters are very rare.

Spells that Fundamentally Change the World:

  • Animate Dead
  • Arcane Lock / Knock
  • Create Food and Water
  • Pass Without Trace
  • Lesser Restoration
  • Plant Growth
  • Remove Curse
  • Sending
  • Tiny Servant
  • Tongues
  • Zone of Truth

Spells that Make Mysteries Less Fun:

  • Detect Thoughts
  • Invisibility
  • Locate Object
  • Nondetection (expensive but worth it)
  • Nystul's Magic Aura

Spells that Make Exploration Less Fun:

  • Clairvoyance
  • Darkvision
  • Dispel Magic
  • Enhance Ability
  • Find Traps
  • Fly
  • Galder's Tower
  • Gaseous Form
  • Rope Trick

Annoying Combat Buffs:

  • Aid
  • Haste
  • Healing Spirit
  • Mirror Image
  • Protection from Energy
  • Spiritual Weapon
1
pendiaOP•

Keep in mind that these spells already exist, and that they take at least 10 minutes to cast with ritual rules. I don't think that a caster being able to cast (for example) zone of truth 50 times a day vs 5 times a day fundamentally changes the world. Being able to ritual cast them effectively reduces the cost of these, so would increase the effect they have on the world in much the same way that reduced shipping costs mean that many western products are made in china where labour is cheaper.

Also keep in mind that if you intend to go into combat with a 1 minute duration spell, you'd have to be able to set it up so that you encounter an enemy after 10 minutes, but before 11 minutes. Not exactly an easy feat.

But dispel magic is one I hadn't considered. Animate dead, create food and water, and healing in general are also pretty big things.

How do you think rope trick, enhance ability, plant growth, arcane lock, and knock break the game?

1
CoidzorWhere's mah ale?•

Plant Growth shouldn't break the game, but it would change the paradigm of society slightly if it was being regularly cast to enhance the fertility of farmland.

Of course, the fact that the enhanced fertility use of the spell takes 8 hours significantly limits the impact that being able to cast Plant Growth as a ritual would have. 8 hours means that 10 minutes more isn't really a big deal, but then, it also means that only being able to cast Plant Growth once or twice using spell slots isn't a big deal.

Not without either A. changing the number of hours in a day significantly or B. significantly shortening the amount of time it takes to cast Plant Growth to enhance fertility.

​

Admittedly, the overgrowth component of Plant Growth could be used to create a lot of fodder for Fabricate when cast on the right kinds of plants.

2
SkritzTwoFace•

Rope trick gives everyone time for a free short rest, and/or an ambush. Enhance Ability means a cleric/druid’s friend can be buffed for no cost, so their services would be highly sought after if any sort of skill check was going to happen. Arcane Lock casting for free would make rogues useless, and eliminate most chances of surprise attacks, unless the other person has that free Knock, in which case wizards are now better rogues than rogues.

1
RobyrtCleric•

Arcane Lock / Knock / Pass Without Trace make typical guards, tracking and mundane locks irrelevant, replaced by wizards. In particular, PWT+Magic Aura means you can't be tracked at all, for no spell slots.

Enhance Ability means you have advantage on any skill check unless there's time pressure. It makes it hard to build dungeons with no real benefit, basically Guidance but more annoying.

Rope Trick means that short rests are now 10 minutes of exposure to enemies, not 1 hour.

Plant Growth already increases agricultural yields even without being a ritual, so you're right about that one.

1
pendiaOP•

Arcane lock still costs 25gp, so not everyone is going to get an arcane lock. It's already available and permanent, so most people who want one would already have one. And it's not foolproof - it just makes the picking or breaking DC 10 higher.

Pass without trace isn't invisibility. Mundane guards can still guard a well lit corridor - RAW it doesn't matter how high your stealth is, you need to be out of sight (i.e. Cover or invisibility). Even if you allow stealth in plain sight, you can't hide a door - if the guard sees a door open and no one goes through, they can investigate/raise the alarm.

Keep in mind that these spells already exist. A group on a stealth mission will already have pass without trace of its available to them, ritual casting it just preserves a spell slot for someone. Arcane locks are already more limited by components than spell slots.

Enhance ability can be replaced with the help action.

Rope trick - is 10 minutes vs 1 hour rally that big a difference? I mean, under these rules there's going to be a lot of ritual casting, so that's a lot of time that's going to be spent in the open anyway. And at least in my groups, I'd welcome anything that makes short rests more important.

1
RobyrtCleric•

Sure, you can have Pass Without Trace up for the duration of a typical heist, but as a ritual you can use it for mundane travel as well. Same with Enhance Ability - yes, you can sometimes Help for a similar effect, but now you have it on things only one party member knows like picking a lock, jumping a chasm, or navigation, as long as you have 10 minutes to spare.

Arcane Lock and Nondetection are limited by money most of the time, but now the scale goes way up for those who can afford it. You can hide an entire group from divination, or lock every building you enter. Basically, the "I don't care about spell slots" stuff that happens at 11th level now happens at 3rd level.

1
i_tyrant•

I don't think that a caster being able to cast (for example) zone of truth 50 times a day vs 5 times a day fundamentally changes the world.

That depends on how many high level casters your world has, really.

If every court in your world has a Level 20 Inquisitor able to cast Zone of Truth 50 times a day already, sure.

But if the high level casters who could do this are rare (and likely busy doing other more important things tbh), it's very important.

Because with the change, all you need for every court in the world is a 3rd level cleric to do it all day vs a 20th level one. That does, in fact, change the world dramatically.

1
CoidzorWhere's mah ale?•

Galder's Tower

What's your reasoning there?

1
RobyrtCleric•

Galder's is a secure home base, basically Tiny Hut but better. You can set up a large cluster of them for a moving castle.

1
Unexpected_Megafauna•

No one has mentioned fucking DEATH WARD, a 4th level spell that would make the party nearly unkillable

Animate or Create Undead is a big one

Spells with long durations in general will be problematic, summoning spells will be broken AF, and healing is also broken

1
i_tyrant•

No one has mentioned fucking DEATH WARD, a 4th level spell that would make the party nearly unkillable

Well, once per fight per person anyway. It gets expended when used, and recasting it takes 10 minutes like all rituals (unless you have the actual spell slots for it).

3
Unexpected_Megafauna•

Can you imagine though? It would get very rough lol

1
i_tyrant•

Definitely makes the whole party tougher!

BBEG: "Mwahaha, now I shall instantly slay your little rogue friend!"

"Nope."

"Bah! Fine, say goodbye to your...wizard!"

"Nuh uh."

"Grrrr-die, paladin! There's not even a save for this one!"

"Eh. Pass."

BBEG: flustered noises

Cleric: ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)_╭∩╮

1
HumanistGeekRanger (Hunter)•

Scry, arcane eye, teleportation circle, and plane shift would have big impacts.

1
CoidzorWhere's mah ale?•

Teleportation Circle less so, because the big limitation for establishing permanent circles is the material component cost.

1
CoidzorWhere's mah ale?•

Wish as a Ritual could do a lot, most notably by churning out Sansuri's Simulacrum for free.

(10 minutes = 1 simulacrum, 1 Wizard, 20 minues = 3 Simulacrum, 1 Wizard. There are 63 Simulacrum, 1 Wizard within an hour. 4095 Simulacrum, 1 Wizard within 2 hours. 262,143 Simulacrum, 1 Wizard within 3 hours. 5 hours will break the 1 billion mark, 6 hours will exceed the human population of Earth. 2^144 = 2.23007452 x 10^43 or about 22.3 tredecillion should be about how many there are between the Simulacrums/Simulacra and the original Wizard after 24 hours of replication, since there are 144 10-minute increments per 24 hours. Even a handful of hours per day is enough to quickly produce enough Simulacra to replace the entire population of Earth after not terribly many days.)

​

Of course, a Wizard making a Simulacrum of himself as a ritual would mean that the simulacrum would have full spell slots and be able to make another simulacrum of the Wizard and so on, for even more effective simulacrum chains even without Sansuri's Simulacrum. (144 new Simulacrum per 24 hours.)

Ditto for True Polymorph. In fact, that chain of simulacrums could then True Polymorph themselves into Adult Gold Dragons and then the original Wizard could True Polymorph into a Ghost for a while and age them all up until they're Ancient Gold Dragons.

Then those Ancient Gold Dragons would be able to access any spell that a humanoid would have through Innate Spellcasting in addition to potentially having their own Innate Spellcasting and being able to use their Change Shape ability to turn into a Variant Human with the Ritual Caster feat, which still covers some things even without getting the buff for whatever reason.

1
Deathscythe343•

Surprised that I haven’t seen wish mentioned more yet. Being able to cast this multiple times to get a 25k item would ruin the in game economy.

You could literally go from dirt poor to the wealthiest person in the area real fast.

Two casts of this gets you a castle.

Twenty gets you a large castle/palace.

A high level caster could spend a week doing this and have more money than everyone else in the world.

10 minutes to cast = 6 casts per hour. 150k per hour.

Spend 8 hours a day doing this = 1.2mil per day

Over the course of a week = 8.4mil.

Yes please!

1
CoidzorWhere's mah ale?•

Being able to cast this multiple times to get a 25k item would ruin the in game economy.

That's not one of the safe uses for Wish, though.

Your chances of being able to successfully do that 10 times without losing the ability to cast Wish is less than 10% (~8.27%). 12 times and you have a less than 1% chance of not losing your ability to cast Wish (~0.68%).

A single 8-hour day of this would have 48 chances for a failure, for ~2.18 x 10^-7 % chance of being able to pull it off. A week of such days would have 336 chances for failure, or a ~2.33 x 10^-59 % chance of being able to pull it off each and every time.

0
ubernoner•

I would argue that all spells have a ritual, otherwise you couldn't make magic items with certain spell effects; you don't make something that casts Fireballs by preparing an object then blasting it until it absorbed the spell (though that could be an entertaining bit of fluff). My thought is that only Arcane spells could be used in this way, as almost all cleric and paladin spells are really prayers, while druids and rangers are channeling the wild.

1
AmoebaMan•

How am I 10 replies in and nobody has mentioned Foresight?

Wake up, spend an hour tops ritual casting, and everybody in your party has advantage on every attack and saving throw, plus every enemy attack has disadvantage. And you still have your 9th level slot.

1