by
Mike Mearls
 |
|
"Ritual"
by James Ryman
|
This
installment tackles rituals and ceremonies, the first
and perhaps most important chapter in the book. If you
play Monte Cook's Arcana
Unearthed you know that rituals fill an important
role in the game. Ceremonies are part of everything, from
welcoming a stranger into your home to sealing a business
deal. My main goal in this book was to take ceremonies
(and runes, but more about them in a future installment)
and bring them to the forefront of the game. Wouldn't
it be cool if ceremonies had a real impact on the mechanics
of the game? Just as a smart group of D&D adventurers
buffs up with bull's strength and mage armor,
Arcana Unearthed adventurers might conduct a few
rituals each day to focus their skills and fortify themselves
for the obstacles they will face.
Thus,
Chapter One of Mystic Secrets includes a few dozen
rituals, all with mechanical effects that could prove
useful to an adventurer. Here's a sample one to show you
the format.
Ritual
of the Friendly Path [General]
A
favored ritual of explorers and wanderers, this benediction
establishes a tie between a traveler and his destination.
While he is on the road, he always knows the relative
direction toward his goal and approximately how many days
it takes to travel there based on his current mode of
transportation and the intervening terrain.
This
ritual can only be used to establish a tie to a city,
town, village, or other place inhabited by those who are
friendly or neutral toward you. For example, it fails
to work if your destination is a hidden treasure vault
or a castle held by a hated enemy. This ritual depends
on amity and welcome to create its sympathetic tie.
Prerequisite:
You must have traveled to your destination at least once
before in your life.
Components:
A needle left floating in a small cup of water and a fistful
of dirt from the place to which you wish to journey
Actions
(10 minutes): Place the dirt on the ground at your
point of departure, forming it into a small pile. Place
the cup atop it, with the needle in at least an inch of
water. You and your companions kneel around the cup, join
hands, and stare into the water. After a few moments,
the needle spins around once for each day it will take
you to arrive at your destination. When it is done, a
brief image of your destination appears in the water.
You then gain the benefits of this ritual (described below).
Effects:
Until you arrive at your destination, or for a number
of months equal to your Intelligence score, you always
know the relative direction to your destination and can
roughly estimate the number of total days of travel it
will take you to arrive there, based on whatever means
of transport are available to you. You gain a +2 insight
bonus to Intuit Direction checks while this effect lasts.
First
of all, notice the last line in "Effect" regarding
the bonus to Intuit Direction checks. This change was
suggested by our playtesters. That's the sort of addition
we see a lot in playtest, a logical outgrowth of an ability
that makes it more useful without overpowering it.
The
Description
As
you can see, the ceremonies draw heavily on background
and setting flavor to bring them to life. When I first
started work on Mystic Secrets, ceremonies looked
a lot to me like spells that anyone can cast. The original
Ritual of the Friendly Path might've been a lot simpler
if I hadn't decided to go this route. It probably would've
included only the costs and effects without the descriptive
elements, but as I thought about it, I decided I didn't
like that approach for a number of reasons.
My
most important concern was that I didn't want rituals
to look like spells or feats. I wanted them to be vivid
and unique, because they play an important role in Arcana
Unearthed. There already are enough feats and spells
out there to last you a lifetime. Why simply copy them
when I could make something new? So, I decided early on
that I wanted ceremonies to have a unique trait that set
them apart from everything you've seen before.
Of
course, if I wanted to make them different I had to figure
out how they would look different. It occurred to me that
in the "movie of a roleplaying game", or the
scenes and images you picture in your head during a game
session, a ritual should have an important visual concept.
"Ritual" implies a set of actions, symbolic
objects, and other tangible facets. While spells and feats
describe the end results they achieve, I thought that
rituals would be more interesting if I delved into not
only what they did, but how they did it. Best of all,
rituals play an important role in Arcana Unearthed
and deserve a bit more detail than just another game mechanic.
Finally,
and perhaps most importantly, the extra color and detail
makes rituals an important, noteworthy part of games.
My hope is that, if you use these rituals in the game,
you will take the time to describe the ritual as part
of the action. I wanted to create a tangible divide between
the typical D&D session and the average Arcana
Unearthed one, not only in terms of mechanics, but
also in terms of how characters act and the actions they
take during the course of a session. It struck me that
tying the mechanics of a ritual to roleplay would serve
as a powerful tool to draw out the unique characteristics
of the Arcana Unearthed rules set. There's a common
(and correct) thought that using roleplaying restrictions
to balance mechanical gains is a bad idea. I decided to
turn that thought on its head -- why not have mechanical
benefits arise from roleplaying actions?
In
the case of the Ritual of the Friendly Path, you might
make a conscious effort to gather dirt from the places
you visit and store it in small packets. If you're ever
lost in the wilderness, you can perform the ritual to
find your way home. You could also perform the ritual
multiple times, once for each place you visit, to keep
an accurate, mental map of a region in your mind. This
advantage is by no means a game breaker. After all, it
provides little help if a herald of annihilation crosses
your path (you'll find out about them soon...), but it's
a cool little piece of color that makes Arcana Unearthed
stand out from the typical fantasy game.
So,
in a nutshell, that's why the ceremonies and rituals have
descriptions of how they work and the symbols behind them.
The
Mechanics of Ritual
Mechanically,
I wanted ceremonies to be as easy to gain as possible.
Feats have what I call an opportunity-balanced mechanic.
When it comes time to choose a feat, you can only select
one of them. The benefits of one feat are, in theory,
balanced by the benefits that others offer. When you choose
a feat, you consciously decide that you don't want the
benefits that other feats offer. That's why it's important
that feats remain balanced by their prerequisites and
against the other feats that are out there. If one feat
is superior to everything else in all situations, there's
no reason to take anything else.
So,
feats are in part balanced by the limited number you can
take. The same thing goes for spells, since you can only
ready a finite number of them per day. I didn't want to
use a similar approach to ceremonies. Since they're an
important part of Arcana Unearthed, I wanted to
make them easier to gain. Thus, the ceremonies are balanced
against the cost of sacrificial items that you must pay
to gain their benefits. In pure mechanical terms, they're
like magic items that you can buy and use at any time,
even when you're far from the nearest settlement. When
you use a ritual, you decide to put money toward it rather
than a new magic item, some other ritual, a horse, or
whatever else you might want. In theory, you could grant
every character in your campaign access to all the rituals
and it wouldn't unbalance the game. To draw a parallel
example, you could create a shop in your campaign world
that offers every magical item for sale at its list price.
If the party doesn't have the money to buy the items,
or if you use the suggested character wealth guidelines
by level from the DMG, your game will run fine. The characters
won't be able to purchase a powerful item until you reward
them with the cash they need for it. Rituals work the
same way. The balancing mechanic behind them lies in the
act of gaining the benefit, rather than the cost of choosing
to gain access to it. It's the difference between renting
an ability (a ritual) and buying one outright (a feat).
So,
I created rituals with a lot of color to help bring the
setting to life within the terms of game mechanics. I
made knowing a ritual a relatively weak ability. Instead,
the power comes from paying the cash to complete the ritual.
Thus, the characters can know lots of rituals without
unbalancing the game. The final, key question was how
do characters learn rituals? They're not feats, spells,
or skills, so I had to create new mechanics to cover the
process.
Learning
Rituals
My
first thought was to give everyone access to all rituals,
but that seemed weird. Mechanically, it would work out
fine, but in terms of story it was a bizarre way to go.
In the movie of your game, it seems weird that the dim
giant warmain knows as many rituals as the brilliant faen
magister. With that example (literally—it was the
case that prompted the final mechanic) I had my solution.
I
love Knowledge skills. They seem pretty useful and are
a good way to reflect a smart character's abilities. It
seemed to be me that Knowledge (ceremony) should be an
important skill, since rituals are such a vital part of
life in the Diamond Throne. With that in mind, I tied
the number of rituals you know to your ranks in Knowledge
(ceremony). As you gain ranks in that skill, you learn
more ceremonies to reflect your increased knowledge. I
really liked this solution, because it helped unite the
setting and the mechanics. Since rituals are important,
placing ranks in Knowledge (ceremony) is a logical step
for a character. Awarding access to ceremonies for that
decision provides a nice incentive for even a warmain
or a champion to develop that skill. I did something similar
with Knowledge (runes), but that'll have to wait until
next week. Even if you don't have ranks in Knowledge (ceremony),
you can still find someone who knows the ritual and learn
it from him through study. In addition, if your Intelligence
is 10 or higher, you start the game with knowledge of
at least one ritual.
Ceremonial
Logic
Finally,
I had to figure out how powerful I could make the rituals.
Since I wanted them to be easy to gain, simple to use,
and cost a character through use rather than access, I
decided to keep them roughly in line with 0 and 1st-level
spells. I didn't want rituals to make spellcasters obsolete.
There's also the obvious thought that, if rituals are
super-powerful and everyone in the world of Arcana
Unearthed has access to them, why hasn't the world
devolved into an endless war of ritual and counter-ritual?
Thus,
rituals tend to be passive in nature. They provide bonuses
to common activities but rarely do they give you an advantage
in attacking or harming another person.
That's
my Design Diary entry for this week. Feel free to comment
or post questions in our
forums. Next week, we'll
look at runes. See you in seven!
DESIGN
DIARY—MIKE
MEARLS PAST ENTRIES
