Did D&D 4e's Ritual System Miss the Mark?

Or is it a great approach to managing non-combat spells?

There are tons of reasons thrown around for why D&D 4e failed. Many reasons can be easily dismissed as not valid (there was no roleplaying) while others just bring to light how ahead of its time the game was (powers). I’ve covered before the many reasons why I think 4th edition is great and I am sure I will dig into those reasons again. But today, I want to mention a complaint that might be a valid point.

Spellcasting. Specifically, non-combat spellcasting.

It is quite common to hear that 4e made everyone a spellcaster. At the most basic level, I might agree with this. By giving every class cool things they could do, it leveled the playing field. No longer was it just the wizards that got to do awesome things. Now even the fighter and the barbarian had cool powers at their disposal.

I don’t look at this as making everyone a spellcaster. I see it as making every class in the game fun to play. No character would be limited to swinging an axe while other players were hurling missiles and fireballs.

In addition, the standardized rules made nearly every class approachable for all players. New players were no longer limited to playing fighters simply because they are easy characters to create and run. It was now just as easy to play a sorcerer or a druid because the mechanics were the same for all. The differences were in WHAT they could do, not in HOW they did it.

The wizard, however, did have some additional complexity in 4e. Wizards still had a spellbook where they stored all their known spells and they still had to prepare some of them each day. This was a nice variation for the wizard that allowed it to use the 4e mechanics, but also gave it a little edge as a spellcaster with access to a greater pool of powers than other classes.

Anyway. Here I am talking about things that I like, when I promised I had a complaint.

I want to clarify that my complaint is not really a complaint in the sense that I think something is broken, but rather I think they might have avoided some of the other complaints if they approach this differently.

The problem is that many of the typical spells that a wizard (or other spellcaster) would use when not in combat were moved to the category of rituals. They were no longer spells in the same way that they were in 3.5e and in 5e. They had slightly different rules.

Wizard spells, in 4e, were things like Magic Missile, Acid Arrow, Sleep, Fireball, Web, etc… All spells that exist in other editions of the game and things that the wizard would use regularly in combat.

But D&D, even 4e, is not all about combat. A lot of the game is spent exploring and roleplaying and solving puzzles. In these situations, a wizard might need something like Comprehend Language, Silence, Arcane Lock, Knock, or other such abilities. In other editions of the game, these are still spells. It is possible that they could be cast as rituals, but they were spells first and foremost.

4th edition, however, created a distinct set of rules for these abilities. Now they were rituals. They were still stored in a spellbook and they very much looked and acted like the same spell from the other editions. But now, you could ONLY cast them as rituals.

If you wanted to comprehend a language, you needed to get the ritual from your spellbook and spend 10 minutes casting it. It would then last for 24 hours.

By comparison, the Comprehend Languages spell in 5e uses a 1st level spell slot, takes 1 action to cast, and last for one hour.

Is this a big deal. No. Not at all. The actions are all still there. Wizards can still do all those things that they could do in the other editions of the game. And because the ritual rules were separate from the combat spells, they no longer had restrictions about how they could use those spells. You did not have to burn a spell slot to comprehend languages.

I suppose one could argue that if you were in the middle of a combat encounter and needed to comprehend a language, 4e made that very difficult. You could no longer spend an action and immediately comprehend the language. You would need to spend 10 minutes while arrows flew past you. That is probably more realistic in that situation and, arguably, more interesting.

By separating out the rituals like this, it gives the impression that all the stuff wizards could do where the combat spells. The spells are listed with the class, but the rituals are a separate section of the book—much like spell lists in the other editions. I could see a player overlooking all these rituals that they had access to and instead jump to the conclusion that, ‘4e is nothing but combat’.

I personally have no issues with the rule, but I can’t help but wonder if approaching this differently might have made a difference in how the game was received.

One final thought on this.

I find it interesting that many of the reasons given for the failure of 4e seem to come from spellcasters. Well, rather, those that like to play spellcasters.

They didn’t like that 4e gave non-spellcasters access to the cool things that they felt only their character should be able to do. And they didn’t like that playing their character got just a little more complicated by having rituals handled separately from spells. It is almost like they feel the game should revolve around them?

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What do you think? Do you like how 4e handles the differences between rituals and combat spells?

Let me know your thoughts.

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