Review: Dungeons and Dragons 4e (Part Seven)

Book One: Player's Handbook
Part the Last: Rituals

Some of you are probably quite sick of all this nerdy stuff by now. No fear! We're finished with the first book as of the end of this post, and then we only have *two more books* to talk about: the Dungeon Master's Guide and the Monster Manual.

Thus far, as I was telling Jonathan last night, my impression is that a lot of the changes in 4e are steps in the right direction, but that they probably don't step quite far enough to get me to play the game regularly. Still, it's early to tell for certain; much will depend on the DMG (and not much will depend on the Monster Manual, but I like creature catalogs anyway -- they're fun).

Okay, so Rituals.

Rituals are essentially spells that take a little time to perform, and that are always read off of a scroll or out of a book. "Spells" in traditional sense are now mostly offensive or combat-based. Most of the magical effects that aren't specifically combat-oriented are now Rituals.

This makes sense for a couple reasons. The first is, as all the classes now have their own at-will, encounter, and daily powers that work mechanically like spells do, and since all those powers are combat based, it makes sense to let the magic-users focus on spells that will be useful in combat as well. This is very much borrow from MMOGs.

Secondly, in previous editions of D&D, where all the non-combat spells existed side by side with combat spells, choosing a spell like "Knock", which unlocks doors, meant that you couldn't choose something like "Magic Missile", which kills things. Which meant that hardly anyone bothered with Knock.

Rituals are a fairly elegant fix to both of those problems, and in addition it appears (at first reading) that they are not limited to magic-using characters. As long as you train a Ritual skill, you can use them.

As Will pointed out the other evening, the fact that Rituals take some time to complete also means that they can provide some tension, with several characters having to fend off attacking beasties as the other characters try to finish up the ceremony. Cool.

...And that pretty much wraps up the PHB. Next up we'll start on the Dungeon Master's Guide, which is of great importance to me, since 90% of the time I'm the one running the game anyway.