Word of Wizards - Excerpts: Divine Power Rituals

Divine Power Excerpts: Rituals

This excerpt shows the disappointingly short list of rituals from Divine Power. In Arcane Power, we had 19 rituals but here we have a grand total of 8 ranging from Level 1 to 25.

The ritual being showcased in this excerpt is Adjure which allows you to summon and bind an unwilling immortal entity to do your bidding by performing a single task. The task cannot be directly involved with combat, results in death and what is physically impossible for the entity to do. It can only be a single task that does not have multiple commands.

What's most interesting to me about this ritual is that for the first time, they have incorporated a skill challenge for using a ritual. When an immortal is summoned by this ritual, the caster has to go through a skill challenge to determine who has authority over each other.

The skill challenge ends when the caster has earned 10 success or 3 failures and the duration of the entity's servitude is determined by the number of successes accumulated as a result. If the caster manages to get 10 success before 3 failures, the entity performs a task up to a year and a day and the duration of this servitude varies between minutes, day, week and month depending on the success rate.

But there's a catch. If the caster fails to get more than 1 success when the skill challenge ends, the caster is overpowered by the entity and has to serve it instead for a day.

While it looks like an intuitive thing to do by mixing skill challenges into rituals to get various results, I think this might be a little difficult to incorporate for those who don't like to run skill challenges. Also, the prospect of wasting 3,000 gp and 1 hour of casting time just because you failed in a skill challenge is most likely to make players shun this ritual altogether. I mean wasn't that the whole point of rituals which was to bypass situations that could involve going through skill challenges in the first place?

This might not be something new and I've managed to miss this but regardless I would like to hear how you would handle a skill challenge in rituals.

Drop a comment even if you have other thoughts about this ritual.