Rituals: Make them more transparent to players

[Choofed]

Rituals since their first implementation are a mechanic with a lot of potential. People think it’s cool and they want to partake in them. Issue is, they’re entirely obscured by a veil of “FOIG” that has hidden how they work.

Anecdotal evidence has displayed that when they were bugged, no one knew how to fix them, that they didn’t know it was bugged in the first place because it was so obscure how they worked, and so on. When we had the scrying crisis, everyone for a time was convinced that rituals were enabling the penetration of scry wards because of a lack of transparency.

There should not be groups of individuals who know who don’t know how their spell list works. It makes no sense that veteran masters of their magics, wizards specialised in the peak of their field, are left dumbfounded by a ritual they know precisely how to operate.

Hopefully with understanding of how they work, people could suggest an expansion to this cool mechanic as well.

Direct Feedback:
This feedback comes with a singular statement. Rituals need to be moved out of obscure FOIG status into a directly public format, with a wiki page and preferably information displayed in game when -ritual is done on their precise mechanics as well.

[Peacelily]

Possible fixes!

• have rituals show up as Feats once you unlock them. This also means you could have items that can grant them, or get them as epic feats!

• have rituals include an explanation of what they do in the ritual description if you can cast it

• Perhaps -area could trigger a Spellcraft check on places affected by a Ritual, providing information to the checker, and even more with the Investigate feat, making magical interrogators really viable

[Rei_Jin]

Rituals are something that I love the flavour of, but do not love how FOIG they are.

I had a situation in the past where a property I had the lease on, was impacted by a ritual. Nothing we did seemed to undo its effects, and it lasted for months and months.

It was only when I poked the dev who made Rituals to begin with and they did some exploring, that they found out that the code had broken in that case and they had to manually remove it from the map.

The staff were helpful with this situation, and supportive; I have no complaints about them, and instead have praise.

But so long as the following is not on the Wiki and accessible openly in game through character sheets, there will continue to be issues with them, and low take-up of them

• what rituals there are
• which classes can lead them
• how many participants for each ritual
• material costs involved
• effect of each ritual
• which rituals can “undo” other rituals
• duration that the effects of the rituals should last

I know that there are some “black box” elements of rituals in terms of what specific elements add to the success percentages accrued by any given ritual, and I’m 100% okay with that, as it encourages exploration.

My preference would be for a wiki page for rituals, and for each ritual to be listed as a class “ability” so that when you unlock it in game, the above details can be reviewed in the feat description on your character sheet.

[silverpheonix]

There should not be groups of individuals who know who don’t know how their spell list works. It makes no sense that veteran masters of their magics, wizards specialised in the peak of their field, are left dumbfounded by a ritual they know precisely how to operate.

Agreed, 100%. Our characters are not clueless, stoner, college kids reading from a skin-covered book in an abandoned cabin. They should understand how they work and what they do.

I don't even know how to explain that we have rituals when we didn't before. "Some lunatic distributed pamphlets across the island detailing how to do the rituals, in what languages, with what ingredients, number of participants, the schools of magic, and the time to perform, but not what they do" is the best IC explanation I can come up with.

A specialist wizard has no idea what a ritual utilizing their school of magic does? That doesn't make any sense. Magic is a highly structured, symbolic thing. Wizards spend their entire lives studying how spells and their effects are structured (their dweomer), but we can't look at the structure of the ritual and determine even the barest baseline functionality? That makes no sense. FOIG is great but there should be some method of verification that isn't OOC guesswork. Even runes, the only comparable level of FOIG I can think of (ignoring that it isn't FOIG at all anymore) have an item that definitively tells you what type of rune can be placed on an item, if at all.

Actually, a more comparable might be the Summoner's Cauldron on Rayne's Landing. However that is relatively simple: you put things in according to an established formula. It either works or does not, and you can remove the possible ingredients from your list by clear process of elimination. The only potential obscurity is "did X ingredient fail because it's intended, or a bug?", however I know OOCly the entire list of working ingredients so I know that there are no bugs in the system as far as the ingredients go. There is a check and balance between IC and OOC information.

Case in point: The Arcanum cast Blightful Presence in the Werth. It lasted a week. Then a month. Then two months. Druids could not remove it with a counter-ritual. Nobody on the staff was able to say whether it was a bug because nobody on the staff knew how it was supposed to work. Lorenzo player was going insane trying to get this fixed. Eventually the staff had to reach out to the one person that designed the ritual who said that it was not supposed to be permanent and was bugged.

I remember asking a staff member (must have been on discord, can't find it) "hey is X feature of Y ritual a bug or intended? I don't know whether to report this or not, since it feels wrong" and the response was one word. FOIG. That's terrible.

Rituals are a bug-reporting nightmare.

[Sincra]

Rituals are FOIG because that's part of why they exist, I've made it known I'm working on their transparency in the past and have made talks with the writing team to that end.

The wiki does not need to be involved, rather, the game should be giving the information in the dialogue menu to those that pass checks, as is the case for the rest of how the ritual system works.

Locking this thread as this has come up before and always ends up being a shouting match about how it needs to be entirely visible OOC for anyone to act on it IC or OOC, which tends to be partially true for knowing what things do. As stated above however it should be something discernable via direct IC in the same manner by which you choose the ritual to perform.

I'd hate to just see a wiki list beyond what classes can do which, and suck all the fun of discovery out of this system.