GreyGriffin:
So, if you're not willing to change rituals, either individually or systemically, but rituals are only useful in niche scenarios, as compared to other (generally) less costly methods, how do you avoid the Magic Button Railroad scenario, where rituals are involved? It's a bit of a catch 22, and a design problem I'm sure plenty of the 4e staff had fistfights over.
I'm still not convinced they're, generally speaking, only useful in "niche scenarios," but yes, that's basically what I'm talking about here.
I don't want rituals ever to be the only option for something that I want the PCs to be able to do, I just want them to be a competitive option in at least some situations. I also want there to be optional accomplishments or courses of action that could not be efficiently reached via skills and powers and items.
I don't tend to write adventures, and certainly not for publication. I prefer to improvise and collaborate, plugging in pieces that I've been thinking about or that occur to me in the moment. So, I want to start thinking about the kinds of situations that call or for or make people think of using rituals. The main issue there is that I don't tend to want to spend a lot of time thinking about or posting about stuff that might not be bothered with.
One thing I thought about was what if the party received a request from someone to be on the lookout for examples of some heavy, awkward artifact or objet d'art. Maybe he even gives them a scroll of
tenser's floating disk (with or without the components), or fronts them the cost of one. The PCs are on the lookout for the item and then they find
two of them. Maybe they get clever and find a way to stack them, and assist with the Arcana check to support the weight, but hopefully it gets them thinking, hey, if we'd picked up another scroll, or had someone who could perform that ritual, we'd be doubling our reward.
Tenser's floating disk is fairly non-niche and pretty generally useful, even without getting into questions (long since answered, across multiple editions) about cheap flight and free movement. But that's the kind of think I'm wondering about, and looking for more suggestions on. I can always ask my players in a given game what would be good incentive for them to use rituals, but I'd like input here on what sort of things I can and should keep in mind.