Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback Request: Ritual Casting

Currently it seems that the Wizard and maybe the Cleric are missing spells or certain spells are a spell slot + action.

Suggestion: for spells like Find Familiar bring back the ability to cast it out of combat without using a spell slot ( currently as is for the Wizard) I am of the opinion that the familiar could be very useful but with game mechanics being the current way they are where the wizards familiar vanishes after a long rest (does not happen in DnD) having to use one slot to re-cast the familiar makes it worthless in it's current form. especially since the familiar can not deliver spells making any familiar that only has 1hp horrible. At least the Warlock gets to cast it for free and gets two options that is very helpful in combat/scouting.

I absolutely agree with this! Ritual casting as stated in the 5E rules might also help balancing some issues the current resting system has.

Yeah, that would be nice, but I think they are trying to balance out Ritual casting by making some spells last for longer/as long as you maintain concentration. So if in 5e you would probably re-cast Shield of Faith in between encounters, you don't need to do that BG3 if you maintained concentration (which admittedly can be hard to do with the Burning status ticking away). Hence you have more free spell slots to cast spells in general.

In 5E you can't cast any spell as ritual. Only the ones tagged with "ritual" and "Shield of Faith" isn't one of them
But mostly stuff like "detect magic" or "identify" for example.

The list of ritual spells also isn't really that big, bust most of them are some really nice quality of life spells.
http://dnd5e.wikidot.com/spells:ritual

I noticed that 'Detect Magic' and 'Identify' are missing from the available spells. Not sure if those will be coming later, but I do know another game demo has them available as Ritual spells that you can cast to ID your magic goodies.

(And in BG1 and BG2 you didn't find magic items with all the details already revealed to you. Minor quibble, I know, but finding and then ID'ing the new stuff was half the fun. )

Yeah, I know - but the point your cleric probably has more spell slots available because they have not been casting Shield of Faith or Protection from Evil and Good as often as they would in 5e. So they have more spell slots to spare to cast Detect Magic with a spell slot and not as a ritual.

I think the ritual spell casting works in Tabletop because the DM has better control of time so the 10 minute ritual casting happens when the DM wants it to.

This is a case where CRPG and Tabletop are different enough that I would vote no ritual spells in CRPG because you just can't make them work right. I mean, do you have a ritual take 10 minutes of real time to cast one? how do you balance rituals so they don't become free spell slots?

Sigh, I just realized if they can't get rituals working right, there will be no pact of the tome warlocks since rituals are their core mechanic.

Find Familiar doesn't take up a spell slot, does it? Pretty sure they just do out of combat casting for rituals then.

This is kind of an odd case as in P&P casting the spell with a slot takes an hour so in practice everyone takes 70 minutes to ritual cast it instead. Giving Pact of Chain Warlocks the spell at will is an odd hack to get around lack of ritual casting and how badly it would nerf PoC if it cost a spell slot (also familiars should persist after rests really).

I would just make it that out of combat, you can cast ritual spells without spending a slot. They’re not really spam-worthy spells anyway like cantrips. And it’s not like you have to wait one hour in realtime for short rests either.