OK, here's the dilemma: let's say you have a 400BP mage who takes the Sorcery skill group at 4 at CharGen ... he gets some karma and decides he wants to raise his skills. For 44 karma he can break the group and raise Spellcasting and Counterspelling to 6. For 55 karma (11 more) he can take the group to 6, adding Ritual Spellcasting 6 to the other two skills.

Is the extra 11 karma worth it to be kick-arse at Ritual Spellcasting? Will a lot of high-powered mages and mage groups be knocking down his door asking him to participate in some real big rituals if he does go for it? What do you think?

In my experience as a player and GM, Ritual Spellcasting is one of the least used skills in the game. I've used it about as often as Parachuting. That said, when the time comes to use either one, you'll be proud to rock a solid dicepool.

As a GM, I've used it with great success, but generally the players are coming to a contact that they know has it and are hiring the group for a ritual.

In both cases, Ritual Tracking is probably the most often used. Healing is number two, and the vengeance kill number three.

Every spell can be cast as a ritual. So there are high dicepools there. If you have a group of mages, this can be very effective.
(Here it totally depends on the group. If you for example play a hermetic circle, ritual spellcasting is really worth it. If you are the only mage and a mage following some obscure tradition, then it won't help much)

Such questions are in general very hard to answer, because it very much depends on how you run the game. Some groups only allow hermetic and shamens, making ritual spellcasting better. In other groups you will find few mages and everybody seems to have his own system of believes.

You do not need a group for a ritual - you can also cast alone.

One thing to keep in mind is that you can use Ritual Spellcasting alone. You only need a bound spirit to act as spotter (or one of the other targeting options from SM). Ritual Spellcasting implies that you need more than one, but it does not make that mandatory.

-D

P.S.
This is as of SR4 (not SR4a). I don't know if things have changed in the newer edition.

I thought skill groups only could go to 5, or did they change that in SR4A? (or is it a house rule you are using?)

I've never heard of that.

Indeed...
I love me some Ritual Casting...

You can only START a skill group at a Max of 4. You can take them all the way to 6 with time and Karma.

In fact, doing it in a group gives you barely any benefit for the whole group resisting the same Drain; a very sub-optimal choice for resource allocation.

If two spells with one hit would be equal to one spell with 2 hits... But thats not really the case...

Espacially if you cast your spells on positiv BC the effects will be quite impressive.
Every additional caster gives you (his spellcasting+his magic+BC)/3 additional dice on avarage. Thats about one or even two additional hits on your spellcasting test.

So you're saying that five hits on one spell is better than three hits on two spells? I still greatly disagree. The only reason to have anyone else in your Ritual Spellcasting Test is if they have the Great Ritual metamagic. Note that the extra dice you have from a Ritual Spell cannot exceed your actual skill, since it follows the Teamwork mechanic - that is the main reason I don't like it. Two or three people taking the drain of casting a spell just to give me 4-6 extra dice? They'd be better off casting the same spell alongside me than trying to give me dice, Backround Count or no.

Except that you cannot accept any more than your Skill in Teamwork Dice (So a ritual Team is really pretty useless, honestly), and you are still capped out on Successes equal to your Force of the Spell. *shrug*

EDIT: Damn, Ninja'd by Neraph...

Neraph--There are cases, such as Heal where a single spell with more hits is better than multiple small spells since only the first one will work. Ritual Spellcasting is useful when it's "go big or go home." Cases where you can just cast the spell twice with fewer hits are rightly better done as normal Spellcasting.

How many of these cases are likely to happen? Yes, heal makes sense from a mechanical perspective since you only get the benefit of a single casting of heal for the wounds (if I'm wrong about this forgive me) but how often does reality match what makes sense from a mechanical perspective? How often can someone who is wounded afford to wait to receive a healing from a circle of mages? How often do you go on a mission with a group of ritual casting mages?

Yeah, starting limits I'm well aware of, that's not what I meant...

...and I just searched through my books, and I can't find anything anywhere that explains where I got the "Skill Group limited to 5" thing from...might've been an early houserule that turned into truth over the years...LoL

No worries, SnowRaven...

Stealth - I don't think it's very likely, which is why I said above that Ritual Sorcery is used as often as Parachuting. Heal, I've seen as a ritual group when one of the runners had been beaten down hard, and the medic was able to stabilize him but that was it. The team called in a marker from a group they knew to get the runner back on his feet before the meet with the Johnson who had paranoia issues about people not being present at meetings. Troll went from 6 boxes of overflow to lightly wounded in a couple of hours.

From a world perspective, I can see it for the movers and shakers. Damien Knight survives an assassination attempt by the skin of his teeth and is seen dancing at a Gala the next day. Same with Angela Colloton, Johnny Spinrad, and the other huge names among the mundane. Anyone with sufficient cred and influence can go from a hair's breadth from dead to right as rain, overnight.

Ritual Spellcasting is used to locate people when you only have a blood sample or other such bodily part, which is damned handy when hunting for someone who dug a hole and buried themselves in it.

For more details, check out Safehouses.

In a recent game, a magician of mine cast Mind Probe through Ritual Spellcasting and Sympathetic Linking to find a missing NPC and determine what her status was.

The rules don't work that way - look at the example in the rules (SR4, pg. 106). The character who breaks her skill group has to raise her other skills to 5 normally to regain the skill group. So getting Ritual Spellcasting up to 6 would cost 22 karma, not 11. If your GM is house ruling it the way you posted, go for it - it's like a 50% discount on the price.

No Glyph... he has the right of it... it's 25+30 to raise the group as a whole. There's no point to recreating the group at 6... no more to raise it! (only break it by adding specializations).

It's 10+12+10+12 to raise the 2 skills individually and ignore the 3rd.



That said... another case for good ritual casting is mental manipulations. You want as many successes as possible if there's a chance the character will get multiple resistance checks to question the manipulation. (alter memory, influence, etc.). Some might be as simple as casting on a sleeping target... make sure I'm on the 7:25 train to the arcology and in the last car. Not a lot of time or reason to think about it... others might need to stick for a while.

They're another good example of cast big or go home.

The biggest problem on ritual castings is the material component costs. (500xforce)

Ah, I misread the post. I thought he had already improved the other two skills.

Except for influence and Alter Memory, you still have to time it perfectly. The subject gets another (cumulative) resistance roll every Force*3 seconds. Against the two aforementioned spells, the subject only gets a very limited amount of additional rolls.

Ninja'd. By 8 hours.

"Hey, uh... mages.... We're hunting down this guy for Lonestar and we had caught him but he kind of lost his left arm during the capture. Anyway he escaped and we need to you to locate him using this festering leg that we kept around for some reason..."

You'd be surprised. My last run I GM'd, the team was chasing another shadowrunnner team, to get back an employee that was "extracted," and had a security RFID embedded that they were tracking. The opposing NPC team found the tag, and ripped it out. The team found the meat and chip, and ignored it entirely. Go figure.

No no, ritual sorcery IS the reason for keeping lost blood/limbs/eyelashes.
It's also why you don't let it fester.

OK, so not a lot of love for Ritual Sorcery in general, no real surprise there. Just going back to the second part of the question, any opinions on whether a runner with RS6 would get asked to join in a lot of magic rituals?

I mean, I guess most dragons, corps et al would have a few of their wage mages trained specially to participate in corp rituals when necessary ... but given that someone with RS at 6 would be rare as hell on the streets, would they not be in pretty big demand?

All participants in a ritual have to have the same tradition and know the spell. So even with ritual spellcasting 6 it is unlikely that a magician is asked often to join a ritual team, especially if he ascribes to an obscure tradition.

Character in question is a vanilla shaman, so should be able to take part in any shamanic rituals. I am just thinking with my GM hat on - the player is debating whether to raise the Sorcery group or Spellcasting/Counterspelling. He has 30 karma in the bag at the mo, and I am trying to persuade him to go with the group because I can have fun making group runs based on the fact like-tradition folk might ask him to help in a ritual ...