So on the Monday last event we did a couple of fairly generic, slightly lame Lure of distant shores on myself and Charlii.
The details don’t appear to have made it onto the PD database yet (email sent). So other than the slight panic that downtime will be a dud and plans will fall apart , it got me thinking. How do I know if a ritual fails to work vs a database error? Would we have had feedback from the ref (who got accosted by other people part way through our performance)?
Also does anyone do less flamboyant, dare I say it more mundane rituals? Autumn rituals like winged messenger for instance I am thinking of doing in a more transactional style and saving the theatrics for the coven bond rituals.
Less flamboyant? Our Winged Messenger ritual consisted of ridiculously hammy tales of lovers who are torn apart and divided by the high seas, who must find a way to communicate, with salacious undertones oh my!
You don’t always know; sometimes the message will disappear but you have no way of knowing if it is received unless you receive a response. A ritual to renew a magical army caused the materials not to leave, that was fair;y indicative it didn’t work. Even EXPLOSIONS don’t always mean fail. Sometimes you succeed and still get magical trauma.
I maybe wrong but I was under the impression that PD has gone for a definite policy of telling players stuff ™ with Empire such as whether a ritual worked or just outright failed.
Rituals are not marked or graded. If you complete the requirements, and spend the resources, they will always succeed.
If the ref took your mana and said you’re good, it’ll be a database update issue, not a ritual failed one. You are aware if your rituals haven’t worked.
Edit:
I suppose I should add a quick line about why we do want to see your rituals if possible. There’s several reasons. Watching rituals is fun. It adds to our enjoyment, and gives us more things to do. It also lets us help check your maths, provide effects nice and quickly for immediate results like RP effects, get the database updated on the spot, clarify any relevant rules questions, etc.
Finally, it means we can add value to your rituals if that seems appropriate - temporary additional roleplaying effects, spontaneous visions, traumatic wounds, etc etc. All of these are (hopefully) fun and add more interest to rituals that can otherwise be very simple and transactional, and tend to be based on watching what you’ve done for interesting ways to riff off it with a quick RP effect or similar.
This needs repeating a few times - if the ref tells you it works it worked. Database issues aside. If you did a ritual and see no effect for it please god contact peedee, preferably with some details so we can track why it didn’t work. If it goes wrong - a ref will tell you it has gone wrong. We did “hidden numbers no idea if it works or not” game once and it didn’t go very well.
Spontaneous ritual casting is a bit more of a gray area - and there are a few rituals that might “work” and still not give you the result you expect - the most obvious example is “I want to send this stuff to an NPC and expect them to react in a certain way.” In that case the ritual “works” by sending the stuff, there’s absolutely no requirement for the NPC to pay any attention to stuff sent them via a spontaneous ritual.
This needs repeating a few times - if the ref tells you it works it worked. Database issues aside. If you did a ritual and see no effect for it please god contact peedee, preferably with some details so we can track why it didn’t work. If it goes wrong - a ref will tell you it has gone wrong. We did “hidden numbers no idea if it works or not” game once and it didn’t go very well.
Spontaneous ritual casting is a bit more of a gray area - and there are a few rituals that might “work” and still not give you the result you expect - the most obvious example is “I want to send this stuff to an NPC and expect them to react in a certain way.” In that case the ritual “works” by sending the stuff, there’s absolutely no requirement for the NPC to pay any attention to stuff sent them via a spontaneous ritual.[/quote]
And even in that case, the refs are generally very keen to manage expectations by verifying with the ritualists beforehand things like “You know there is nothing to say they have to respond, right?”