You won't see me argue that MM is better than FM!!!!
Not many virtues are in that league.
I don't think jebrick even came close to suggesting that Mercuians couldn't master for fast casting. On the other hand it takes a minimum of two seasons to get to mastered spells: 1 to invent and one to master.
The latter is what I was getting at. I agree that 8 minutes vs. 2 hours has no bearing on whether the ritual is inherently stressful or not, but 1/6 chance to be interrupted by a wandering monster vs. 12 x 1/6 chance of interruption is extremely significant - at 8 minutes, you'll almost always be able to complete the ritual successfully in situ, but, if it takes 2 hours, then you're basically wasting your time (and potentially your vis) by attempting the ritual mid-dungeon-crawl, which forces the characters to retreat to a safe (i.e., wandering-monster-free) location before attempting rituals.
In any case, the events don't have to be random to cause sufficient time pressure to make a 2-hour ritual non-viable while an 8-minute ritual is fine. They just have to be outside of the PCs' control. This is further emphasized if the players don't know how much time they have to work with, but that doesn't mean the GM can't know.
I agree that those things should be answered if rituals are to be an activity performed in the field under circumstances where the PCs may not have full control over all aspects of the situation and so could be interrupted. If rituals are made a seasonal lab activity, to be performed within the covenant's defenses, then those answers likely become far less important.
I like your idea, JL.
I would not remove the botch but move it from cast to setup. Because you did not prepare the spell properly, it fizzles. You lose one pawn of vis per botch. Or you handwave it to success by adding the missing pawns.
I wonder if Wizard's Communion shouldn't be used for how many pawns of vis helpers can bring in, one per magnitude. Unless you consider this a useless complication.
EDIT:
In fact, each botch could be an extra level of fatigue and/or wound. Another amusing thing is that Cautious with AL would really apply here, since it's all about the setup.
I sympathize with your desire JL, but I just do not like the idea. Been staying quiet until I had something constructive to offer, and now I think I do.
Try this idea out...
Ritual Magic
[tab][/tab]There are three ways to cast Ritual Spells; Standard, Hasty, and Elaborate.
Standard: Standard Ritual Casting generally takes place at an auspicious time, requires preparation, or has a material cost (£=Magnitude). For example; the Aegis is best cast on a solstice or equinox, Healing rituals work best if the patient has been Stabilized, and Conjuring a Mystic Tower is done best if the magus invest 7£ of ceremonial materials into his effort. The caster has the standard amount of botch dice, including those added for vis use. However, they are allowed to use every natural advantage at reduction. A magus who has the ritual mastered can claim calm conditions only if the Standard conditions are met.
Hasty: Rituals cast as an immediate decision, with no preparation or special investment. Examples include: are casting an Aegis on an odd day and/or at a strange place, casting a Healing ritual in the field, setting up a Tower just anywhere without any ceremony. Add additional potential Botch Dice equal to the Magnitude. This will encourage magi to be careful to cast their Rituals at the right times under the right conditions to avoid extra hazard.
Elaborate: An Elaborate Ceremony can be made out of casting a Ritual spell. It takes a number of assistants (“Acolytes”) equal to the magnitude a number of days equal to the magnitude to prepare for the casting. The material costs involved equal 5£ per magnitude. The magus casting the ritual must oversee the process, which counts as Distraction from the lab. If these conditions are met, roll a Quality Die (a No-Botch Stress Die). Those who have traits that would somehow reduce potential Botch Dice reduce requirements instead. Each Botch Die removed reduces the Acolytes and Preparation days by one, and lowers the cost by 5£. For example: a magus with a Mastery score of 2 (Stalwart, Penetration) needs two fewer assistants and prepares two days faster an a savings of 10£ less. One with Mercurian Magic halves all of these requirements, since requiring less vis is a way to somehow reduce potential botch dice.
you don't articulate why you don't like it. Where your effort falls short is that it doesn't really do anything. Standard rituals cost 7 pounds in materials, in your example, for something that will last forever. I'm charging a season and 7 pawns of vis for the Tower, you're charging 7 mythic pounds and 7 pawns of vis. I'm assuming there is no risk, as under my paradigm? Elaborate rituals are ridiculously expensive, because most people won't be able to afford the costs in silver. 30 pounds of silver to work a 6th magnitude Aegis? Spring covenants would never even be able to afford the casting, as they are struggling for silver AND vis.
I don't like the idea for many many reasons. It deviates way to far from standard practice, it penalizes players unfairly, it makes things harder (I favor making them easier), and it just doesn't work for me.
If you like it, do whatever works for you. You do not have to appeal to my aesthetics for your own game. But yours is an idea I would not implement in my saga nor is it one I would want imposed on me as a player in another saga. Just plain do not like anything about the idea.
The alternative I offer is not anything I would use either. Just offering some food for thought. The issue, you say, is that Rituals are too easily handwaved. Well, stop handwaving them then 
The Elaborate Ritual option is a plausible excuse to hand wave, so you can assuage your "setting issues". The powerful and prosperous covenants get to hand wave it and everyone sleeps okay at night.
The fiscal costs are to have something to "check off" he inventory besides vis. Interesting how many magi have no problem throwing vis around yet silver is such a precious commodity (and even in the most liberal economies a pawn is ten times as valuable as a pound).
Your Tower example breaks it for me. It would be cheaper and take less time to pay a team of masons to erect a tower.
Oh, and that healing incident that you use as an example of hand-waved healing, I should also mention it was a hand-waved injury as well. It was all NPC stuff to set the PC up to shine.
It absolutely does not penalize players. Under the current paradigm it takes a season to learn an Aegis spell from lab text. Under mine it takes a season to cast it, and no appreciable time to maintain it. How is that a penalty? How does it make it harder to cast an Aegis? It actually makes it easier, since it bases it on the lab total.
Of course I like my own idea, Mark, but it's a fair question to ask you what you don't like about it, when you say you don't like it.
If I were to stop handwaving rituals under RAW, rituals would be fairly risky, it's conceivable that a troupe might never see the negative effects of casting a ritual, the dice may ever be in their favor for the ritual spells. But in the setting, eventually the law of averages catches up.
My tower would cost 7 pawns of vis, 1 season (less time than a mason, less money than a mason) and would never need to be maintained, as it is a D:Momentary virtue. Your tower would cost gobs more money to be done safely than mine, although it can be done faster. Let me also add that knowing Conjuring the Mystic Tower is by and large a waste of 35 spell levels, especially player characters, since it gets cast once, or twice. Is a season worth a tower? Are two seasons worth two towers? If you've got the juice to pull it off, is a season worth a mighty castle?
How exactly does a PC shine when the PC does something where there is no consequence of failure? At best it's a demonstration of capability, not that there's anything wrong with that. But I've seen healing handwaved, I've been on the end of having healing handwaved. If it is simply a bookkeeping exercise, then it's not shining, it simply is logistics. If something is a matter of logistics, by and large, then it should be handled in the seasonal system.
Hi,
My version :
For most magi: Ritual magic is always risky, because rituals are so rarely cast. The roll is always stress. Botch dice accrue for vis and any other reasons, but can be reduced by Mastery, Gold Cord, Cautious Sorcerer, Cautious with AL and Cautious with Phil. Time spent is per normal rules, possibly including Choreography.
Mercurian Magic(major): You are Pagan, influenced by but not quite part of the Mercurian tradition of old. You cast spontaneous magic per usual MM rules. You get to add Magic Theory to all Hermetic Ritual Casting Totals (not ceremonial). Ritual casting defaults to calm conditions, not stress, and normally do not involve any botch dice. Cautious with MT helps with botch dice, under the rare circumstances they occur, as do the usual reductions. Your vis use for ritual is halved, and you benefit when casting with other magi, as usual. You can never have both MM and Diedne Magic; the two pagan traditions are different and not compatible. You cannot take or have inflicted upon you any virtues or flaws that specifically degrade your ritual magic.
Diedne Magic(major): You are Pagan, influenced by but not quite part of the Diedne tradition of old, and have a bad Reputation of 3 among many magi. You have Loose Magic. You get to add Magic Theory to all Hermetic Spontaneous Casting Totals (not Score), including Ceremonial Magic. Cautious with MT helps with botch dice, as do the usual reductions (which includes Cautious with AL/Phil for Ceremonial Casting, as for other magi.) You do not get the canonical DM spontaneous benefits. You can take LLSM during character creation, but must also take Poor Formulaic Magic, costing 3 virtue and 1 flaw point. You can never have both Mercurian Magic and Diedne Magic; the two pagan traditions are different and not compatible. You cannot take or have inflicted upon you any virtues or flaws that specifically degrade your spontaneous magic.
Optional: The Aegis is superbly designed, and its casting conditions default to being considered calm. (If you don't choose this option, Mercurian Magi become more in demand, eh?)
Anyway,
Ken
If we are to resort to House Rules, I think a really elegant (ahemm) solution is the following, based on the idea that Bonisagus developed Ritual Magic from Mercurian Rituals, which relied on a large number of participants not just to increase their power, but also to stabilize their massive energies (a similar idea can be found regarding Volkov rituals in The Dragon and the Bear, for 4th edition).
Hermetic Rituals remain unchanged, with the (harsh) interpretation that they are never cast under calm conditions, so they always incur (at least) 1 botch die + 1 botch die per pawn of vis, minus 1 botch die per mastery level (minus gold cord etc.). Wizard's Communion is changed. For each participant in the Communion, subtract one botch die from the lead caster's roll instead of adding one botch die. This can bring the number of botch dice to 0.
I don't really care for making something "easier" by making it more "complex." It's counter-intuitive to me that a ritual with more participants is safer. I can appreciate it as a House Rule, but it prevents the odd situation of a magus who lives in a city as an eremite from having his own Aegis around his home.
Hi,
Maybe there's a different issue here, that of healing in general. RAW, there are various rolls involved with healing, iirc, over the course of days, weeks, months, which might easily be elided, handwaved, etc.
I generally think that extended downtime should never involve rolling dice. A few die rolls between encounters? Sure, to see if a character has to retire from the adventure (we must leave him at the nearby monastery and press onward to the Faerie Bridge!) or be buried.
Anyway,
Ken
See, in your desire to proove a point, you totally glossed over what that incident was really about. I think that, maybe, if I clarify what went down it may demonstrate that Ritual rules as they are worked perfectly fine.
The situation was a PC, Solomon, facing a powerful jinni. He was the only character with the right spell for the job, but not the way he was casting it. As SG (and GM) I forsaw a possible TPK if things didn't change. The NPC, in this case Roberto, had a chance of taking it on. But it usually sucks when the NPC steals the show. I decided to use the NPC as a means to acquire an Arcane Connection for the PC, then hand waved "he got injured" to plausibly take him out of action.
The PC, Solomon, he shined by being the one to take out the jinni.
The first hand-wave part comes from me giving a different PC a rook of Corpus so Roberto could get healed. And I totally forgot about her cool Corpus power. So that PC got to shine in a different way. As you said, a demonstration of capability. Solomon is the one with the tense moment.
The second hand-wave is that the NPC, Roberto, healed himself a second time and I didn't feel like rolling. It was an NPC action for self benefit, healing part of an Injury inflicted upon said NPC because of storyguide fiat.
And he had the spell Mastered.
And it was calm conditions, in camp surrounded by grogs, an hour after the incident and after being partially healed already.
Now I ask, how would I benefit from having added more risk to that situation? Or having it take a season? If it was a PC and I wanted to play "killer DM", maybe. But this was an NPC, one useful to preserve the party and keep things going and one that is my favorite PC when I get the chance to play, one whom I injured by fiat to give a PC an opportunity (one from which they learned how to deal with future genies).
If I injure by fiat I should heal by fiat, and yet I followed all the standard steps.
And the whole point, the only point, is that there is nothing wrong or woobly about the Ritual casting system if applied properly. In my judgment.
Hold on a few before you jump :mrgreen:
I do sympathize with what you are trying to do, and I have an idea...
Dude. I never said healing will take a season. So, jump, indeed.
I haven't ironed out lesser rituals, but I did make it explicit that healing rituals were not to be considered Greater rituals...
Cautious Sorcerer does not work for Ritual spells according to RAW.
It's one of those readings that is probably overly strict, since it helps with formulaic and spontaneous casting AND in the lab, but not with ritual spells, if you accept the parenthetical note about which spells it helps with being an exclusive list. If you read it without the note it is very different: "[y]ou roll three fewer botch dice when casting spells, and when working in the laboratory." So, would you, based on that reading not allow it for ritual spells? And if you include the parenthetical note, how different is it than lab work is from formulaic and spontaneous magic?
With the exception of my quick rebuttal that healing rituals wouldn't take a season, I did hang on and not jump, waiting over 12 hours, which is an eternity in internet time. 
I'm not saying you could have benefited by adding more risk to the situation. I'm saying that the rules seem to strongly indicate (to me) that rituals are always stressful, i.e. never relaxed. You interpret things differently. This becomes something of a problem because you will never have risky situations for rituals, unless they are completely contrived by the SG, just like the situation you describe was contrived to make it relaxed. Healing is a problem, of sorts, but the bigger problem is that if Spell Mastery 1 mitigates all risk of botch, then Ritual magic is kind of broken, or hangs between two extremes It's never risky, everyone will always master rituals, and only when the SG decides to make it risky is it a problem. If, as I believe rituals are always stressful, then it's a huge problem of logistics for the setting, because you either have a lot of covenants botching their Aegis, at least 1 per year, and if there are other annual rituals, some of those are botching as well. There isn't any real middle ground except the HR that one only rolls for rituals if they are required "on screen" or otherwise important (stat boosting rituals, I'm looking at you), which I hate because it makes the setting slightly less consistent.
So, what I'm trying to do is to capture the idea that rituals can be done without risk, but it requires a cost, namely a season of time. That exchange of a season for something of value is something of a recurrent theme in Ars Magica, it's not an unreasonable cost, either. It's very similar to a longevity ritual, in that it is performed once over a season, and then is repeated as needed from the lab text. The Aegis of the Hearth is the best example of a Greater Ritual. The season is spent analyzing the environment, identifying boundary markers, understanding the flow of the aura around the covenant, and doing the mystical work necessary to protect the specific place from external magics. Every Aegis becomes unique to the location, indeed, this explains why it works so well, because time was spent tying the magic around the covenant into a kind of shield. It is certainly Mythic in description, and while it isn't mythic in practice, neither is the current method of noting how much vis was used and moving on. Rolling a die for the Aegis isn't particularly mythic either, which is part of my point. I'm not interested in unnecessary die rolling. I'm interested in creating a really coherent setting with rules that are applied consistently.
Creating a ritual over a season isn't any different than inventing a ritual spell in RAW over a season. Including a mechanism to sustain a greater ritual, similar to the ability to reperform a logevity ritual should it fail, doesn't change anything as far as how the PCs operate now. The maintenance of an Aegis is a bookkeeping event. Heck, the recasting of an Aegis could be a bookkeeping event for all I care, since there is a lab text, and if it does work like a longevity ritual... It does reflect the setting, and it doesn't create this massive gap between risk-free and risky rituals that exists now.