Essentials Rituals

I recently purchased some books out of the Dungeons & Dragons Essentials line (Rules Compendium, Monster Vault, and both of the Heroes of Forgettable Title books). The version of D&D 4th edition (aka 4e) in these books is more to my liking than the previous core books (which I found interesting but not enough to spend money on). The class structure is less rigid in these books (something they were starting to do with psionic classes in Player's Handbook III) and they redid some things that seemed a little off in previous books (magic missile without a two hit roll and a slightly more sane way to give a dual-wielding rangers an offhand attack).

But sadly, the Essentials line did not address rituals. In fact, the Essentials versions of the cleric and wizard are lacking built-in access to rituals and the Essentials cleric gets Resurrection (a ritual in normal 4e) as a daily power at level 8.

Rituals were supposed to be a way for a caster character to have access to a variety of utility effects without having to sacrifice combat capability. I happen to think this is a great idea; I even contributed to a book of rituals for 4e. Though I think the cost in time for rituals is a tad high and the cost in character wealth (for ritual components) makes players less likely to use them.

My fixes for this are twofold:

First, make the casting time for most short rituals 1 minute, and allow a character to use one of these rituals to be as part of a short rest. A minute is long enough that its hard to work into a combat but it can be used in combat if there is a great need, and they can still be used without slowing the party (or the pace of the game) down. Longer rituals default to 1 hour and can be used as part of an extended rest. Any rituals that require significantly longer should stay as they are.

Second, give ritual components (as well as the ritual scrolls) as treasure to make rituals more tempting to use. Assuming that the character's rituals are priced correctly, it would make more sense to use the components casting rituals than selling them, since items generally don't sell for their full value.

Some people have also made some noise over Essentials not improving on 4e's magic item system, but I don't have much to say on that front. A longsword +1 has always been kind of dull on its own, and I don't think the 4e version of magic items is any worse that silliness that was 3e's weapon and armor special abilities (at least when an item had more than one of them).

Though I do like the idea of forgoing giving out a magic item in treasure in exchange for leveling up an existing magic item (plus a little coinage since, if you had giving out a new item they could have sold their old one or given it to another character, I'm not sure how much would be appropriate though).