While looking through the new CoM book today at lunch I reread the section on ritual magic. Therein it mentions that the Cast Ritual Spell is a -40 subskill of the Magic Ritual skill. That is a pretty steep penalty to use the skill for what they probably actually want to use it for.
I am aware of the rules allowing some subskills to be swapped with the base skill, but that doesn't look like a good fit here. That doesn't seem to make sense, and it looks to violate the intent of the subskill to prevent abuse to the game (at least that is how I see the intent of the subskill and its penalty).
So I was wondering if it would be possible to have a Spell Casting Maneuver (or even a general skill maneuver) similar to the combat maneuvers that offset the penalties for doing difficult applications of other skills.
A quick look at the impact this would have is:
1) simple rituals would not require this. Any ritual with a cost of less than 10PP would be better served just by taking the basic skill.
2) more involved rituals would be significantly easier to cast, but require a specialization in application rather than including the broad skill bonus. So investing 8 ranks in the Cast Magic Ritual (X) Maneuver, lets the user cast it at full skill level without needing to invest 40 ranks in the Magic Ritual skill to get the same effect - but the character who did it the hard way is going to be able to identify unknown rituals way better than the character who took the cheap way.
This same idea could be applied to other similar situations such as Inscribe Rune (-30).
If I were to do this I would probably require the Maneuver be specialized in some way (one ritual, or rune for example). So the users would need to put 8 (or 6) ranks in each specific application they learned (similar to how many combat maneuvers work).
Has anyone tried something like this? Do you see any major problems with doing this?
Thanks,
-Pyrotech
