Editing AEDU System (section)

==Rituals==
A side aspect of the AEDU System was to change many "utilitarian" spells of the past, which had contributed to the phenomena of casters overshadowing martials - as the old saying goes "why bother with the [[Rogue|thief's]] hide in shadows and pick lock attempts, both of which are skill based and so can fail you at the worst moment if the RNG God chooses, when a [[wizard]] can automatically solve those problems with Invisibility and Knock?" The Rituals mechanic was built around taking these spells out of the powers pool and making them harder to "game"; all rituals require skill checks and a certain amount of time and resources to perform, so casting "knock" went from being something any wizard of high enough level could do as a matter of course to something that was a legitimate method, but still not as quick or as cheap as just letting the [[rogue]] give it a shot.

Rituals actually expanded quite drastically as the edition progressed; free of needing to worry about the "how often will somebody cast this?" issue they'd faced when they were part and parcel of the spells, WotC got quite creative as time went on. Rituals became capable of all kinds of weird, magical effects; creating campfires that shrouded campsites in protective illusions, raising floating islands, summoning castles from across the world, or opening portals in time all became potential toys players could have. Plus, as ritual casting was locked behind a feat, it was finally possible to play a [[gish]] character who studied magic, and performed miraculous feats out of combat, but relied on sword and skill alone in battle. Heck, one could use rituals and restrict classes to martials for a high-action [[Sword & Sorcery]] campaign, especially with the variant healing rules seen in [[Unearthed Arcana]].