Rituals in Sessions and Downtime
In Downtime
As even high level rituals take at most a day, casting rituals requires a trivial amount of time compared to the months or years that a downtime action represents. Therefore, characters will be assumed to have the benefit of any suitable rituals during each downtime action without having to specify that they will cast them. Therefore, any player who does not wish their character to use their rituals must specify in their downtime return.
In Session
Rituals are almost always complex endeavours that require careful preparation of the ritual space and dedicated focus by the ritualist(s) rather than something that can be performed in a few minutes among non-participants, thus characters will not usually be able to perform rituals in session. This does not prevent them using the other powers of their Ritual Discipline.
As we assume characters will have planned their attendance at gatherings in advance, ritualists may start each session with:
A maximum number of active rituals equal to their highest ritual discipline
A maximum number of 'levels' of rituals equal to their Mental + highest ritual discipline
At the beginning of each session, players wishing to have active rituals will need to meet with one of the ST team after they sign in to make the appropriate tests where:
A test of Mental + Relevant Ritual Discipline is made for each active ritual requiring at least 1 success to complete the ritual.
Each successful ritual will then apply a cumulative -1 penalty when testing to see if any further rituals are successful.
Failed tests mean the ritual is not active for the session and bestial failures will result in an additional cost or temporary flaw.
For each ritual test that draws the red token, the character will also need to make a hunger test as the ritual draws more significantly on their vitae than expected.
Multi-Disciplinary Ritualists
Ritual frameworks interact in complex ways and the vastly different mental states used by different frameworks to sustain or trigger rituals are hard to simultaneously maintain. Therefore, a Ritualist with more than one Ritual Discipline may start the session with up to one ritual from a second Ritual Discipline. The Ritualist is free to choose which of their Ritual Disciplines they take the majority of their rituals from on a session-by-session basis.
Due to the intense difficulty of maintaining two different frameworks, attempting to start the session with rituals from more than one Discipline imposes an additional -1 penalty to tests to activate rituals from a second discipline (or extra -1 for third, etc).