Ruin Explorer
Legend
Sure, but you were claiming it was ignorance of fantasy that was leading him to that opinion and I don't think that's true. I also don't think the "trained" point is very strong, but we'd have to go through dozens of examples to show that - certainly relatively untrained rules-followers can enact rituals with strong magical effects in a lot of fantasy. The major issues with rituals in fantasy tend to be:I'm saying trained, not special. You don't need to be trained to ATTEMPT a ritual, but without training you are far more likely to fail or end up dead than succeed. The mystical words don't come with a mystical word to reader's language translator, so the person reading it won't know how to pronounce words that need very precise pronunciation and enunciation. Bulenoanthrayek. How exactly are all of those syllables pronounced? It's not bound to follow the rules of any language known to man.
A lot of times these untrained people end up summoning the wrong thing or calling it uncontrolled and ending up dead, or if not dead trying to get rid of it before it kills too many people.
That's why a feat exists. It's so you can perform the ritual, not attempt it with a high likelihood of failure or death.
1) The ritual does not do what it says/people don't understand what it does - i.e. people think the ritual summons and binds a demon, but it actually just summons one, or people think the ritual brings the dead back to life, but it actually just makes zombies.
2) Someone breaks the ritual causing disaster - i.e. smudging a line, extinguishing candles, stopping people finishing chants, etc.
3) The ritual doesn't require special training or mystic power, but does require ridiculous components which are incredibly hard to obtain or even unique.
I can't offhand think of any "performed the ritual poorly, got killed" stuff - I mean I imagine there is some but it's not common. It's "didn't know what the ritual did, performed it right, got killed" more often.
One of the coolest moments in SF/fantasy that I can think of is when someone accidentally performs a blood ritual in a way that actually works and breaks reality (the titular mistake of The Reality Dysfunction by Peter F Hamilton).
I think with the way things are costed in 5E, Ritual Caster is overpriced as a Feat. It was a reasonable charge in 4E when Feats were cheaper and the rituals were more diverse (and more ritual-like, rather than just slow-cast spells).