I've been thinking about house ruling it as such, and decided to ask the hivemind to see if there is any obvious reasoning I have missed. It is almost entirely a roleplay spell, in comparison to other rituals that have actual mechanical and informational benefits, get requires a finite resources to use.
Sending can have mechanical and informational benefits. For as long as war has existed, the way they have been fought has always centered around technology’s capacity to relay information across distances to enable coordination. IRL history, battles, even wars might have had different outcomes based on the capacity to send a short message like this, and receive a response. Entire languages have been invented just to accomplish this feat, and entire other languages have been invented to keep these messages secure against interceptions. And that’s just one potential application of sending. It’s such a useful ability that sending stones is uncommon. That rarity puts them on par with a +1 weapon, and you can only use a pair of sending stones 1ce per day.
I agree with with IamSposta. It's got less to do with gameplay balance and more to do with the worldbuilding and storytelling implications of making it a ritual. Consider a spell like Create Food and Water; if that were a ritual you'd expect cities to be organized around food-conjuring wizards instead of farms and hunters. That's not necessarily a bad thing but it does create a drastically different (and perhaps less familiar) kind of world that the game designers felt maybe shouldn't be the default.
All fair arguments, though I doubt wizards of the coast thought about the world building implications too much, considering this is the same game where we have Clone, yet lichdom is supposed to be a massive temptation for wizards (it would take ones 100 uses of clone to even approach the cost of turning to lichdom, and that's just the monatery cost. 100 uses is thousands of years of life for even the shortest lived races).
Regardless, perhaps some sort of usage limit would need to be placed on the spell if it were to be made a ritual then. Maybe a 33 percent chance of being unable to cast the spell again until competing a long rest?
Prerequisite: 5th level, Pact of the Tome feature A new page appears in your Book of Shadows. With your permission, a creature can use its action to write its name on that page, which can contain a number of names equal to your Charisma modifier (minimum of 1).
You can cast the sending spell, targeting a creature whose name is on the page, without using a spell slot and without using material components. To do so, you must write the message on the page. The target hears the message in their mind, and if the target replies, their message appears on the page, rather than in your mind. The writing disappears after 1 minute.
As an action, you can magically erase a name on the page by touching the name on it.
Basically, you get a phone with a texting plan, but you can only fit 3-4 people in your contacts.
Key balance mechanic: The creature must write its own name into the book, so you can't contact anyone who you haven't met yet, and if you erase their name, you have to travel back to them before being able to use this again.
It also writes into a book, so the Warlock doesn't get the benefit of telepathy.
Title.
I've been thinking about house ruling it as such, and decided to ask the hivemind to see if there is any obvious reasoning I have missed. It is almost entirely a roleplay spell, in comparison to other rituals that have actual mechanical and informational benefits, get requires a finite resources to use.
Sending can have mechanical and informational benefits. For as long as war has existed, the way they have been fought has always centered around technology’s capacity to relay information across distances to enable coordination. IRL history, battles, even wars might have had different outcomes based on the capacity to send a short message like this, and receive a response. Entire languages have been invented just to accomplish this feat, and entire other languages have been invented to keep these messages secure against interceptions. And that’s just one potential application of sending. It’s such a useful ability that sending stones is uncommon. That rarity puts them on par with a +1 weapon, and you can only use a pair of sending stones 1ce per day.
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I agree with with IamSposta. It's got less to do with gameplay balance and more to do with the worldbuilding and storytelling implications of making it a ritual. Consider a spell like Create Food and Water; if that were a ritual you'd expect cities to be organized around food-conjuring wizards instead of farms and hunters. That's not necessarily a bad thing but it does create a drastically different (and perhaps less familiar) kind of world that the game designers felt maybe shouldn't be the default.
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All fair arguments, though I doubt wizards of the coast thought about the world building implications too much, considering this is the same game where we have Clone, yet lichdom is supposed to be a massive temptation for wizards (it would take ones 100 uses of clone to even approach the cost of turning to lichdom, and that's just the monatery cost. 100 uses is thousands of years of life for even the shortest lived races).
Regardless, perhaps some sort of usage limit would need to be placed on the spell if it were to be made a ritual then. Maybe a 33 percent chance of being unable to cast the spell again until competing a long rest?
Take a look at the Far Scribe Warlock Invocation
Basically, you get a phone with a texting plan, but you can only fit 3-4 people in your contacts.
Key balance mechanic: The creature must write its own name into the book, so you can't contact anyone who you haven't met yet, and if you erase their name, you have to travel back to them before being able to use this again.
It also writes into a book, so the Warlock doesn't get the benefit of telepathy.