I am new to Savage Worlds and new to GMing in general. Recently, I had the pleasure of GMing the published adventure "Class Ring" for the ETU setting. The player characters were all chosen from the published list of ETU Character Archetypes.
I am puzzled by the final showdown with the demon Solas. To banish him, the heroes need to successfully execute the ritual Exorcismus Daemonis. According to the stats for this ritual, it has a Casting Modifier of -4.
According to the ETU setting rules, to perform a ritual you use the ritualism skill, or if you don't have that, you use Smarts -2 with double the Casting Modifier (-8). None of the player characters actually had ritualism and neither did the friendly NPC Dr. Peter Hyde, so it was going to have to be cast using smarts.
Dr. Peter Hyde had the highest smarts (d8) and according to his bio actually created the ritual, so it made sense for him to perform the ritual. 2 heroes with Smarts d6 assisted with the ritual (Cooperative Rolls), while two attempted to delay Solas.
My understanding from reading the rules is that everybody participating in the ritual would make their Smarts roll at -10... -2 for using smarts and -8 for the doubled casting modifier.
This seems super dooper hard. Basically, to pull it off, the heroes would need a lot of aces. In fact, the only way to get success is to ace and be lucky with your next roll.
I note that the Dean's notes to the adventure strongly suggest at least one character have the ritualism skill, something I overlooked in preparation... in hindsight, I should have ruled that Dr. Peter Hyde had ritualism... after all, he created the bloody thing. But be that as it may, my questions still stand:
- In the scenario I describe above (no casters with Ritualism), is -10 the correct modifier to the smarts roll.
- Are heroes assisting with the ritual w/o Ritualism subject to the -10 modifier?
- Do heroes assisting with the ritual make their cooperative roll during their own turn in initiative order or do they make their cooperative roll at the same time as the hero leading the ritual. For example, if a hero's initiative order is after the caster of the ritual, would he make is roll with the leader so that the leader might benefit from the assistant's success? Or would the assistant roll on his turn in initiative order and his success would benefit the leader in the subsequent round?
