Rping a prophet?

[CyberThread]

Do you think a player should be denied playing the role of a prophet, would require to much meta knowledge and being correct?

[Psyren]

Not at all. Just because they see the future doesn't mean they always have to understand it, or that it is always relevant. Give them random visions and nonsense sayings whenever you don't have anything specific to feed them and they can feel all prophety without revealing too much of the plot.

For example, one DM I had gave the Oracle a weird poem as a vision. He then told us outside the session that it didn't really mean anything and he just liked the sound of it, but later he planned to come up with a plot hook based on it to make it relevant later. About 10 sessions or so later, he did.

You can also give them visions of a future/alternate modern society - "large multicolored beetles with hard shining skin swallow multitudes of people, travel slowly down a pitch black river and peacefully vomit them up. The people then enter shining towers made of glass where strange symbols burn with cold fire at their summit." You can come up with dozens of stuff like this.

[firebrandtoluc]

I can do this with my DM. We have enough experience that I can usually figure out what he's got planned before the characters see it. A recent character of mine claimed prescience and I went ahead and called em as I saw em. Gelatinous cube, treasure crushing trap, etc. I was wrong at least once, but he fudged it and put what I called in there anyway. It was fun.

[Jack_Simth]

Do you think a player should be denied playing the role of a prophet, would require to much meta knowledge and being correct?
Depends on which sort of prophet. There's a few different basic varieties (at least in fiction, not commenting on Real-World stuff here).

1) Heavy symbolism and very subject to interpretation: Quite a lot of the prophets (at least in fiction) hand out prophecies that only make sense in retrospect, and even then being subject to interpretation. There's an example of this variety in OOTS (http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0015.html) - "when the goat turns red strikes true": Referring to This one (http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0021.html) or this one (http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0059.html)? This also came up in one of the Deep Space Nine episodes: "When the river wakes, stirred once more to Janir's side, three vipers will return to their nest in the sky" "When the vipers try to peer through the temple gates, a sword of stars will appear in the heavens. The temple will burn, and its gates shall be cast open." For a while it was thought this portented disaster (especially when three Cardassians returned), but it later turned out that the thing was referring to a comet (which shatters into three pieces over the course of the episode... and after passing through, makes the wormhole just slightly open continuously).
2) Mixed real and fake. In the old Buffy the Vampire Slayer series, Buffy occasionally had prophetic dreams. They contained... elements that were true future events. They also contained a rather lot of useless garbage. Sorting out what is the prophecy and what is the dream? Good luck.
3) Then, of course, there's full-on premembering. Highly detailed, accurate visions (which may or may not be set in stone).

1 and 2? Pretty easy for the DM to feed a player something workable. Many even enjoy dropping such clues. Not that it matters - it's quite possible for the player to come up with them, and make them fit after the fact, without any work from the DM at all (the trick being to keep it generic enough that it's unclear who's who, what's what, or maybe unclear that it's even immediately relevant at all).

3 is not generally suitable for a game. It can work out great in fiction, but there's a very high propensity for it removing player agency. That's fine in a book, movie, comic, or play, where most things are set by the writer(s) well before they happen anyway, but it doesn't work well when you've got five people all with their own ideas of what should happen and how it should come about.