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    Ogre in the Playground
     
    Planetar

    Join Date
    May 2018

    Default Re: How do handle Communing with the deities or oracles

    Some ideas I had:

    (1) "Weak" gods. It's somewhat of a cop-out, but the gods don't need to be omniscient. They don't need to have perfect memory (you don't remember in details what happened 20 years ago, why should they be able to?). They might have a "divine administration" of servant that store and organise information, and recover them when needed, but that might take some times.
    => With this approach, communing with god is no different from asking advice to the Archmage or any other powerful NPC. They have more chance to be correct than the average mortal, but can still be quite wrong.

    (2) Fundamentally inhuman gods. There is a lot of advices here and there on how to handle interactions between dragons and PCs. Like the fact that time is fundamentally different, and that a dragon might say "I need some time to answer" and disappear, to come back 100 years latter to give his answer to the hear, not understanding the urgency of the situations in which humans are usually dealing with. Those same advices can be applied to gods too. Their mindset can be so different that communication with them is extremely difficult. Their values and goal being on a timescale so different from humans that they might feel disconnected from reality and uncaring to the humans that contact them.
    => Why don't they answer clearly the question? They tried before, and are not convinced by the results, so now they're trying to be cryptic, or maybe they gave up on explaining the reason for their orders, and just give orders like "Do that. Why? You would not understand." (They might still be wrong if they don't actually have the power of prescience). Etc

    (3) Why so many obstacle against to go to see the seer? The answer is simple: the more peoples use the seer, the less effective they are, as as soon as you know your fate or someone else's fate, you can change it (willingly or not). It's like playing rock/paper/scissor, if one person can see what the other will play, they can change their choice to win. If both persons can see what the other was planing to play, no information is gained by anybody.

    EDIT:
    (4) Additional ideas, for Oracle and lower-level divination. If you have a Divination Tarot (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarot_card_reading), you can literally answer the divination by giving some of the cards and let the player be puzzled by them while still giving some kind of information (with cards like "Justice" or "Wheel of Fortune" or "Death"). Just avoid doing so for high level divination spells, as it might feel a little too easy to misinterpret.
    Last edited by MoiMagnus; 2021-04-27 at 09:42 AM.