this post was submitted on 05 Jan 2024
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Oracle / Seer / Diviner
Great flavour, lots of precedence in stories. But in practice if abilities didn't give us info/tantalising hints it was a waste of resources, and if it did then we'd skipped over fun adventure story beats.
On the one hand they are a great way for the GM to give you info and hints. On the other hand, they can feel like they short cut'd fun story-rich adventures to libraries and sages and NPCs with secrets we needed to know etc.
I think the DnD 5e School of Divination wizard did some good things to make a diviner fun without ruining the vibe. I love the Portent's ability to "see the future" with its messing of the d20 roll as well as the Expert Divination (you gain 1 lower spell slot when casting divination spells) allows you to cast divination spells without "wasting" slots if you didn't get anything good. It is really a hard concept to use often because at some point as you get more powerful you transform into a NPC just giving advice instead of going on adventures.
Another thing that makes Oracle / Seer / Diviner characters difficult to GM for is that you need to know things in advance, where the adventure leads to etc. As one whose GMing style leans heavily into Play To Find Out that sort of characters is kind of counter to it.
That said it is highly dependent of what the player want out of such an archetype. If it is a flavour for how the character solves problems I'm all for that. Touching an item to get a vision/impression for something (adventure) related to it go ahead. That is not too different to other ways of investigating. But the player who wants those powers to get "quest markers" or to completely negate obstacles ("hurr durr I have foresight so I've seen the ambush") gets hard noes from me.
Also agreeing with @dumples@kbin.social, D&D 5e Divination wizards are very well made and the divination spells work well in those kind of worlds.
Of course, if you know you have a seer in your party, you can plan ahead and come up with some prepared scenes. They don't neccesarily have to be predicated on what's going on near the players either; they could, for example, foresee the bbeg tormenting his captives - get some flavor about how evil he is, maybe some plot-relevant information to use later, but it doesn't actually depend on which level of the dungeon they're on or whatever. Obviously, this depends on the details of exactly what spells they're using and in what system.
I’d be interested to see The Sprawl or Blades In The Dark’s “planning” mechanics applied to an oracle.
The Soldier playbook in the Sprawl gets to roll at the at start of each job to determine how many bullshit points they can spend during the job to get where they need to or have something they need.
Alternately if you like vague prophecies I’m picturing a system where at the start of the adventuring day you roll on a table of prophecy fragments, each with a mechanical effect, and the more powerful you get the better effects you can have and the more fragments you can roll for. That way you can have vague prophetic words that have a mechanical effect for you to play the hand of destiny.