Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6750958" data-attributes="member: 4937">For all the spells that have been created for D&D over the years, most of which I feel are useless variation (how many flavors of direct damage do you really need), I keep stumbling over gaping holes in the spell lists where there ought to be things but I've never really thought about it.I've got two questions.  The first is very general.  What holes in the available spells have you noticed before, and how have you tried to fill them?The second is specific ideas regarding the hole I've noticed most recently, which is the idea of contacting a spirit, which is a very basic magical trope.  Now, there are plenty of rules in D&D for summoning a spirit to get it to do something for you - notably fight your enemies - but there aren't really any rules for if you just wanted to contact a spirit and ask it a question.  This seems like it ought to be a lot easier than a summoning conjuration, and interestingly might be in the divination school, letting you have a bigger range of 'consorts with spirits'.The spell that has the closest flavor to what I'm thinking of is Contact Other Plane, which is a big hefty-weight version of what I'm thinking of in that it lets you phone a greater deity or the like.  What if you would like to just like to reach out to someone or something at the bottom of the hierarchy of spirits.  Obviously, you are more likely to not get an answer, but you don't need phenomenal cosmic power here or be anyone special to speak to an ordinary spirit being, nor are you necessarily risking going insane.  What I want is something between the flavor of Summon Monster and Contact Other Plane, available as a 1st level spell, reasonably restricted so as to be balanced but also reasonably reliably so as to be worthwhile.  Alternately, you can think of it as being more like Planar Binding, only the spirit isn't forced into any sort of bargain - it just answers a question and leaves.Mechanically, some of the balancing factors could be:Possible Restrictions:1) There is a chance no one is home, or they glance at your caller ID and just ignore you.2) A random spirit picks up the phone.3) The spirit is annoyed and potentially hostile.4) The spirit doesn't know the answer.Your ideas for mechanically handling any of the above are welcome.I'm interested in interesting ideas for how we pick the spirit that answers.  Randomly select something?  Let the player pick something appropriate from a monster summoning list?   I'm even more interested in how we determine what questions are appropriate.  The obvious thing is to limit the DC in some fashion, but one of my most frustrating tasks is setting a DC for knowledge rolls or figuring out how much knowledge is implied by a given degree of success.   I just can't think of anything better than a chance based on arbitrarily classifying how difficult the question is.  The Contact Other Plane spell assumes deities and that all questions are basically equal.  You can ask about minute trivia and general knowledge with equal chances of success.  That might make some sense for a deity, but we'd want more reasonable limits on what you can ask an earth elemental, a dretch, or whatever.</blockquote>

Verification