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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 5046053" data-attributes="member: 4937">Divinations can be really hard on the DM because the DM often doesn't know the answer.  Many DM's simply give as vague of answers as they can get away with out of frustration.My experience with divinations is that they work pretty well when they let the player's play 20 questions and get 'yes'/'no' questions.  When they rely on the DM predicting the future or making up some poetic riddle on the spot, that is usually too high of a burden on the DM and the spell proves useless in practice.  Also, divination spells are very hard to balance.  They tend to be either balanced by something ('vagueness') that renders them useless whenever it matters, or else gamebreaking in the sense that they shortcut plots.  Adjudicating 'speak with the dead' is a case in point.In the case of your doors, I would have probably tried to use the weal/woe answers to address your specific concerns in a 'yes'/'no' way.  I'm aware of just how problimatic vague divinations can be and I try to do my best to make them roughly as useful as they were intended to be.  However, I fully sympathize with any DM that panics when the player attempts some sort of precognition.</blockquote>