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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6291592" data-attributes="member: 4937">BTW, I love the good natured way you argue your reply.I can understand the arms race objection, but I think it applies to any character ability and not just skills.  What is sense motive but a lie dectection spell unless you counter it with runaway bluffing ability?  What is Track and boundless skills in that regard but discern location unless you counter it in some fashion or just say 'no'?  When your player can "Track a Falcon on a cloudy day", then you are in an arms race if you want the murderer to get away from the scene whether or not spells are involved.Well sure, but that isn't problem limited to only magical forensics.  The murderer wears ordinary disguises, tells ordinary lies, and wore gloves to avoid leaving finger prints.  The arms race is still in place and is inevitable in any contest between a criminal and increasingly compotent investigators. So why not spells to?If your NPCs have +30 Bluff skill, what good is it in having a Sense Motive skill sense you are always blocking the PC's abilities?   The answer to what hints and tips you give to the party to unravel the true murderer is, "The same you would give from search, sense motive, knowledge, appraise and spot checks."  (Or whatever skill system you use.)  Each followed up on avenue may (or may not) offer an additional insight as to what the whole picture looks like.  For example, if they party uses stone tell to see the murder or hear about it, they get some insight as to what the murderer looked like.  If they see that a person who looked like Tim the Enchanter did it, the clue might not be 'Tim did it, you win!'.  The clue might actually be, "Either Tim did it, forebear the thought, or someone who knew Tim well enough to pull off a convincing disguise of Tim did it."   Or supposing they don't get a face from the clue, the clue might be, "Someone wearing a blue cape with silver threads did the murder."  Interrogating Tim's maidservant might discover that Tim had such a cloak, but it went missing (so she says) a few days before the murder.One possible answer is that the diety, being less than omniscient simply doesn't know.  If the murder took place underground (or at night) it's rather unlikely that the cleric's patron sun diety actually knows the answer.  The answer might well be, "I don't know." or "Ask again later." or as the spell suggests, "Unclear."  One mistake I often see is attributing to dieties the knowledge of an omniscient monotheistic diety.  In general, my advice with Commune is that if the question is outside of the purview of the deities sphere of influence, the deity certainly doesn't know and you should communicate this expectation to the players.  And even if does fall in to the deities potential sphere of influence, only deities of the mightiest sort are very likely to have noticed.  Commune is generally useful for asking the Sun deity about things that have happened in broad daylight to worshippers of the sun deity and so forth.  The sun deity simply knows nothing about what has happened underground to the followers of the god of stonecutters, and would need to barter with another deity for that information.  And if we are going to be a rules lawyer about this, if another diety is involved in the plot, examining the rules on deities perceptions, it's highly likely that if hitherto the incident was not brought to the dieties attention, that the whole incident has been cloaked by some other diety.  It takes a standard action within a few hours of an incident and no other deity involved for the diety to discover something.  If you were to go to your rank 6 sun deity and say, "I'd like to know what happened in the basement of the temple of the fire god 8 hours ago.", well good luck with that.  "Me too.", is the appropriate response.That question BTW is one that is terribly likely to go wrong in the short term, even if the diety does know, because you failed to actually ask about guilt, leading to a situation where both 'yes' and 'no' are wrong and the diety may respond, "Unclear." simply to avoid being misleading.  Hope you have a high caster level and can think to ask the right questions if that's going to be your approach.  However, in general, I agree, if the PC's are clever enough to ask the right questions and have a sufficiently high caster level and enough time to cast the spells then Commune can be a trivializing 'I win' button.  But I'd also be looking for different restrictions regarding toning it down than simply making it something only NPCs did - which IMO is neither logically consistant nor particularly interesting nor particularly player protagonizing.  For example, the 100XP surcharge for collect calls to ones diety is one such limitation that could be played with.  If you were to up this to 100XP per answer, players would be very careful before placing the call.  Or we could limit things like, "Please limit to one call per cleric per month.  The deity is very busy right now and every moment they spend talking to you is a moment that they can't spend observing the world to get the answers you are looking for."This is however I think a very different complaint than one that suggests divination spells are campaign wreckers, and would actually be closer to the one I've experienced as a player and a DM.  Generic spells about the future or past are very hard to run in a way that they actually provide useful information even when you the DM want to empower the players to use them.  Either nothing interesting has happened in the situation and you are struggling to find relevant events in a hitherto unimagined past, or else you are struggling to construct a prophesy for the future when the PC's decisions will have such a great impact on what that future is.   This typically results in discouraging the player from further attempts to dip in the pool, because they think that they'll be blocked on every attempt even when you are actually prepared.</blockquote>

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