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Message: <blockquote data-quote="gizmo33" data-source="post: 3208243" data-attributes="member: 30001">I am reading the SRD and I don't see anything about "full and complete answers" under Commune, or even stuff about what the "god thinks is important".  It says "correct within the limits of the entities knowledge".  It also says that a deity won't give answers that are "contrary to the deity's interests" in the case of short answers - but I think it's really stretching it that somehow establishing who is and is not supposed to be a member of the faith is somehow against a Lawful deity's interest.  However, it is, apparently, against the DMs interest.IMO whether or not Lawful Evil people are allowed to be members of a given church would be a core issue to be settled by an organization.  Not some trivial element only of interest to some "Oprah-like" god.  The rest of your post is a long string of basically trivializing the importance of this question with a bunch of anachronistic mis-statements of what divination is really trying to accomplish.  Being a DM, means, of course, that you're allowed to talk in circles and wave your hands and explain nothing with regards to the conduct of your NPCs, but I really can't see how a stable, Lawful deity would find this in her interest.With regards to some of the rest of your post:  The deities in the 3E D&DG are all human-like beings with finite powers, the Hebrew god certainly provided his followers with more direction than the 10 commandments, real world examples without divination magic are not useful analogies in understanding a DnD world that has divination magic.The "Oracle of Delphi" example was not relevant to the question of metaphor (itself of questionable relevance when talking about the "Yes/No" answers of the Commune spell).  What it is relevant to is the desire of the deity to answer "questions of piety", which the article asserts was it's central purpose.  All this while you're suggesting that a deity expects to make a few vague statements regarding what they want from their worshippers.  If that were the case then the role of the Oracle of Delphi within Greece would be incomprehensible.   In any case, unless you can construct an example of how a "Yes" answer to a question can be constructed as a metaphor, I'm pretty sure we have little left to agree on here.And speaking of metaphor (or analogy in this case), one of our main differences is the way we apply real world history, religion, and mythology to these problems.  IMO one has to match concepts with their closest analogue.  It doesn't make any sense to me to talk about how to interpret magical divination with examples from non-magical history.  It doesn't make sense to talk about what Thor's expectations would be of a paladin.  This is mixing and matching things from completely different environments.  You can find equivalent technologies to magic in many instance, but IMO it serves no constructive purpose to belittle divination with anachronistic comparisons to Oprah and telephones when it really obscures the actual expectations that people had regarding divination (either historical or mythological examples would apply here).</blockquote>

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