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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6522121" data-attributes="member: 42582">I didn't ignore Commune. I discussed it at length. Here is what I said (post 932):I'm also not really sure how a Commune spell helps. First, look at it from the perspective of the fiction. What does a Commune spell consist in? The PC performs a certain ritual, and then is vouchsafed a certain experience. If the PC has the experience without the ritual, how is that any different? There are certainly D&D modules out there in which PCs have prophetic dreams without having to perform rituals prior to them. Now look at it from the perspective of the real world, rather than the fiction. How does a Commune spell help? The player of the paladin asks, via Commune, "Did you save me from the Baleful Polymorph?" How, as GM, am I meant to know what the answer is that the Raven Queen will provide? Either I have to make it up or the player has to make it up. If the player makes it up, what difference does it make whether the player makes it up when the Commune spell is cast, or when the curse ends?The Commune spell reveals backstory: it doesn't provide any mechanics for creating backstory. Someone has to write it - why not the player?More generally - why is it important that the only miracles be those generated by using discrete class features or spell? What adverse effect results from narrating other events in the game as consequences of divine beneficence?Isn't it obvious that the clerical divine intervention ability is not the only form of divine intervention in the game? For instance, every memorisation and casting of a clerical spell is an instance of divine intervention that doesn't conform to that pattern. Likewise every turning of some undead. Not to mention that a GM would be free to have gods intervene in other ways - eg bring a curse down on a city, which the PCs might then try and lift - without it having to be the case that some NPC cleric called down that curse.And if your thief was an arcane trickster, wouldn't that claim make sense? Though 5e reintroduces anti-magic shells, which create complexities around this sort of narration.Yes. It has a series of escalating Religion-based divinations - Consult Mystic Sages, Consult Oracle, Voice of Fate - whose scope of knowledge is defined by reference to whether it is known to the most learned sages, known to at least one creature, or concerns matters yet to occur.</blockquote>

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