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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Crimson Longinus" data-source="post: 8759181" data-attributes="member: 7025508">In a more rules-light game solving this sort of thing via a skill roll (or similar) would be perfectly appropriate. However, D&D has classes and other ways for the characters to gain codified capabilities. If one wants to play a devout fighter whose prayers are occasionally answered they probably should take a feat that allows them to cast some divine spells. That being said, improvised action are of course allowed and should even be encouraged, they just shouldn't step on the toes of capabilities the players used character building resources for.Also, I feel best improvised actions are such  that use the specific environment/situation cleverly and thus are not just routinely repeatable. I would a bit careful about allowing "pray to a god for help" to work particularly reliably, because if it does, it can easily become a potential solution for everything. You can always pray and a god in theory could solve almost any problem. And of course there is a relatively high level cleric class feature for that.All that being said, if we are talking about just stabilising dying person, as noted, in 5e that is not particularly hard. So allowing subbing religion for medicine or allowing rolling medicine with advantage like some have suggested wouldn't be particularly huge deal. Though I still wouldn't want either of those become just automatically repeatable routines.Now if we are talking about something more, like actually saving a character that has already failed their last death save, then that's a bigger question. I think pretty reasonable default answer would be that it just can't be done. However, the setting metaphysics and the fictional position permitting, this certainly could be a setup for some sort of a dramatic deal with a god like Vax did in Critical Role. But it definitely should come with a significant cost, nor should it be easily repeatable.Now I actually did think a while ago about what effect, if any, prayers and religious rituals of laypeople would have in my setting, and I decided that the usual way for the god to bless people would be via divine guidance/inspiration for specific endeavours. So for example if you made sacrifices/supplications to Vajurnu, the God of Travel before embarking on a journey, you might gain their favour. Mechanically this would be represented by "divine inspiration points" that could be used for rerolls for rolls that you're required to do in order to get safely to your destination. It is very subtle and non flashy magic. A sceptic might even suspect whether the gods did anything. But the faithful will know that it was due the favour of the gods that their mission was successful and they would be right about that.[USER=42582]@pemerton[/USER] I know that you have a habit of starting threads by asking these sort of context-free questions because you're actually wanting to make some sort of a point. I think it would be helpful if you would just explain what the your actual intent is in the first post.</blockquote>

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