D&D General Why do people like Alignment?

[kermit4karate]

Sure. That's why it wouldn't be right to tell @pemerton he's wrong about what he did. He's the only one of us who was there. He knows the little cues and actions that clued him and the rest of the group into what the DM was doing. He knows the bigger things that were done. Add to that the time factor with him forgetting a lot of those details, but knowing that they were there and made the right decision, and the difficulty of putting it all into text and even accurately describing some things, and you have a situation where those of us 100 miles above and several decades removed, shouldn't be telling him that he was wrong.

It's okay to ask questions about the details, or even say that given those same details you would or would not have made that decision, but it's not okay to tell him that he was wrong for his decision. We don't know nearly enough to make that call.

Wait, wait, wait, wait wait! @Maxperson, if this is a veiled attempt to encourage a reasonable, thoughtful approach to judging a situation, well, you've come to the wrong place, buddy!!

 

[Maxperson]

Wait, wait, wait, wait wait! @Maxperson, if this is a veiled attempt to encourage a reasonable, thoughtful approach to judging a situation, well, you've come to the wrong place, buddy!!

Veiled?

That's a pretty thin veil, buddy!

 

[kermit4karate]

It is. Not specifically the deck of many things, but if a god doesn't shut down frivolous uses of commune, he's going to simultaneously get 3 guys asking over and over about decks of many things, 4365 clerics asking if they should go on a date with this person or that other one, 15352 if they should go to the casino tonight, and on and on and on. He's got farms to take care of and serious communing to do.

That true; burnout's a thing. That's why all gods should get at least -- at least -- two weeks of PTO/year.

No farms to help or crops to poison, prayers to answer, whiny followers. Nothing.

Just chill...

 

[EzekielRaiden]

It is. Not specifically the deck of many things, but if a god doesn't shut down frivolous uses of commune, he's going to simultaneously get 3 guys asking over and over about decks of many things, 4365 clerics asking if they should go on a date with this person or that other one, 15352 if they should go to the casino tonight, and on and on and on. He's got farms to take care of and serious communing to do.

This is a slippery-slope argument. It does not actually demonstrate what you wish to demonstrate.

 

[Maxperson]

This is a slippery-slope argument. It does not actually demonstrate what you wish to demonstrate.

No. There's no slippery slope there at all. Frivolous vs. Non-frivolous isn't something getting worse and worse and worse down the slope.

 

[Umbran]

As was said by me, those deities are spread out by the millions of threads simultaneously across a huge number of settings. A bunch of clerics will be communing with him at any given time. Some shlub bothering him over and over and over in order to get a good draw from a deck of cards isn't going to be looked upon favorably.

Maybe this was brought up before and I missed it...
This was talking about the Commune spell, right?
The spell whose description starts with, "You contact a deity or a divine proxy and ask up to three questions ..."
So, I guess, never mind that the spell description has a solution for this - that gods have proxies to handle the small stuff.

You are presenting what seems to me to be a contradiction - a deity whose attention is stretched to its limits, but still has attention to spare for minutiae. The deity has to, and is capable of, handling millions of processes, but is then so stretched that it cannot tolerate waste, so it puts even more attention on that one guy, and how his requests are getting frivolous.

If the Commune spell is such a burden for a deity to handle... why do they make that spell available at all?

Because if the god allowed that sort of thing, he'd have thousands or even hundreds of thousands of shlubs doing it.

How the deity handled a cleric in Faerun isn't going to be obvious to another cleric in Greyhawk. So, how does this word get around for there to be a deterrent effect to keep the shlubs from doing it? Is there like, a multi-planar deific social media account for clerics where the gods post, "Smote Jacob the Pedantic for playing 20 Questions with Commune," or something?

 

[EzekielRaiden]

No. There's no slippery slope there at all. Frivolous vs. Non-frivolous isn't something getting worse and worse and worse down the slope.

Your argument is, "If we allow X, then that will mean people ask about Y, and then Z, and then W, and then P, and then Q, and then R (etc.), so we cannot allow X."

That is a slippery slope. It's one of the most classic examples thereof: "Well if we allow kids to dance, then they'll start doing things purely for the fun of it, and playing hooky, and using drugs, and getting pregnant, and playing pool, so clearly we can't ever let the kids dance."* The slippery slope is "because we allowed X, now we have to allow everything", and you haven't actually shown that. That's precisely the problem: you are asserting a chain of--allegedly--required consequences, without actually showing that those required consequences are...required. Because I don't buy that. I don't buy that this cleric asking about the draws of a deck actually leads to an epidemic of clerics asking about their love lives or where to eat this evening. Not least because it's a 5th level spell!

*This is a reference to Footloose, and this kind of argument is quite literally part of the plot. Reverend Moore even gets the final push to fix the mess he's made of things when some of his congregants begin burning books they claim are unsafe for teens to read.

 

[pemerton]

This is a slippery-slope argument. It does not actually demonstrate what you wish to demonstrate.

It's probably more like a "floodgates" argument than a slippery slope one.

Personally, it seems to me that if a deity can cope with all the clerical prayers for spells every morning, a little bit of Communing hardly seems like it will bother them.

Or to come at it another way: if a GM wants to veto the use of divination to assist in draws from a DoMT, then I guess that's their prerogative. They can even lampshade it if they want to - "Sorry, your god makes it a point of principle not to answer those frivolous questions." But trying to argue that fictional coherence strongly suggests, or even entails, that those questions can't be answered seems hopeless to me: gods have exactly as much capacity for attention and cognition, when it comes to noticing and responding to prayers, as the GM deems them to have.

If your gods are typical mythological gods who don't know everything an augury could be wrong even if the rolls are good.

I don't remember anything in any version of the Augury spell that says that the GM can use it to provide the player with false information on a success.

In the AD&D PHB it refers to "The base chance for correctly divining the augury". In 5e D&D, it says that the DM choose the omen based on what the results of the action will be. I don't have the 2nd ed AD&D or 3E wordings, but I'd be surprised if they said that the GM can just decide to give a false answer while presenting it as a true answer. I mean, in that case what would even be the point of the spell?

 

[Micah Sweet]

I still do not understand why this is such a horrendous problem. The requests for this are going to be a drop in the bucket. It's not like the Deck of Many Things is appearing before millions of simultaneous worshipers. You're making this out to be something a bazillion people could do simultaneously. It isn't.

I'd just bypass the whole thing and use @Lanefan 'S idea that the Deck is simply immune to divination.

 

[Umbran]

It's probably more like a "floodgates" argument than a slippery slope one.

"Given them an inch, and they'll take a yard."

Unfortunately it ends up as, "I am a deity, great and powerful... but need a spam-blocker on my prayer line!"

Actually, it sounds to me more like using an in-fiction justification to handle an out-of-fiction issue: The in-fiction gods police use of Commune, because the GM has a problem with how the spell is being used in play. It winds up having issues with scrutiny, because the point is not actually consistent fiction, but passive-aggressively telling the players what they ought not do.