[Genesis]

Originally Posted by Sindri

I'm not sure I understand. My players don't think they are clever, they are clever. If they weren't clever, I wouldn't be gaming with them. A substantial part of the point of gaming for me is getting together with friends and testing our cleverness.

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We are playing a game and that implicitly involves me playing with them. What's more realistic people abuse things like crazy. Nobody ever didn't do something because it "wouldn't be sporting to the laws of physics." If their abuses of divination lead to a bad result it means that they way I set up divination was badly done... thus this thread.

What I meant here is sort of what hal has gotten at - giving the players a chance to go 20 questions with your plot can kill it pretty quick.

Apart from that, player/character separation is pretty important in the games that I run (although obviously people have different reactions to this). Don't let clever players use their knowledge of the fact that they're in a game to abuse oracular abilities. Clever players should be using their cleverness to play characters - gaming the divination system isn't necessarily a flaw in the system; it's just as much a flaw of RP (you can't game the world in most settings, anyone who does so is participating in bad faith).

It's definitely important to keep in mind how divination works in fiction and historically but the aim of the thread is really functional design rather than aesthetic design. I'm not sufficiently drawn to any one style of resolving divination such that that will be a part of the feel of the world and thus justify itself purely on aesthetic grounds so above all the way divination works should prioritize not producing unintended consequences due to realistic usage that interfere with PCs going around and doing PC stuff and ideally encouraging that sort of stuff. Fictional and historical divination is especially problematic since the protagonists rarely do much in the way of divination themselves instead of going to someone else.

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They do? Being sent trouble doesn't come to mind as a common problem for diviners. Sure they fail to understand things all the time but I can't rely on the players misunderstanding. I could just make up prophesies and then manipulate things later to achieve them but I'm honestly not super fond of prophesies in the first place so taking a risk and spending effort on them doesn't really appeal to me. And of course if the intention isn't for the PCs to extract information from divination then what's the point? It's not like they will sink valuable resources into divination if that's the case or be happy if they do. Certainly if divinations in and of themselves interested me I might throw them in anyway, but they don't really. They are just means to an end by allowing additional avenues for researching stuff and testing wits against villains and whatnot. If I could reliably produce prophesies where people go "Wow that's totally cool and makes sense and we totally didn't guess that beforehand." sure that would be a fun addition but I don't trust my ability to do so and the penalty for a poorly handled prophesy is worse than the payoff.

I'm having a lot of trouble thinking of a mythological/fictional/anything setting with divination where knowledge of the future doesn't routinely come back to bite the bum of people who act on it, actually. You're right that diviners are often spared the worst of the fireworks (except for all the cursed ones, like Kassandra, etc.), but that's mostly because they're not the ones that are trying to cheat fate - they don't often act on their knowledge. But everyone else, from Oedipus, Agamemnon, and Cuchulain to Macbeth, gets screwed. Heck, the entire Harry Potter series happens because of the various misinterpretations and unforeseen consequences of acting on a single prophesy! Gamers, knowing that they're gaming, have a tendency to be wary of traps set by GMs. My point was that you shouldn't let their cleverness spoil one of the Great Lessons of Prophesy in Fiction: knowledge of the future can only serve to doom those that act on it.

I gladly admit I'm making an aesthetic argument here - but I think this points to a mechanical solution: knowledge of the future is a 'cheat' for players, so you shouldn't feel bad using it to 'cheat' as a GM either. It might be on one of the PC's sheets, but it's still your tool. Give the players whatever information you like, however you like it. Don't let them use it to try and 'outsmart' you - remember you're not the adversary, despite what players often think. You're there to craft a rewarding story, divination be damned.

Anyway, that's why I'm arguing against a strict mechanical solution to divination: it invites player abuse and doesn't serve the purposes of the story. Where the purposes of the story are furthered by divination, the GM should allow the story to be furthered, by all means - but if you put concrete rules to it, and the players know them, it turns divination from a maddening and vague glimpse into a tool to be perfected. Divination can't be perfected.

I had an idea for a game where all the PCs would be precogs of some sort, and divination mechanics would be a central aspect of the game, but that's a very different sort of story - and I certainly wouldn't let those mechanics bleed into other games, where the focus isn't on fortune-telling.