What counts as a “specific goal, event, or activity” for the Divination spell?

[Cenorin]

The divination spell reads in part:

Quote:

Similar to augury but more powerful, a divination spell can provide you with a useful piece of advice in reply to a question concerning a specific goal, event, or activity that is to occur within 1 week.

What counts as specific enough to be a valid subject? The immediate motivation for this comes from a Kingmaker campaign. My players came up with the idea of casting divination once a week to ask "Will anything attack our kingdom this week?" They make the case that "keeping the citizens of our kingdom safe" is a specific goal.

I don't think that's specific enough, but I'm trying to figure out what would be. For example, what do you think about these as divination questions?

1. Will anything attack the village of Willowford this week?
2. Will an organized fighting force attack the village of Willowford this week?
3. Will the kingdom of Varnock attack the village of Willowford this week?
4. Azzarokor said that he would be back for revenge. Will he attempt to take his revenge on me this week?
5. Azzarokor said that he would ruin the harvest festival this week. How can I stop him?
6. Azzarokor said that he would ruin the harvest festival this week. Will he attack by air?

I would say that 4 and 6 are valid, but I'd like to hear other takes. 5 is a little weird because "How can I stop him?" is so open-ended, but I would probably give a hint like "he likes to use mind control spells - ward yourself against those". I'm not sure about 2 and 3.

One limitation I've imposed is that obscure or protected knowledge might be beyond divination's power. For example, "Where is the legendary artifact called 'The Eye of Ragnarok' hidden?" would yield the equivalent of "I don't know". I've seen this limitation in published adventures, and my players seem fine with it.

[Matt2VK]

UG! I hate these type of spells. Completely open to interpretation and the answer is subject to change depending on what type of action the players do.

Not a big fan of any of those questions. They're either to open ended or very limited.

Here's the question I came up with as it gives a specific goal (Protect the people) while asking for a useful piece of advice.

What activity can be done to protect the people of Willowford, the village, and the territory surrounding it?

Just need to remind your players. No plan survives contact with the enemy. There's a reason why most empires don't rely of the Divination spell. They get advice and act on it. Others see there action and change there plans accordingly. Advice that was giving, while maybe preventing that situation, has now changed the situation to something else.

So asking what prep can be done for a more favorable future instead of trying to get detail knowledge that is subject to change would work better for you & your players.

My view of Divination is it plots out the trends of the future, not the actual future.

BLAH, rambling here. Hopefully I've helped some what.

[Mysterious Stranger]

If you look at the short description of divination in the spell list it states “Provides useful advice for specific proposed actions. It does not allow you to predict if an event will occur, that requires commune or something even more powerful. What divination can do is to provide useful advice about an event that the players are planning to do.

So the first 4 examples are invalid and divination will provide no answer. Example 6 is also not valid because asking to predict what someone else is going to do. Question 5 is the only one close to a valid question. Even then it is poorly phrased. A better way of putting it would be how can we protect the harvest festival? Ironically that question could result in a warning about him attacking from the air. Watch the skies would be a legitimate answer for that question if Azzarokor is planning to attack from the air.

Basically when the characters use divination you need to be able to determine what is their proposed action. If you cannot determine what action the players are proposing the spell will not work. Anything that starts with the word will is not going to work. Asking if something is going to attack a specific town is not a valid question, but asking about their plans to attack a specific town is.

Also statements that a person made have made are not on any consequence to the spell. Typically the question should be in the form of a single sentence. So Azzarokor said he would ruin the harvest festival. How do we stop him may cause the spell to fail. Asking how do we stop Azzarokor from ruining the harvest festival is a much clearer question. Considering this is a cleric spell and any cleric able to cast it is going to have a high wisdom giving the players a break on this type of thing is probably a good idea. I would suggest when a player uses a poorly worded question and you understand what they mean, that you rephrase the question and ask if that is what they mean.