Something that came up in play recently, in that we expressed dissatisfaction with the Cleric’s spell Augury. As written, it is a simple ‘will the next three minutes be dangerous or not’ question, with a <30% failure chance and a high cost.
Sounds cool, but in practice, underwhelming for a Second Level spellslot. So far I’ve been waiving the component part of the spell, but I think I have a slightly better solution.
So, subject to playtesting:
Augury comes in two forms, a quick and dirty reading at the near future, and a more ritualistic casting that can reveal vague hints about a future action.
The quick version will function as we’ve been using it in game so far. The cleric takes a round to meditate on if a certain action (opening a door, destroying a rune, etc) will bring harm to the party if performed within the next 3 turns. The DM will roll to ascertain this, with a 70% + 1% per level chance of getting an answer, and the cleric will either get a feeling of assurance or foreboding.
The ritual version requires 1 turn of meditation. During this time, the cleric will use bones, cards, tea or a similar object to divine the outcome of a certain action within the next day. The chances of a true reading remain the same, and the answer (a vague vision, at the DM’s discretion) will be accompanied by an appropriate feeling. The ritualised version usually requires specialised components of great value (gilded cards drawn with special ink, dragon bone, 100gp crushed pearl in tea). There is a 5% chance (roll of 95-100) of the component being damaged and rendered unusable the act, representing bad omens or too much power being focused through them (cards bursting into flame, bones crumbling, tea tasting sour).
