I think the DnD 5e School of Divination wizard did some good things to make a diviner fun without ruining the vibe. I love the Portent’s ability to “see the future” with its messing of the d20 roll as well as the Expert Divination (you gain 1 lower spell slot when casting divination spells) allows you to cast divination spells without “wasting” slots if you didn’t get anything good. It is really a hard concept to use often because at some point as you get more powerful you transform into a NPC just giving advice instead of going on adventures.

I’d be interested to see The Sprawl or Blades In The Dark’s “planning” mechanics applied to an oracle.

The Soldier playbook in the Sprawl gets to roll at the at start of each job to determine how many bullshit points they can spend during the job to get where they need to or have something they need.

Alternately if you like vague prophecies I’m picturing a system where at the start of the adventuring day you roll on a table of prophecy fragments, each with a mechanical effect, and the more powerful you get the better effects you can have and the more fragments you can roll for. That way you can have vague prophetic words that have a mechanical effect for you to play the hand of destiny.

Another thing that makes Oracle / Seer / Diviner characters difficult to GM for is that you need to know things in advance, where the adventure leads to etc. As one whose GMing style leans heavily into Play To Find Out that sort of characters is kind of counter to it.

That said it is highly dependent of what the player want out of such an archetype. If it is a flavour for how the character solves problems I’m all for that. Touching an item to get a vision/impression for something (adventure) related to it go ahead. That is not too different to other ways of investigating. But the player who wants those powers to get “quest markers” or to completely negate obstacles (“hurr durr I have foresight so I’ve seen the ambush”) gets hard noes from me.

Also agreeing with @dumples@kbin.social, D&D 5e Divination wizards are very well made and the divination spells work well in those kind of worlds.

I’ve only seen diviners as a type handled properly in one game which, if my faulty memory is correct, was C&S (2nd edition, probably also 1st, but not 3rd onward), but I may be huffing paint thinner.

First, diviners had a group of useful spells like detecting traps, hidden things, etc. This meant you didn’t get that whole weirdo vision quest thing with “information” that was only recognizable as such long after the fact, rendering the divination kind of useless, as the only thing a diviner could do.

But even for the visions there was a decent system in place. The diviner would cast the spell and based on the results of that roll, paired with a roll (or decision) made in secret by the GM, get a degree of success that translated into percentile points. The GM’s roll/decision decided between good or bad omens.

If the GM rolled/decided on good omens, they’d come up with one of those vague, flavourful visions so beloved byirritating to players. But… at any point for the duration of the cast augury, if something that could kinda/sorta be interpreted to belong to that vision showed up in play (GMs being encouraged to err on the side of the player), the player could use some of that percentile pool to modify die rolls in their favour (or, equivalently against the opposition’s favour) to do things like turn failures into successes, or successes into critical successes or the like, thus retroactively making the vision “come true” mechanically.

If the rolled/decided omens were bad omens, the percentile pool (smaller if the player rolled well, larger if the player rolled poorly) was instead given to the GM to use to stymie and confound the players in ways related to the vision.

The end result was that the flavourful vision was there, but its application to the situation was determined in play and had mechanical relevance, which was satisfying to the players.