I've recently added my own version of the spell contact other plane to my homebrew version of DCC. In the process, I reviewed older versions (nicely collected and analysed by Delta at at his old school blog) as well as the similar spell commune and googled some discussions on the internet. RPG.net poster Sleeper puts things very nicely:
"it's a game changer. It's probably the single most powerful divination spell in common use, and once the PCs have access to it certain mysteries will no longer be mysteries.
But that's a good thing. D&D shouldn't be the same game at 15th level as it is at 1st level. And commune is actually a very well designed spell, probably the best implementation of a general divination I've ever seen. The limited number of uses and the yes/no format means it's good at narrowing things down, but the players first need to know what to ask, and it won't always provide actionable information. It's also of limited use when fishing for information. But if the players can narrow down a list of suspects, they'll always learn who's behind everything.
As a DM (playing the god), it means you have to have a good idea of what's going on behind the scenes in your campaign. Because the players are going to ask and they'll remember your answers. If you wing and improvise too much, it's easy to paint yourself into a corner. One good approach it to only allow the spell at the end of a session -- have the cleric's player hand you a series of yes/no questions, and then bring the answers in next time you meet. That gives you some time to breathe."
...and here:
Once commune is available, the game changes in a very fundamental way. You can no longer run a murder mystery with 3 suspects, where the point is to figure who did it. Because one spell later, and the players will know. That doesn't mean you can't have a murder mystery, but it has to be framed differently. If they have no clue who the suspect is, or they still have to prove the suspect did it, the spell won't hand them the solution.
But the spell isn't just for immediate problems, it also opens up the world. Because the same group of PCs who can cast it can probably also cast scry, teleport, wind walk, plane shift, and other spells that completely bypass the problems they faced at low levels. High level characters will generally have the resources to find nearly anything, and then travel to it almost instantly; a lot of the painstaking logistics and pacing limits of lower levels simply vanish. But what commune does that those spells do not is give the big picture -- because the players will start asking questions aimed at figuring out who and why, not just what and how. Commune becomes the means to start putting all those pieces together, even if there's no reasonable way they could have figured it out without divine assistance.
Which is fun, because it creates the third type of sandbox. Low level sandboxes are dungeons, where PCs are constrained by walls and passages. Mid-level sandboxes are hex crawls, which are limited by how far the PCs can travel on horseback in a day. But once the PCs have reached a high enough level to cast commune, they move beyond the map. It's the end game; they should be movers and shakers who are involved in various plots and schemes among queens and demon princes and archmages. And courtesy of that spell, the player are no longer limited to decisions like turning left or right when the corridor branches, or picking cardinal direction on the overland map. No, now they can pick the plot. They can choose whether to build up the army to resist the invasion due in the spring, or chase the archmage trying to open a gate into the Nine Hells, or foil the ghoul king as his pallid claws try to conquer all of the Underdark.
That's the ultimate freedom of choice. And those choices should always matter because the world isn't static. There should always be another threat, always be another conspiracy, always be another problem that needs to be solved. By choosing which are important, they're actively shaping the world; and by deciding what gets ignored, they're choosing what's expendable.
Many, perhaps most, of those decisions will require the use of commune. That's not a flaw, any more than needing to cast detect magic to determine which of the swords is magical is a flaw. It's just another tool, in the PCs' toolbox. If a situation feels frustrating and insolvable to the players, it's the DM not providing enough decisions points, or the players failing to use the resources they have available. It's not the spell.
...and finally here:
movies and books are pretold stories. The author has complete [control] over not just the mechanics of the spell, but the questions everyone asks. That's not true in D&D, where the players ask the questions and the DM has to come up [with] answers. And that's where commune really shines, because it's almost perfectly designed for that dynamic.I'm very excited about the spell being available to the PCs, but my players seem underwhelmed. We'll have to see how it all plays out...
One problem with a lot of divinations in many games is they're too GM-centric. You see that a lot when it comes to precognitive abilities -- it might be a power on your super's character sheet, but it's mostly a GM's tool. And even if you manage to activate it yourself, it often just becomes a means for the DM to dispense plot hooks or do an infodump.
Not so, with commune. Commune is player-driven. The players have to cast the spell, and come up with the questions. But it's not completely open-ended either; the players aren't left to flounder. There's a structure; they know they have to ask specific questions that can be answered with a yes/no, and they know they have a finite number of queries. It's also very good for the DM, because it can be really hard to come up with an answer on the fly. But the DM doesn't have to come up with a rhyme, or a clever little allusion, or anything like that. They just need to come up with a yes, a no, or a don't know. It also helps that commune is based around the DM playing a character; these aren't general questions to the setting in the general, they're questioned asked of a specific god. You don't have to be objectively right in all ways when you're speaking for an entity that has biases, and isn't all knowing.
It's a great little piece of design. The structured, player-driven nature of the questions puts the power in the hands of the players, while the terse, finite answers are friendly to the DM.
