Quote Originally Posted by Aharon View Post
I take from that that you don't think taking 10 on this check is possible, as some of the spell's proponents do?`
No I don't. Taking 10 requires no threats or distractions, the possibility that the hostile mind your contacting might damage your mind for more than a month is plenty threatening and having to concentrate to maintain the spell and come up with questions or refer to a list you've already thought up sounds more than a little distracting.

The problem here is that the god knows more than the DM does. A solution would be to "postpone" the advice. For example, if the caster asks what the greatest danger will be that he faces the next day, the DM doesn't answer, but the god does. When the caster meets the opponent the DM deems the most dangerous, he tells the player what the god said, and the player may change around a few spell slots retroactively. It's not a perfect solution, but it makes the spell workable without using the rails.
That's one possible solution, but it seems rather ..... inelegant and doesn't mitigate the danger inherent in casting the spell at all. It also doesn't really get the game off the rails, it just hides them. If the DM declares that this is the encounter the god told you about and the next encounter turns out to be more threatening either because of poor decisions on the part of the DM or the player, the god was wrong even if the percentile dice said he was supposed to be right, this means that by declaring this encounter the most challenging of the day, the DM is tying his own hands for encounters for the rest of the day and there's simply no way he can counter poor decisions on your part.

This solution also does nothing to address the question of whether the god is just probably right, or if he's definitely right because fate is a thing.

Besides, in nearly every story you've ever heard about a diviner divining his own future it ends very badly and nearly every tradition that claims the ability of divination, IRL, agrees that trying to divine your own future is impossible or against the rules and inviting bad juju of some kind.