Divination question.
- If you could predict your demise, would you be able to hinder it? Or would your fate be sealed?
( Are you able to CHANGE the course of events? )

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Ahh, I've spent the last few years with this central to my main PC's magical paradigm. But rather than go on and on and on.

Yes.

But, sometimes prophecies are self-fulfilling. So, you have to ask yourself: What does your character believe?

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Of course you could change things.

The idea of being unable to alter future events that you've foreseen is very poetical, and it's all well and good for stuff like books and movies, where every aspect of every storyline is under the absolute control of a single dictatorial author. In a collaborative RP context, though, players have the reasonable expectation that their actions can have consequences, that they can to a certain extent shape their own stories.

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That's a pretty philosophical question with implications much graver than you would like. If you answered it definitively one way or another, you would consign the setting to irreconcilable inconsistencies. The concept of free will is not coherent and comprehensible in itself, really.

As far as appearances go, though, the setting is full of diviners who use their spells to gain useful information and guide their actions. If it didn't seem as if they served some purpose, people wouldn't use them. Your own demise is no different from whether you're going to find treasure in a cave. And adventurers do use divination to find treasure.

Of course, if the act of divination itself was predetermined by previous causation (or some final cause the universe aspires to), there's no way to verify you actually made any difference to how it was fated to go down anyway.

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No!
No short answer, i want the heavy stuff! <3

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This is something even gods argue about.
I'd say PCs are able to change their fates with enough know-how.

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THREE

Mages/UMD folks pretty much do it whenever their premonitions soak up damage from an attack.
IMHO divinations that foretell future are never 100% sure, and in best case you get most probable outcome.
And who knows, maybe finding out you MIGHT die might be the thing that eventually set your demise in motion in first place...

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Was going to suggest this

One thing I wonder is, does the spell actually create a rift in time through which you watch the future, or does it instead create an image based on the predictions of the spell?

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The fact that there are literally thousands of permutations to what can happen to you based off what others around you do and what you do yourself is the reason most seers end up going insane.

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http://www.d20srd.org/srd/epic/spells/timeDuplicate.htm references that the timestream is full of possible futures, this spell showing that it's apparently possible to manipulate one.

There are also quite a few classes that somehow see or interract with time. Zerth Cenobite is one of them, actually being capeable of punching people forward in time. As for the original question, I do know that some abilities allows you to alter the immediate past outcomes (reroll!). I also think two or three classes got this ability from time related crap like foresight or by viewing several of the possible futures to gain an insight bonus.

From a philisophical standpoint though... who knows. By taking actions to prevent it, you just might end up sealing it.. or by not taking action you might end up sealing it. As such you might be damned if you do, damned if you don't.. The thing is, you're only viewing ONE drop in an ocean of possible outcomes. To see them all for a perfect accurate take on the future would probably require much more brainpower and concentration than any one spellcaster can do. It's a chicken or egg sort of question I guess.

In the words of the Chronokeeper. Time flies like an arrow, fruit flies like banana.

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Everyone dies...so there is nothing to predict or escape. If what maters is when:
1) if you could see only the way you die but not how you reach to that point, you can change the course of events
2) if you knew all course of events that would lead to your death you would be able to alter the timeline.
Altering the timeline doesn't mean though that you can escape death. The change of events might move your death or demise anywhere in the timeline (prior or later of the event you have seen).

The only way that someone would be able to escape death of non natural causes is to be able to see all the possible futures after each of his actions, which is nearly impossible. Take a game of "chess": not ever since its creation a totally same match was played. And chess has about 10 rules. If you take a game of "Go" that only has 3 rules the variables are astronomical.

Nature has only one rule: you live to die.... try to calculate that

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