Hey guys I just hit third level on my divination wizard and couldn't wait to pick up Augury. It's very thematic for my character but after speaking with the DM I'm having a hard time understanding when best to use it and how to phrase my intentions?

From what I understand I cannot ask it a question? And it cannot answer yes or no in the form of weal or woe.

If I understand correctly I have to state an intended course of action and wait for an omen pertaining to that particular course of action?

If any of you have experienced with this spell and can help me get a better grasp on how best to utilize it that would be great! Examples would be super helpful.

Thanks guys! 🔮

I'm not clear on what you intend since you seem to use the negative when you probably mean the positive (you say "cannot" when I'd expect you to say "can"). I'll try to answer as best I can.

It's really how your DM decides how to run it. This is one of those aspects of the game where the DM has to decide how to deal with it.

RAW, you:

1. Pick a course of action that will be performed in the next 30 minutes.
2. Get a response as to whether it will have good, bad, good and bad, or neither good nor bad results.

You can use it whenever you want (so long as you have the tokens), but it takes 1 minute to cast or 11 minutes to cast as a ritual. Honestly, I don't like the spell because it requires the DM to have knowledge that he might not have. Eg "If we attack that group of Orcs head on, how will it go?" "Ummm...depends on how well your dice throws go, I guess?". I'm sure there are more uses, but I don't normally have that far ahead planned to such detail that I can answer most questions - I bounce off the rolls and the players for short term stuff.

As a result, I don't have any examples because neither I nor my players have ever cast it.

The reason you can't ask a question is the bit that Linklite alludes to... The DM can't know the results of rolls before the rolls are made and a wise DM wouldn't want to get locked into forcing a certain result. Instead, you state a course of (near term) action, and get a probabilistic response. For example, "Revisit the encampment outside the wizards tower after we just broke in and rescued his prisoner?" The fire next to you bursts into thick, choking, black smoke. Woe, very, very bad woe. The DM can't know the results of saving throws before they are made, but they can know that this wizard has access to level 9 spells and the diviner's portent feature and that the party is level 8. Things probably won't go their way. The PCs never quite have the knowledge that if they go back to the encampment they will meet the wizard and he will win the fight. They know it's a possibility that they could encounter him, and the portent says something about the likelihood of and the outcome of that encounter.

I never found it to be a great spell. It’s really, really DM dependent. By itself that’s not a bad thing, it just asks a lot of them. And really, almost everything is going to be weal and woe because very few things are unambiguously good or bad. 

I used to have an NPC/Potential BBE who would cast Augury as a ritual every time he had a meeting with the PCs. He would make them all tea which always took exactly 11 minutes and then he would read his tea leaves for the answer. The question was always if it would go well should he try to kill them then and there. He never tried. He’s literally the only villain still alive from that campaign. I don’t know if that helps at all, but I figured it can’t hurt to share it.

Augury is a deceptively simple spell, but hard to put into proper context in D&D because Augury is a great example of a "soft magic system" inside the "hard magic system" of D&D. When you cast the spell, you're not asking a specific question and you're not looking for specific information. Rather, when you cast the spell you are simply opening your mind to the multiverse and sensing a tiny glimpse of the infinite weave of possibilities around us. As such, the spell works best in a campaign whose players and DM are interested in deep and thematic roleplay rather than just the old school hack&slash style of play. 

This spell won't tell you if you'll defeat the BBEG, or what you'll die of or when. That's too long term. Anything beyond the next half hour becomes an infinite blur thanks to the Butterfly Effect. The spell also won't tell you WHY the DM gave you the answer that you got. "Weal" and "Woe" are intentionally vague. That's because your mind is mortal and finite and simply cannot interpret the full depth of what the cosmos has to show it.

But let's say the party comes to the edge of a dark and spooky forest. Before entering the forest, you take a minute to cast this spell. Maybe the DM tells you "Woe". So you tell the party to be extra alert because dangers lie ahead. And the party will thank you when the scouting ranger detects the ambush before you all walk into it. From a game-mechanics standpoint, what just happened was that the DM may have lowered the DC that the ranger needed on their Perception roll to detect the ambush because you had cast the spell and warned them to be extra vigilant.

Or maybe the party gets lost, whether in a dungeon or a forest or a city doesn't matter. You have two options, go left or go right. You take a minute to cast this spell, considering going left, and the DM tells you "Weal". So the party goes left and finds what they're looking for. Maybe you just saved their lives or maybe you simply saved them some travel time. You'll never know, because once you make a decision you set yourself on that path and all the other infinite paths that you could have taken become invisible to you. 

So yeah, Augury is an amazing spell, IF both you and your DM are willing to commit to the depth of roleplay required to really bring the spell to life. 

Well, I hope this helps. Have fun!