Dungeons and Dragons

Use a die to determine whose action the godling listens to. 1-4 could each be a player, the remaining numbers are a random action. Pick whichever die gives the right balance you want. A d6 sounds right to me so there's a 1/3 chance of random shenanigans

So like when you have a Pokémon with a level higher than you have badges for?

Make them submit their choice to you in private, don't let them communicate with each other.

Otherwise you're breaking immersion, almost like its asking their characters or something, which would be silly. Almost impossible to avoid meta gaming, you'd just change your pick to the majority pick, even for a disciplined and experienced player trying to role play well.

Instead, pretend its pulling the information from their subconscious or something. So you can't ask the players publicly, they can't know what the other players said. Or just roll for it.

In the end, using your idea will only work if you really know your players. With an arbitrary random group, I figure the result would be either 100% success rate (they all agree with each other and coordinate perfectly) or a close to 0% success rate (they rarely cooperate). Neither situation is what you want.

Luckily, when you want a certain percentage of success, that’s exactly what dice are for! Now, my group tends to be one of those “cooperators” so I’d tend to want to balance it assuming the party will always agree on what they want the godling to do. Then, maybe use a combination of religion, arcana, and diplomacy checks across the party to determine whether their characters are able to successfully pull off coordinating themselves to control the nigh-uncontrollable thing. I’d still use the “they have to agree on the action it will take” thing but then use the dice to add uncertainty.

If, on the other hand, you expect a lot less agreement amongst your players, you can still use dice, but this time, make the skill check determine whose commands get followed, with close results or consistently low results across the whole party leading to no one’s commands being obeyed and it doing something random and chaotic instead.

In the case of a cooperative party, we’re using dice to lower the success rate. In the bickering party, we’re using dice to increase the success rate. But in both cases, we have in mind a certain target success rate, and it is dice that will get us there.

DnD doesn't really have rules where you can't coordinate with your other players, and requires a hive mind consensus. My worry is that it will be too far afield from what the players are used to.

If you wanted to keep it more similar to 5e rules, you could give the players a free action to order the godling to do something, but require a DC roll to make the check (whatever makes sense, Arcana, persuasion, wisdom, religion). If the DC is failed, or multiple characters do the order action, then some random combination of target/ability is executed. If no order is given, do some random stuff.

That sounds awesome. What do you want suggestions for?

Hmm, I don't mind your idea at all but it is hard to implement so I see your trouble. Some folks have given good options but I'll offer a different way to do it. I'd have one attack per player since it is a god, let him wreck house. Maybe increase the number of enemies to accommodate the attacks. Since this is a god regaining their power and their trying to control it I'd have two DCs for their check each round. First DC is if they listen and should be passed most of the time maybe 10 or 15. If they don't then it might be bad for the party but otherwise they attack the target as intended. The second DC should be failed most of the time, maybe 20 or 25. If they fail this DC the the god still acts as ordered but releases a chaos burst as it does. I personally always use the d10000 list of chaos burst, its fun.