Has anyone ever done a prolonged dream sequence or some other kind of "false reality" situation, which lasts more than one game session, and had it turn out positively?  I'm inspired to ask this question by a conversation brought up about the current season of Doctor Who.

RPGPundit

Quote from: RPGPundit;456676Has anyone ever done a prolonged dream sequence or some other kind of "false reality" situation, which lasts more than one game session, and had it turn out positively?  I'm inspired to ask this question by a conversation brought up about the current season of Doctor Who.

RPGPundit

Nope.

To me, the "And It Was All A Dream/Virtual Reality Adventure/Whatever" schtick translates into "As a GM, I fucked up and did something else instead of giving any thought to tonight's game because I just didn't give a shit."

The only way I think it can work is if it is some part of the campaign whole. A Force-inspired precognition dream for Star Wars, some wicked illusion spell or dreamscape message for D&D, or a glitch in the braindance/virtual reality software of Traveller/Cyberpunk/whatever that delivers an important clue to Players. I have to admit that I have yet to see this done effectively by myself or anyone else. I think it is possible, but very unlikely.

No. Indeed a lot of people I play with are pretty anti-dream sequences of any kind.

The longest I've ever done in a game was perhaps 30 minutes or so of play (I was a player, and didn't know that it was a dream at the time). The most interesting element in hindsight was a metagame element - I died in the dream, and started to tear my character sheet in half (a venerable tradition of mine). Rob, the DM at the time, nearly gave it away when he stopped me from tearing it up, though he managed to string us along with various possibilities until he could conclude the whole thing plausibly.

Narratively, I didn't mind it, since it was short and everything had totally screwed up in the dream, though I wasn't sure why it had happened ultimately.

After Dallas, I have a strong aversion to this type of plot. I also suspect Doctor Who is going the same route, though I hope I'm wrong.

not as a dream per se, but I had an episode of my old Delta Green campaign where the characters ended up in a coma and then we played out a session (or two?) in Carcosa, where the characters fought for their lives against entropy and Hastur, and to wake up. It worked really well, with characters being dream/shadow-versions of themselves in a rather bleak and surreal world.

Never tried it; frankly it doesn't sound like a great idea to me. I think players would look at it as a bait-and-switch or cop-out and in my experience players always react poorly to that kind of thing. You have a game, your players are enjoying it, then you tell them "actually, it's not this, it's X." Is X really cooler than the game your players are already enjoying. Look into the heart and the answer is it is lame.

If I was enjoying playing a swords-and-sorcery game and five sessions into the game the DM told me my character woke up and it was all the Matrix I would have little to say but "fuck you."

I think it is partly the problem of overkill or laying it on too hard - brief sequences of dreams, hallucinations, illusory worlds, five or ten minutes out of a session, those have worked well for me. But that's a different thread.

Quote from: DKChannelBoredom;456692not as a dream per se, but I had an episode of my old Delta Green campaign where the characters ended up in a coma and then we played out a session (or two?) in Carcosa, where the characters fought for their lives against entropy and Hastur, and to wake up. It worked really well, with characters being dream/shadow-versions of themselves in a rather bleak and surreal world.

I had similar episodes in a Delta Green style CoC game where characters slipped in and out of Carcosa over the course of the adventure. One of my more memorable CoC games. The dreaming characters would be drawn into a weird melodrama that conflated the King in Yellow storyline with their own messed up pasts.

I haven't seen any that went on for longer than half an hour or so (unless you count Dreamlands adventures in CoC)... but I think something like the Carcosa example works for a genre, like horror, where protagonists' dreams traditionally can be important and effect the real world.
For whatever reason I'm seeing a corollary with something like Ender's Game... where the characters, near the end, are not aware of the real significance of their actions... what shouldn't be so serious turns out to be very important. So yes, it was all a game (dream) but it mapped on to reality in significant ways... but I guess that changes the 'It was all a dream!' synopsis into something else.

I played in an Exalted game with a lot of it. Our gm was 100% story telling swine (; so we just listened as it came. It was very interesting really.

I have run a lot of adventures where the characters entered dream-realities, on their own or by being trapped there, but it was still an adventure in a surreal environment (sometimes with the objective to get something in there, sometimes to realise the falsehood of the surrounding reality and find a way to escape), not an exercise in "guess what, players -- all you did didn't matter". That's just a horrible thing to do.

C. L. Moore's Jirel stories - particularly Jirel meets magic - are good models of doing it right.

I used it in a game where the PCs couldn't all make the same session one week so I ran a separate session for each of them. I thought of the dream angle because plotwise I couldn't split them up and risk them all being separated the week after.
It kind of fit in with this waking old gods and unlocking a dimension portal that they were working towards. Basically the dream involved fighting ones way into a chamber and then being confronted by a number of ritual artifacts. A cup, a knife a and a few other bits and bobs.
It worked really well for 2 of the PCs , especially the one that was a FreeMason as he sussed the ritual steps immediately. One of them just didn't get it and once there was nothing left to kill he had no fun .
Then the next real session they came to the same chamber and they basically knew what to do.

Of course in Amber I have played with dreamscapes, tarot worlds and all sorts of stuff.

We played in a ravenloft game once where we were captured and our minds inhabited some other folks on a mission far in the past. When we die we had to try again it was kind of VRish.

I can't remember if it lasted more than a session, but it certainly turned out positively. Of course, it was tied to the plot and there were clues that it was a dream all along.

Seanchai

"It was all a dream" to replace what has just happened is lame in any media.

Playing within a dream sequence is a different kettle of fish. I've used it to heighten tension over an upcoming event or to give certain enemies more of a trepidation factor, but never as anything other than that. Sure, the PCs have awoke to it was all a dream, but not to "oh golly, Billy's not dead after all and i didn't accidentally cause the heat-death of the universe."

Only rarely. And only when I'm out of my rocker and having an especially bad day as a GM.

I tend to call these my Scooby Doo episodes.