How would you handle dreams and dreaming in an RPG?

The one case I can think of that has adventures in dreamland and mechanics for it are Call of Cthulhu, where I think they pretty well fuck up royally on both their dreaming mechanics and the Dreamlands setting, as far as capturing the feel of the stories.

Are there any other games where dreams, lucid or not, are significant? How to handle the mechanical aspect of them?

RPGPundit

Well, the mechanical and the social aspects of the thing are (to my mind) intertwined.  There's a requirement for doing it well:  Everyone has to be clear that the things that are done in the story are important.

"It was just a dream" (or its sci-fi alternate:  "That was in an alternate history which you have now prevented") play holy havoc with that.  The trope can be, at base, a way for a serial story (in which nothing fundamental ever really changes) to play with big world-rending changes without paying the price.

If you (particularly as a GM, but really as any member of the group) go through a session with people, and hear them tell their stories and play their game, and then at the end you say "But none of that really matters to what I think is important," then you've just pissed all over the basic relationship that makes it worth getting people together in order to play in the first place.  You've just said that they're not co-participants, that their contribution doesn't move you.  You're wasting their time, and they're wasting yours, because you aren't making a connection.

Now "It was just a dream" stories run the risk of that.  If (and it's a big "if") the state of the world outside is the only thing that you consider important then a dream sequence is unimportant, almost by definition.  But the trope doesn't have to go there.  What's required (to my way of thinking) is that there is something that comes out of the story that is recognized as important.  Having a mechanical change (often on a character sheet) is often a good flag of that.  The dream doesn't change the rest of the world, but it changes the dreamer.

So suppose you run through a dream where Giles turns evil and takes over the world, and all the Scooby-Gang die one by one, and then Buffy wakes up in a cold sweat.  If she just shakes her head drowsily and goes back to sleep, forgetting the whole thing, then you've disrespected your fellow players.  If she pants and cringes and wonders ... and then for the next five sessions she's working with "Hidden fear of Giles" (or some such thing) constantly effecting her, then you'e golden.

Am I making sense?  Or is this too abstract and artsy?

I've used a recuring dream for a character when they were on the cusp of making a serious alignment shift. Done in a psuedo-Jungian symbolic fashion. The first 4 or 5 times it just repeated the dream over a few sessions, and the last time the player made the choice on how the dream ended and that changed their character one way or another.

This was AD&D 1e, so Rangers had an alignment limit of Good.  When he switched over a number of his abilities morphed into something else. Sort of the Ranger class reflected darkly.

It was a long time ago now, but I can try remember the details of the dream and/or class ability changes if anyone is actually interested in them?

Have you guys played or heard about The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening? It's one of the greatest games for Nintendo's venerable Game Boy, and it's story is a "it was all just a dream" done perfectly.

Quote from: JongWKHave you guys played or heard about The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening? It's one of the greatest games for Nintendo's venerable Game Boy, and it's story is a "it was all just a dream" done perfectly.

It is so ironic, just yesterday I mentioned on another board about how I thought that the series ending for the TV show Rossane was a very well done "it was all just a dream".

Quote from: JongWKHave you guys played or heard about The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening? It's one of the greatest games for Nintendo's venerable Game Boy, and it's story is a "it was all just a dream" done perfectly.

It's something of a special case, though, as a variant of the Red King's Dream: the world as we know it lies in the mind of a sleeping god and will vanish in an instant once it awakens, which could happen at any moment.

I never goof around with that dreams in gaming. If I do, I usually say something like, "Your character has the following dream..." and go from there.

I loathe dream sequences in novels, for the most part, so I guess that dislike kind of bleeds into my gaming.

I like my dream sequences just like my time travel: There must be consequences.

You know the VR cliche in cyberpunk shiz... ever thought about handling dreams as part of the action? I dunno. Just a thought.

Quote from: beejazzYou know the VR cliche in cyberpunk shiz... ever thought about handling dreams as part of the action? I dunno. Just a thought.

The first Nobilis story I ever ran involved travelling into various dreamscapes through the Labyrinth of Locus Sakhrat, and tracking down rogue nightmares which were trying to break into the waking world and killing sleepers in the process... Finding out why that was happening then launched the actual campaign.

Never explain. That's my whole take. I run dreams much like any other adventure, whatever the genre. I never tell  either before or after that what the pcs went through was a dream.

The characters never wake up as such, they become aware that they experienced something disjointed from their reality but I never make it obvious that it was a dream. Dreams, delusion etc kinda of meld when I'm running games.

Sometimes the experience is collective - hence it could have a supernatural cause. Sometimes it is an individual experience, and all the other players participate as though it was an ordinary adventure. Off course in this situation, the other players have to just pretend, that their characters would not know about the events that occured when they awaken

Regards,
David R

Quote from: RPGPunditAre there any other games where dreams, lucid or not, are significant? How to handle the mechanical aspect of them?

RPGPundit

Well, I'm plugging myself here, but there's Dreamwalker and its four free supplements:

http://www.rpgnow.com/product_info.php?products_id=330&

It's basically a game about people who travel into dreams to combat psychic infestations, but the supplements expand into other organizations/motivations for traveling into dreams as well as giving a "fixed" dreamworld setting (actually two, but they're linked).  

The dream mechanics are "systemless" but they break dreams down into categories that are easy to manage.  There are some reviews of it on rpgnet (one is by me, so don't count that).      

Pete

There was The Nightmare Lands for Ravenloft. A boxed set by Shane Lacy Henly and Bill Slavicsek with four booklets - The Journal of Dr. Illhousen, The Rules of Dreams and Nightmares, Book of Nightmares, and Book of Nightmares Monstrous Supplement, plus a poster map of the Nightmare Lands and another of the Theatre Macabre, home to the creature Ghost Dancer.

Yes, it is where the Abbar Nomads come from.

The framing "story" is that of Dr. Illhousen's Clinic for the insane, specializing in those prone to troubling dreams and nightmares.

The feel is very much 19th century gothic romance/horror romance. The PCs are (presumably) people who are being treated at Illhousen's Clinic because their dreams have driven them insane. Henly and Slavicsek went for a surreal dreamlike feel, and as far as I can tell succeeded. Investigation, atmospherics is the goal here, not hack 'n slash.

Heroquest could potentially qualify, if you stretch the definition of "dream" a lot - Heroquesting is a shamanic practice which could very easily be interpreted as a sort of lucid dreaming, in which characters go to the Godtime (the place where all the world's myths happened long ago, and continue to happen now) and re-enact the old myths (or change them) in order to achieve something in the mundane world.

For example, a village shaman may go to on a Heroquest to re-enact the story of the tribal God of Rain, in order to bring a life-threatening drought to an end. On a more powerful level, the God Learners in Glorantha's 2nd age are all about Heroquesting - their unofficial motto is I'M IN UR MYTHS, KILLIN UR GODZ.