So, turns out that 'a year or more later' turned up to be planned for next Saturday or the one after it instead. Adventurers.
So I'm revisiting this topic.
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Originally Posted by Ghostdancer
If you die in the Dreamlands while asleep you wake up - but instantly take half the damage you suffered in HP as FP. Going their physically required some form of paranormal power and if you died there you died for good.
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You said this is an interesting topic. So I thought some more about what happens from dream wounds and deaths. Taking a look at Planescape Torment, of all places, I think I settled on this idea:
Places in the dreamworld have RW-hazard classes. One's personal dream bubble is
normally harmless (death results in waking up at -1FP as from Nightmares), as are some other 'sanctuary' places.
Other places have a RW-hazard rating, ranging from slightly above zero, up to 1. This is the fraction of real HP that will be lost upon taking damage in the dreamworld. Failing a Death Check in the dreamworld means that damage is recalculated, with succeeded-in-dreams death checks being successful automatically in the real world, but in case if the damage was so big that it bleeds over into the real world demanding a new death check above and beyond those already successful ones, the new checks are to be rolled normally.
Finally, some places are marked as non-returning. That means that dying in dreams there will
not take you back to the waking world - your dream-self has to be carried by someone else, while your real-world body is borderline-comatose.
Oh, and I think that I should let the PC immediately choose whether to be pulled back into the real world or not at the moment of failing a consciousness check. Opting to stay in means more risk, but also an opportunity to regain consciousness in the dreamworld; opting to wake up is a safety cord, with all that entails.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Ghostdancer
I required a roll against Navigation (Mental) which allowed you to shorten the distance traveled by 5% per point by which you succeed. Control (Dreams) also worked to bend space like Control (Space). Some spells worked to do this as well and Dream Celerity (a analogue to the psi power Astral Celerity) increased this too.
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Thinking more on this: I do like the navigation benefit. I'm still unsure how I want to scale time between the real and dream world, and how much time I want to be occupied by travel along strands of the dreamweb between nodes, or the ratio of time spent in nodes and between nodes.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Ghostdancer
It's a Dreamworld...there is no congestion. It's as big or as small as it needs to be. You could have a 100 people in the same room because space doesn't conform to the laws of the real world. I wouldn't look at this too much - it's not in the typical literature anyways.
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Thinking more on this:
I vaguely recall scenes of defending fortresses in Changeling . . . somewhere.
What this means is that while it's nice to have some places (e.g. ancient libraries) stretch out to accommodate infinite crowds, it's also nice to have
some types of dream estate be quite limited.
Having doorsteps of some nodes actually blockable/defensible, but not others, seems like an opportunity for some adventurous moments. Such as spirits asking riddles to let people pass or whatever, which people can nonetheless get around using longer roads (but don't want to). It sort of takes the best of both worlds - the gateway network and the free hyperspace method.
Note: I'm thinking that in some cases Node A connects strands 1,2,3,4 purely on the outside, so you can go from 1 to 4 without needing to get inside A, while in some other cases Node B connects strands {5,6} and {7,8}, so you can go from 5 to 6 without going through the inside of B, but you need to cross B in order to get from 6 to 7.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Ghostdancer
In the Awakening (my campaign) natural ways into the Dreamlands were possible, but rare and often in caves, closets, and other places where their were openings - but didn't go all the way through. Also, mirrors (which lead to the Mirrorwall, a place between places and the setting's analogue to the Astral Plane) could sometimes send you to the Dreamlands - or worse into the desolation of the Mirrorwall itself. One thing I did do in the campaign was make doors to the Dreamlands pop up in almost any place for those who had physically traveled there before - the Dreamlands are jealous and don't like letting beings leave that once walked its grounds.
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My players are going to such a cave. So my plan to present them with such a doorway in a crampy room of an inn elsewhere is being overriden. (Frankly, for a while I thought the party will stop looking into that cave, so it will be saved up for later.)
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Oh, and now I can start making up the geography. I'm thinking of only letting PCs open up new nodes gradually. Not sure how to justify this in-game. I don't want a flat check penalty per node travelled beyond the first. I want some sort of access-granting process, like finding passwords but more metaphorical, and something so that I could delay the process at will, while thinking up the places that exist in the dreamweb.