Fake TPKO ("It was only a dream")

[Hussar]

Y'know, I really like the sealed envelop idea. Then again, I always love physical props. Do it up right - waterstained parchment looking thing with lots of curliques and the like. Have Acrerak's message in the envelope.

 

[DragonLancer]

Not a dream sequence but... in the early 90's I was running a Planescape campaign and on one week I hadn't had time to prepare enough for the session so I rolled up some basic characters and grabbed a generic adventure from Dungeon magazine and ran that. I told the confused players that it was still part of the campaign but a side line. Not sure what was going on they played cautiously and solved the adventure with just enough time to spare for the end of the session.

It ended something like this:

Bang! The innkeep of your local tavern closes the book. You find yourselves seated around one of the common room tables after hours. The table is covered with sheets of parchment and oddly shaped wooden dice.
"What do you think of my new game?" the innkeep asks. "I'm thinking of calling it Dungeons and Dragons."

The idea was nicked from the various holodeck episodes of Star Trek: TNG and while I got some friendly abuse the players loved it.

I'm not entire sure why you are concerned though. I'm sure many DM's have run dream sequences and they have gone down well. What I recommend is that you allow them to realise that this may not be real somehow and also give them some clue to what's coming up, that way they feel they have got something out of it.

 

[renau1g]

First. I highly recommend you play this in the background when you do the big "reveal"

[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N6O2ncUKvlg]YouTube - Nelly - Just A Dream[/ame]

 

[Janx]

I guess my question is: What do you hope to achieve by this? What's the point? I can criticize the idea as presented, but I can't make suggestions to improve it without knowing the goal.

Excellent points, and good ending question.

the "it was just a dream" to fix a TPK (there's no O in TPK) is a trope that should die.

If the dream was a portent of what was to come, a warning of some sort, it would have some value. But if its just to show how bad the BBEG is, its just wasting the players time. You'd be better off showing them the results of his power (slaughtered villages, dismembered corpses, etc).

using the dream to run them through an encounter they would fail because they're missing information, or their standard tactic is faulty, might be useful. The idea then, when they get to it for real, they recognize it, and go "oh don't do X, I dreamt of this, and it ended badly"

But you'd also need to train your players to recognize the dream as a portent. That means baby steps. Let's say 1 PC is the dreamer. show him a short dream where the party gets ambushed and he wakes up with a start. Then have the ambush happen. He'll then connect that when he has a dream, it is of the future. Now you can use this to relay clues.

But just one big mega TPK dream. To show off the BBEG? Not so cool.

 

[kitsune9]

Is that Ravenloft module 'The House on Gryphon Hill' by any chance?

Can't remember rightly about the name. The opening encounter was that our party was on some road in Generic Campaign world, we fight against a headless horseman (flaming pumpkin and vorpal sword). Once we had all our heads taken off, then we wake up bodiless in Ravenloft with our heads in jars. Anybody know this module?

The combat was over two hours because a vorpal sword only works when you rolled a natural 20 in 2nd edition so the DM ran the whole charging/ attack / miss (the horseman wasn't a very good fighter either) and we had to stand there in the middle of the road and just deal with it. Nobody thought to run, because we were definitely hitting the horseman and thought we could take him down.

Then after the combat was finally over, the DM goes about halfway into the box text for the next encounter, looks at his watch and says, "Oh, it's 3 p.m., I have to leave." Literally. He didn't even finish the box text. All of us at the table were irate that we called the convention organizer who kicked the guy out.

 

[billd91]

I like the idea of making it slightly surreal. Perceptive players may realize it's a dream and that it gives them carte blanche to try out anything they want to try out against your main villain. A trial run, if you will.

Then, as PCs get killed in the dream, have them wake up and recognize that the other PCs are having the same dream. What I'd do at that point is, if the awake PC wakes any others, they would disappear from the dream, leaving fewer PCs to fight and scout out the villain's abilities.

 

[Olgar Shiverstone]

Like others here, I regard a "and then you wake up" ending as a bait-and-switch, which would cause me to lose trust in the DM.

I think you can pull off dream sequence events if you gradually and subtly introduce changes that hint that the world isn't as it seems. Some players may figure it out, other may not, but it should be brutally obvious after the fact that the hints were there for them to see.

For example -- psychic effects are suddenly more effective, but physical effects are less so. From time to time for unexplained reasons things speed up, or slow down. Strange and/or non-sensical things appear for what appears to be no reason.

Another approach is to have a semi-obvious transition, whether falling down the rabbit hole or passing through the magic mirror.

 

[NMcCoy]

How much do your players trust you? I've been playing in my current campaign for over a year now. Last session, my character was (narratively) channeling his lifeforce into an important spell, and finishing the spell was, in the DM's words, "the last thing you know, as you slump to the ground, dead." After a moment of "Waitwhat- what?" I (being familiar with his DMing style) realized that the DM wouldn't have just killed my character without a warning signal unless he had something planned. As it happened, another character intervened to revive me before whatever plans he had came into play, but as it was I had enough trust in the DM to sit helplessly during a tense and dramatic scene rather than protesting my character's unexpected demise and causing the game to lose momentum.

Consider also the implications of declarations versus dice. Rolling the dice, even with impossible modifiers, has very different connotations from declaring that "this happens". Later that same session, the DM made a bad call: As a result of necessary situations, means, and motivations, something terrible happened to a valued NPC offscreen, without a dice roll. This struck me as immensely unfair and I had a several-hours-long talk after the game with the DM about it; he later agreed to make it a roll (with absurd modifiers, as it was a beyond-Epic villain's attack; the result was something like 58 vs. Fortitude). And when it was resolved, the party bolstered the NPC's defenses with Fate points sufficiently to mitigate the attack, which left that plot arc ending on a much more palatable note.
So there you have two different examples, one where a dice roll would have felt vastly unfair when a declaration was acceptable, and one where the reverse was the case.

 

[BinkyBo]

I would suggest maybe having the dream be from a different power, one that may be a rival to the BBEG or a god of one of the players showing them that they are not prepared/how to prepare for the fight ahead. Maybe this power can't interfere directly so it chooses to do so with a shared dream.
And you could as others have suggested include plants, the type you might see in a movie that hint a big twist that you don't necessarily catch on the first viewing.

 

[Piratecat]

My preference is to tell everyone that it's a dream, but to have in-game ramifications for the actions they take during that dream. Perhaps it's prophetic, and their actions give them bonuses or penalties later on.

Either way, the fake-out "it was a dream!" reveal is one I deeply don't care for.