"Visions of the future"

[Engilbrand]

I got this idea from a thread about whether or not the players/characters are "the Chosen Ones".
Has anyone tried a true "dream" sequence? A vision of the future?
The players make up their 1st level characters. They then make up that character as a level 20 or whenever you would plan to end it. The first game, you send them against something. It could be a Balor in a pit or a horde of Orcs. You let them know how they interact with each other and stuff like that. The second half of that game has them at level 1 in a city. They wake up. You would start with one character and have him search around until he finds the other members. Clues were dropped in the future. They band together and begin. When they finish a major plot element, the next game is in the future with something different. Maybe they have PrCs instead if that's what they're going for. Maybe you include new scars that weren't there before. Are those Undead over there? What happened to that army they had last time?
When they do big events, the future changes. The characters know this. They get an immediate glimpse on the future. Maybe it's the entire battle. Maybe it's enough for a character or two to die. Maybe it's the planning stage or at the very end. Any way that it happens, the characters would in a state of flux. Undead?! I should start doing this... Demons?! This.... They would also really think about their actions. If we help these people, maybe they'll help us in the final battle.
A few things would need to be followed.
1. Always the same day.
2. Because of #1, you'd actually have to follow a calendar. Actually have a prop. They know what is going to happen in 8 years. They don't know where it will be, but they know that they'll be there. They'll actually have to think about rest and travel times.
3. The DM would need to think a bit into the future.
Some things can be spiced up a bit. If a player is killed in the future, they don't wake up with the memories of that jump. Every now and then, you might replace someone with a different character in the future. Imagine knowing that something will happen to remove you from the quest. Do you leave right then? What you're there the next time and the other guy isn't? If you leave because of this vision, is that why the new guy joins? What if you see one of the characters on the other side? Do you kill him in the future and hope that the memory doesn't stay with him? Do you kill him in the present?
This idea seems like it could be a lot of fun. I know that it would be complicated and take a lot of time, but what do people think? Obviously, the players would have to understand what sort of game it is before-hand.

 

[Aeric]

In my last campaign, roughly three months of the game was revealed to have been a dream. It was my cheapass way of retconning the game when it had gone way off-track. One player thought it was cool, but the rest were confused and even a little angry. I won't be doing that again.

 

[Engilbrand]

Nobody else has anything to say?
I could see why your people were annoyed. I'm advocating giving them at least a little bit of information on how it will all be run. You'd have to really trust your players, though.

 

[howandwhy99]

I ran a homebrew adventure where one session of it was a mass illusion. It wasn't bad. I dropped a lot of hints and other strange clues, but it was also the 2nd session I had DM'd the group. Because they had no baseline of how I described things, it failed. That's the only advice I can really offer. Be upfront or be obvious if they're not getting it.

 

[Bad Paper]

I started giving one of the PCs visions of an artifact that I hoped he would try to claim further down the road.

But then I killed him, turned him into intelligent undead, and the player rolled up a new PC. They turned the undead beastie to dust. Then when he came back as a petitioner, they killed him again on his home plane.

So, uh, visions only work if you don't irrevocably kill the PC.

 

[William drake]

I got this idea from a thread about whether or not the players/characters are "the Chosen Ones".
Has anyone tried a true "dream" sequence? A vision of the future?
The players make up their 1st level characters. They then make up that character as a level 20 or whenever you would plan to end it. The first game, you send them against something. It could be a Balor in a pit or a horde of Orcs. You let them know how they interact with each other and stuff like that. The second half of that game has them at level 1 in a city. They wake up. You would start with one character and have him search around until he finds the other members. Clues were dropped in the future. They band together and begin. When they finish a major plot element, the next game is in the future with something different. Maybe they have PrCs instead if that's what they're going for. Maybe you include new scars that weren't there before. Are those Undead over there? What happened to that army they had last time?
When they do big events, the future changes. The characters know this. They get an immediate glimpse on the future. Maybe it's the entire battle. Maybe it's enough for a character or two to die. Maybe it's the planning stage or at the very end. Any way that it happens, the characters would in a state of flux. Undead?! I should start doing this... Demons?! This.... They would also really think about their actions. If we help these people, maybe they'll help us in the final battle.
A few things would need to be followed.
1. Always the same day.
2. Because of #1, you'd actually have to follow a calendar. Actually have a prop. They know what is going to happen in 8 years. They don't know where it will be, but they know that they'll be there. They'll actually have to think about rest and travel times.
3. The DM would need to think a bit into the future.
Some things can be spiced up a bit. If a player is killed in the future, they don't wake up with the memories of that jump. Every now and then, you might replace someone with a different character in the future. Imagine knowing that something will happen to remove you from the quest. Do you leave right then? What you're there the next time and the other guy isn't? If you leave because of this vision, is that why the new guy joins? What if you see one of the characters on the other side? Do you kill him in the future and hope that the memory doesn't stay with him? Do you kill him in the present?
This idea seems like it could be a lot of fun. I know that it would be complicated and take a lot of time, but what do people think? Obviously, the players would have to understand what sort of game it is before-hand.

mmm, it would be fun, but sounds like youd need the right players, and up their starting level so that their charactes coulder understand what sounds like to be a rift in the mulit-verse, or the timestream; you couldn't play with newbees...and youd have to be on with it all the time so that you dont get off track, but if you did, you could just chalk it up to "well, something you did effected it" and just never explain it. I would advice that something, or someone helps the players, think of like an Oracle being, someone outside of reality who won't be effected one way or another, but for some reason, takes an intrest in the players.

I liked the idea about letting the players make their characters at 20th level, and buidling the game so that happens, I did that once, but not that high of a level. It worked out good, but I spent alot of time on it, and the players were all advanced and good at taking notes and Rp'ing and figuring out things, talking to people and everthing.
good luck.

 

[Sound of Azure]

I had a game a few years back where the PCs were all dream characters in the imagination of a young girl (about 5 or 6 years old) from a near future setting. They all had vastly different backgrounds and pathos because they were from different books that the girl had liked before she slipped into a coma.

The world they were living in was beginning to disintegrate and sufferent from cataclymic shocks, disasters, and changes in how magic worked. These things were caused by doctors trying to wake the girl up from a coma. The doctors themselves turn up a few times in the dreamscape to try and kill off the PCs (in order to allow the girl to wake). The girl herself took the form of a somewhat chaotic princess figure who sent them on quests to recover particular artifacts that represented her favourite memories and stories.

Meanwhile, a silver dragon on the plane of dreams wanted to help the girl keep the PCs alive (he'd been looking after her dream body). Eventually, the PCs were able to create real bodies on the Plane of dreams. They observed the destruction of their world as it disintegrated in a dream storm as the girl woke up. Later, they managed to reach the Prime Material Plane and visited the little girl in the "real world" for a re-union with her favourite characters.

A few tears around the table when that happened....

 

[vic20]

I had a game a few years back where the PCs were all dream characters in the imagination of a young girl (about 5 or 6 years old) from a near future setting. They all had vastly different backgrounds and pathos because they were from different books that the girl had liked before she slipped into a coma.

wow. that sounds really really cool. well done!

 

[F5]

I did something similar once, but in the reverse order.

The players made level 1 PCs, and I advanced them to 16th level. The plot revolved around a historic battle, where the heroes of the day were overrun by impossible odds after an epic last-stand. I made the players' PCs the reincarnations of these heroes, and set the campaign in the ruins of the ancient city their prior incarnations had died trying to defend.

It gave their modern-day quest to stop the old evils from coming back that much more urgent...they had already faced off against them once, and lost.

 

[Sound of Azure]

wow. that sounds really really cool. well done!

Thanks. I haven't managed to have a campaign last long enough to pull something off like that again, unfortunately. It's still one of my favourite campaigns (that I ran, anyway).

There was a definite "wizard of oz" moment when the girl met the PCs... "you were there, and you..."

The wierd thing was that just as we were finishing off that campaign, Final Fantasy X came out in my country, so dealing with all the real/not real stuff in that game was rather amusing.