RPG Dreams

[Zak Arntson]

It had to happen ... somebody brings up dreams.

Anyhow, I dreamt that I had somehow got ahold of one of the first roleplaying games ever written. It was so obscure, it didn't have a name. Supposedly this thing came out before Chainmail and was more of a roleplaying game than Chainmail. It was version 0.3 of the rules, in a blue-covered pamphlet. I flipped through it and saw some charts and vague rules, but I didn't study it like I should have.

Anyone else read an RPG in their dreams? This isn't the first time for me. I've dreamt about reading a Dark Sun supplement (about an asteroid hitting the planet and doing a big metaplot shit), and an 80's old-school Ralph Bakshi Wizard's-style game, complete with badly layed out character sheet and crappy art.

[Rich Forest]

My once weekly game group has been somewhat scattered over the last few months, and I haven't been able to play in a single session in probably six or seven weeks.  Currently, I'm working on getting together a small group to get a game going again.  

So of course, in the absence of actual gaming, I've dreamt about gaming--most recently, just a couple days ago.  In the dream, some people had already arrived for the session quite early, and others were still expected.  A friend and I were trying to choose a game.  We kept flipping through the books, trying to choose one.  It was agonizing.  All the games made perfect sense at the time, but after waking up, I couldn't figure what games they were.  I just remember the inside pages, never the covers—pages and pages of words on text.  The memory of the dream is dominated by images of flipping through those pages.    

And of course, I woke up before we could ever choose a game and play.

Rich

[C. Edwards]

Not precisely an rpg dream but cool regardless:

...my lungs strain for air streaked with the odors of smoke and blood.  The axe feels heavy in my hand but I never stop swinging.  I can never stop swinging.  The goblinoids, orc-like creatures, swarm around me.  Thier grunts mix with a confusing haze of pounding drums and death-cries.  Hacking, hewing and slaying, I make my way to the crest of the muddy hill.  The sight that meets my eyes is at once magnificent and terrifying.  The cloud-streaked red sky plays audience to an endless conflict; churned smoking landscape and a ceasless tide of men, and other things, fighting and dying.  Before I can delve my dream-avatar's mind for any cause, goal, or reason to the battle that will never reach aftermath "I" am swept away from the hill top.  My vision begins to fade.  Red sky, smoke, and my dream-self viewing the carnage from atop his conquered hill slip slowly from the stage of my Cartesian Theater.  I wake, in the dark, to the familiar beating of my own heart.

Last nights dream involved a multi-dimensional shopping mall and the actress that portrays Nikita on the La Femme Nikita television series.  That one wasn't too shabby either. :)

-Chris

[Itse]

I've had a huge fantasy campaign come to me in a dream. This was slightly weird even. I kept having dreams of things and places I always knew were related to the campaign. This went on for half a summer. It only stopped when I finally announced I was going to pull it through. It's been three years now, with probably a year to go.

[hix]

The only lucid dream I can remember having was around the time of the Iron Game Chef Simulationist competition. I actually dreamed the situation for an RPG - and then heard my editing voice go "No, that isn't good enough" and start to modify the rules while I was still sleeping.

Woke up, scribbled down what I'd come up with, went back to sleep. Started dreaming more modifications to the same game.

Never happened before, never happened since.

Cheers,
Steve.

[Henri]

Just a few nights ago I had a dream where I wrote an rpg about being Christian (there was a thread on Christian rpgs a while back that I had been reading).  I remember very distinctly laying out all of the headings and bold and deciding what they should be, and then filling them in.  It was a short rpg, just a few pages long, with only a handful of rules.  Its too bad I can't remember any of the details at all.

[Jason Lee]

The girl had a dream where one of my characters came over to our house.  She hung out and played super nintendo.

[talysman]

I used to have dreams about reading RPG books (usually, they looked like classic D&D or Arduin Grimoire books.) I also used to have dreams where the first part of the dream turned out to be a vivid experience of a roleplaying game I was playing in the second part of the dream, or vice versa.

twice in the last couple years I had dreams inspired by RPGs I was designing. I started having freaky dreams when I was writing the Court of 9 Chambers, then I started having creepy dreams when I was working on the gnostic game Jonathan Walton asked me to work on (in the Forge birthday forums last year, in fact...)

I usually take that as a sign I'd better take a break.

[Lxndr]

My RPG dreams have all been about mechanics, either the creation, changing, or execution thereof.  Yes, I even dream in symbols and concepts instead of pictures - ph33r me.  Parts of Fastlane came to me in a dream and/or hypnagogic state; same with good portions of Shangri-la and Mudsylvania, neither of which have been released yet.

[lumpley]

My game Matchmaker came to me in a dream.  I dreamt I was cupid and I was trying to get these two people together by shouting suggestions at them.  It was so fun that I was designing a game out of it before I was fully awake, almost.

-Vincent

[hardcoremoose]

I dreamt a game about two weeks ago.  It was called Good Comes With The Pigeons.  I'm not going to tell you what it was about though, since I may write it up it at some point, but I can assure you, there are no pigeons in it.

- Scott

[Bob McNamee]

whew that's a relief.

Pigeons the RPG would fill a really really small niche market.

"Ok, aiming for the car...roll d20...damn a 12...do I hit?"

I've only dreampt about playing rpg's once, and could never identify the game... always wanted to dream I was a character on a adventure, esecially back in high school, but never did..."

[Ben Lehman]

I had a dream the other night about RPG theory.

I dreamt I was reading a draft this book that Valamir and Ron had compiled, about the history of RPG dating back to "Little Wars" in the 19th century (actually, there was some French game before that -- "Little Wars" was second in the bibliography) and showing that RPG had a continuous history for the last 100 years.

And I was trying to convince them that, in all honesty, you could tie it back into pre-Grimm collaborative Fairy Story telling, and thus create a link directly to pre-literate society and perhaps even pre-human societies.  I kept reloading, looking for a response, but it didn't come.

It was a strange dream.  I want the book, though.

yrs--
--Ben

[Scourge108]

Back in the days of 2nd ed AD&D, when all the gamers I knew were eagerly awaiting the next Complete Book of (put race/class here), I had a dream I got the latest book before even seeing what it was.  It turned out to be a book about ratfish characters.  Ratfish, distantly related to sharks and chimerae.  Not intelligent or magical ratfish either.  Just ratfish.  I guess if they had kept going with that series, they would have got to that eventually, but it seemed pretty weird at the time.

After seeing Dawn of the Dead 2 weeks ago, I had a dream that hordes of flesh-eating Teletubbies were taking over the country.  The Po's were the worst, because they were fast and would swarm up on you before you could stop them.  That would probably make a better game than one about ratfish.

[clehrich]

Actually, I just last night had a dream in which members of my wife's family (with whom I get along fine, BTW) insisted that I play this game called "The Average Game" with them.  They said it had been invented by 16th century Italian Jews in Lucca.  Then they said that it didn't really have any rules, just these cards you could use, and they handed me some cards, but then I started asking how I was supposed to use them, and then the next thing I knew they were saying that they just racked up a huge amount of points.  Sort of Calvinball as practical joke.  So then I asked again what the rules were, and they said there weren't any, and to make the point I took a blank card and wrote, "I win" on it, and played it, and announced that I'd won the second game for 10,000 points.  They said I couldn't do that.  I then got very annoyed and said that if I couldn't do that, there must be rules, and we started having a whole argument about the lumpley principle.

I think maybe I shouldn't eat so heavily right before bed, huh?