Players: Characters (can't remember the names very well, so including 'hook' and character descriptions)
Myself: Game Master
Michael: Loner with affinity for cats.
Wayne: Scholar with strong social skills
Michelle: Young girl with a shadow self from the ancient (egyptian) past and the potential for dream magic.

Setting: Characters are the Dreaming selves of people who have somehow crossed over bodily into the CoC Dreamlands. They have no idea where they are or what is going on.

Genre: Surreal Horror / Fantasy.

My personal theme: Does anything we do ultimately matter?

This game was played out about 4 years ago over a four month period or so. My mark of failure is that it was only marginally enjoyable by the participants. In the end we lost Michelle as a player shortly after the game ended. Since then I have played many games with just Wayne and Michael and we have had a rip roaring time, in spite of the few numbers.

In terms of game construction: In the end of the game I intended to hand the players the keys to the kingdom, as it were. They were to be given vast cosmic power, enough to shape entire universes. The method for delivering this power was Fated rather than Determined, if you will. Depending on what the players had their character's do, I would have come up with a different method of delivering them the vast cosmic power. Depending on what they then did with this ability, there would be implications for another game I was running at the time (called Devolution). Ostensibly, the Dreamlands game was in the same multiverse, and was dealing with the kind of cosmic power that could have implications for the Devolution game. This aspect came off rather well in the end, at least as far as the implications for Devolution were concerned.

The game sessions largely consisted of a wander through the Dreamlands, using elements from that setting as reference points, with events and locations encountered largely introduced and described by myself. Characters were occasionally chased by things or encountered mysterious things that seemed to be without reason or rationale, bringing in the theme on a recurring basis. I went for a 'dreamlike' style of narration, in that things followed a stream of unconscious when I was describing them. Players mostly directed the action, in the sense that after the initial impetus of "what are we doing here, what is going on?" was resolved more or less, the characters had oportunity to determine what they wanted to try to do in the setting: go home, go native in the Dreamlands, etc.

The characters at more or less went their separate ways in the mid point of the game, then Michelle drew them back together to try to get back to the real world. There was an NPC (Michelle's character's ancient former self) who she made more 'real' by personifying her separate from herself, so you might call this 'villain' her shadow self... This figure led her back to the real world, by threatening ostensibly to do something bad when she got there, but in truth, this shadow self was nothing more than the character's own desire for self annihilation. This element was a germ from michelle's background that I grew, and she supported.

They eventually succeeded getting to the real world, only to discover that in the stars had been right for about a month (as much objective time as had passed in the real world since the characters had escaped into the dreamlands). The world was populated by the mythos now. They came back into the real world with the very essence of human dreams with them, however, and thus the end game resulted.

The end game was fairly fun, but rather short. Each character determined what they were going to do with their essense of dreams, and I narrated a consequence / epilogue with them.

Now: Why it failed, IMO.

Michael and Wayne are both relatively quiet. They were both willing to let Michelle or I take the centre stage and drive the plot as we saw fit. If they were confronted with one or the other of us they would generally make a simple response and then defer the next action back to the two more vocal players.

Michelle thus only had myself to bounce her ideas off, and I was primarily trying to maintain the entire group energy, not just hers.

In essence, to make the game work, Michelle needed more people to play off, and in order for that to happen, Michael and Wayne would have had even more of a back seat. In Devolution, with the same players + 4 others, Michael held centre stage whenever there was combat since he was the party brick (a hafling who spent his life wanting to be a knight in a culture where that concept was laughable... chip on shoulder the size of a continental shelf) and was left to the sidelines in most other situations, but Wayne (the party navigator / arcanophobe) spent the entire game dodging the plot and remaining true to his character... and not really being an integral part of the story unless I worked to involve him.

Now, as it turns out, I would say that both Michael and Wayne would have said they had an OK game, but it was not enjoyable for Michelle, and that definately meant it was not enjoyable for me.

Evan

Addendum. Just had a conversation with Michael and this is his comment:

Er, I didn't enjoy much of that game, so I wouldn't have said I had an OK
game. In fact that's the only game I recall of yours that I didn't get much
enjoyment from.  It may have been the wrong game at the wrong time for me,
but I was only partly inspired by my character concept, and the character's
special ability didn't seem to mesh well with the plot of the game.

Michael.