No, seriously. I dreamed I was playing "Burning Empires" with Luke Crane. I haven't read "Burning Empires" and have only played "Burning Wheel" in a demo a couple GenCons ago, but in my dream version, the game worked like this: First you generated your character, and then you created his space ship. (Fair enough, right?) We were creating characters, and it was apparently a lifepath sort of system. Dunno if it had skills and stats, I woke up before we got to that part.

Here's what I remember. There was a laundry list of factors you could choose about your character. You got to pick three, kinda like character classes in D&D. (I know, I know, not a damn thing like the wheel. Tell it to my hippocampus or something.) From what I gather, these three traits served as lifepaths, and you could choose how far to go down each path. Presumably, you had a limited number of "steps" (or "levels"?) you could take along the paths total. So if I was starting out as a character with fifteen total levels, I could take five in each factor or go 13/1/1 or whatever crazy thing I wanted.

So far, my subconscious isn't being very creative, but there were two twists.

1) Each factor wasn't a profession like "criminal" or "soldier." It was a personality thing, or a defining trait. I remember picking "lonesome" for my character, and maybe "old" or "crabby" or something.

2) Each level taken at character generation had a choice to make -- I remember overhearing "Yeah, deeper into the Lonesome path there's some awesome stuff" and the sense that at each level I had to pick 'right' or 'left' and that these were moral choices, not just "do you major in biology". From a waking perspective, you can see how this would produce a huge garden of forking paths. I mean, assuming ten factors and ten possible levels in each, how does the math work...?

A - splits to A1/A2 - A11/A12/A21/A22 - A111/A112/A211/A212/A121/A122/A211/A222...

So the progression is first level, 2 possibilities, second level 4, third 8... 2/4/8/16/32/64/128/256/512/1024...

Yeah, if my pre-shower math is right this morning, this kind of mill produces 10,240 unique starting characters. Only, wait, it'd be more, because you could have someone who was... whoa.

Okay, you'd have to repeat some choices.

Anyhow, that's my GenCon dream. What d'you make of it?

-G.

Looking up "iterative lifepath roleplaying game character generation" on http://www.dreammoods.com/dreamdictionary/ .

Sounds like a vacation is in order :)

Do you have any big decisions hanging over your head right now that your subconcious is trying to help process? Life is, after all, a game and we have thousands of choices to make each day.

Either that or you are the Hero of your story and have wandered into the Labyrinth without your ball of string.

That's my armchair psychologist stab at it.

I think the subconscious part of your mind tries to tell us that the space ship is an evolving entity in its own right and has its own equivalent of lifepaths. Probably, literally.

Cause, this multiplies your number of unique starting characters by another 10,240 combinations.

Also, the general symbolism of your dream combined with an analysis of current astrological influences and a quick Tarot reading clearly suggests that there is some conflict between the pilot's and the ship's goals and needs.