Opening a New Wise

Rogue Wizard character has the Dreamer die trait and is in process of opening a Dream Wise skill to represent his knowledge gained from his prophetic dreams. Once opened, it would allow him to Help/FoRK/Link this skill with others as per those rules.

Does this seem problematic to anyone else?
Should it be handled like Astrology without tools?
Should the DoF be cast to see if any relevant dreams were able to be applicable to the task at hand?
The original purpose of the Skill (I thought) was to see how well dreams were rembered, and what knowledge could be gleaned from them, rather than leaving it all up to gm discretion.

Feedback (as always) is greatly appreciated.

Knowing things about dreams does not give you prophetic dreams right?

The whole point of the Dreamer Trait is to give the player relevant to the situation knowledge. Having the player roll for a Wise to interpret those dreams seems fine to me, if they fail that just equals more fun.

No, but the DREAMER DIE TRAIT does… right? :wink:

It’s not really a wise, though. I agree that it would be better to treat this as an Astrology-like skill. Maybe Dream Interpretation.

It seems to me that Dream Wise would allow someone to know about dreams and there interpretation similarly to the way that Omen Wise allows one to know about various omens, and Superstition Wise grants knowledge about superstitions.

I could see it as a specialty wise if it was only allowed to affect dreams that were established as having already occured, but the Dreamer Trait seems to infer that knowledge already without any skill required.

It would be nice to have some sort of overall Divination skill that would cover all types of divination skills (Astrology, Palmistry, Tea Leaves, Crystal Gazing, Card Reading, Rune Casting, ect.)
Astrology could be used as Divination, but everyone doesn’t seek their answers in the stars.

Change the name and use the skill the same way for any form of divination that you want to include as something useful.

I’ve had a creepy Augur who used haruspicy (and a couple of times anthropomancy) exactly the same way. I appreciate having the requirement of a more onerous and costly ritual for the omens.

For dreaming I think it still is probably worth requiring at least a vague statement of the dream in advance. You can set up what it will help with but you can’t make it help everything without justification.

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Yeah, it’s the linking of the two that don’t make any sense. Dreamer is just a trait that makes the GM have to give you cryptic clues in “dream” form. There’s no mechanics to it other than that. Dream-wise is knowing about dreams in general. Even something like Prophetic Dreams-wise wouldn’t make sense for me to be a “universal fork” as described in your first post.

This is about the only way I could see it going down:

Jane: Let’s storm the castle!
Bob: Let’s wait, and I’ll see what my dreams tell me…
<Bob tests Prophetic Dreams-wise vs at least Ob 4 as a linked test>

Note that linked tests in BW have failure consequences like any test, the +1 Ob is in addition to that. So for things like this I twist pretty heavily on failures.

Full disclosure: I don’t like the Dreamer trait much, or “universal fork” abilities.

I played a Rouge Wizard with the Dreamer trait. It didn’t really came up in play very often. Part of the character’s back story was that she had forseen the end of the world in her dreams; we used Apocalypse-wise to establish facts about the Apocalypse (Like, for example, that Djinn were prophesied to be involved somehow), but never as a Astrology-style universal FoRK. The character in question also had Omen-wise, but that mainly got used as a FoRK into Falsehood to invent fake omens for the purpose of conning superstitious yokels.

The Dreamer and Gifted traits are pretty central to this character, being used to explain the “Spooky” character trait which drove him from the easy life of nobility into seeking answers in the outcast life of a rogue wizard, one (dream-based) belief revolves around two brothers being consumed by the dragons that they hunt and causing a war that destroys the world. Another belief is about his need to learn to fend for himself as his prophecies have frightened the last of his servants away. (His last is about finding more spells to learn).

The concept for the character was one of a noble child who always seemed to know things he shouldn’t be able to. The dreams grant him this knowledge and they are a form of (uncontrollable) divination caused by his gifted nature and his lifepaths reflect the choices these dreams (and character conception) have caused (Born Noble, Noble Student, Arcane Devotee > Outcast Rogue Wizard) as he sought answers for what was happening to him and why.

Perhaps the player should be broadening his characters Wises so that instead of just using Dream Wise his dreams could be the game mechanism that allows his character to attempt to open any wise related to the issue at hand such as a “______” wise to have information about a person, place, or thing he has dreamed of, but hasn’t actually experienced yet. That would allow the dream wise to be used to recall details of his dreams without FoRKing it into anything (treat it like a graduated test, the better the roll, the clearer the details) so in the case of the Dragon Dreams, it would require four or more successes to recall the coat of arms on the brothers shields. That information could then give him a proper starting point for his research into heraldry.
If the character wanted to attempt a City Wise with the justification of having been there in a dream, he could make statements about the city that he believed to be true, make his (beginners luck) roll and succeed or fail based on those results.
(It’s a cool character concept, but it makes my head hurt)

I’d go with something like Dream Interpretation-wise. Then if they’re about to do something and they want to consult their dreams, they can go to sleep and hope they dream. If they do dream, they can attempt to interpret the dream as a linked test toward whatever it is they hope to accomplish.

I wouldn’t treat it as some sort of universal FoRK. Nor would I assume that they had dreamed about this particular thing in the past. I’m all for using the Dreamer trait as a deliberate act, but make it a deliberate act.

I do like the idea of using the DoF to determine (when asked) if the dreamer just happens to have ever had a dream regarding “_____” as it is similar in game mechanics as asking if there happens to be an unlocked door or window to sneak in through (or any other unplanned yet possible occurrences that are determined by either DoF or even a simple say yes) if so, the dream wise roll could determine the extent of what was seen.

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