Wednesday, March 5, 2008

General RPGs' Dreams

You know, there's something that has always seemed a bit odd to me is RPG characters' dreams. Do they EVER just have regular, non-plot-essential dreams? I mean, if an RPG character has a dream, at LEAST 75% of the time it's a vision telling them of some immensely important upcoming event, usually one that spells doom and destruction for all they know if they don't go out and level up at least 40 times while procuring some holy super-powered divine object/weapon/maiden. They never just have a normal dream about random crap their minds throw together. It's ALWAYS prophetic somehow; even the purpose of the vision can't just be some made up crap. If they dream that they're the chosen one and that a race of aliens are gonna attack their world and they're the only person who can stop the aliens by finding 7 magic rings that can forge the Hyper Force Sword, then EVERY PART of that is true. Not one part of it can be made up, even though, for some reason, most of the characters who have the dreams ignore them until the predicted stuff is currently about to happen or IS happening. Even though EVERY dream has huge significance, they seem to treat the things with as little or even LESS interest than we do with our dreams.

The only real exception that accounts for the 25 or lower percent of the time is when a dream is showing a character some part of their past. And again, there's no possibility that this part of their past isn't incredibly important. Shadow of Final Fantasy 6 never just dreams about how fun it was to go hang-gliding with Baram that one time. He has to have dreams remembering monumental moments that changed his life forever. Karen from Phantasy Star Universe doesn't have a memory dream of a conversation she had with someone last Friday about what kind of boots she prefers. She has a traumatic memory dream of her mom dying when she was a little kid. I mean, I know that these are the kinds of moments that do stay with a person forever, and compared to the 100% accurate prophetic dreams, these ones are pretty believable, but still, no one dreams about massively significant memories like that all the time.

Y'know, I had a dream last week. I don't remember too many particulars (frankly, I'm surprised I remember it at all, because I usually forget dreams the moment I wake up), but I do remember that for some reason or other, I was talking to God about roast beef sandwiches. I really kinda wish I could remember the set-up to that conversation, and what I and God said exactly, because I know I really enjoyed it while it was going on and it would definitely be fun to relate, but that's life.

Anyways, living in this world, which makes more sense than it doesn't, I know I can disregard that dream as probably unimportant overall. But if I were living in an RPG world, this dream would have been a holy vision, and I would know for sure that God himself was granting it to me, and telling me that I must go on a journey to find the legendary Roast Beef Sandwich of El-Al-Eeal, lost since ancient times and key to the salvation of my world from the heinous Bologna Demons, summoned forth every thousand years to bring ruination to all. Not only that, but the dream might have then gone on to display a memory I had of my father leaving on a journey to discover the truth behind the Whole Wheat civilizations of old that created the sandwich I was now to find.

Seriously, though, I know this isn't a big deal or anything, but it still IS kinda silly. I know it would get boring if every time you slept at the inn you had to watch an inane dream sequence that means nothing, but still, it would be a lot more realistic if every now and then your sad-hearted pretty-boy protagonist just had a non-plot-significant dream where he was in front of his entire graduating class from Generic Main Character Mercenary Academy in his underwear.

1 comment:

  1. To exspand on this maybe have dreams also represent what the character is thinking or feeling at that point

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