Issues with the Old System

After the expe­ri­ences of the first Dream­ing Awake cam­paign, it was decided that the game sys­tem suf­fered from some irreper­a­ble prob­lems. Because the list of char­ac­ter skills was left up to the play­ers to define, and because of play­ers’ pre­con­ceived ideas of how muta­ble the game­world is, there was a lot of con­fu­sion regard­ing what kind of things the char­ac­ters could actu­ally do. Com­bined with a com­bat sys­tem which slowed the game down more than expected and seemed to dis­cour­age stunt­ing, this caused the game to play out slowly and shak­ily at the expense of player enjoyment.

Changes in the New System

The new Dream­ing Awake sys­tem is no longer one writ­ten com­pletely from scratch, but instead is based heav­ily off White Wolf’s New World of Dark­ness sys­tem. A num­ber of oth­ers were considered:

• Old World of Dark­ness was a close com­peti­tor, but the newer ver­sion was cho­sen to speed up com­bat as much as possible.
• 7^th Sea appealed as I think the roll-and-keep sys­tem would work well, but a lot of the flavour of 7^th Sea char­ac­ters comes from the set­ting (swords­man schools, magic). I found it hard to make a 7^th Sea char­ac­ter look good on paper while retain­ing the free nature of combat/magic abil­i­ties of Dream­ing Awake.
• Exalted is set up for the kind of power level that Dream­ing Awake char­ac­ters will attain and even­tu­ally sur­pass, but it’s heav­ily reliant on Charms to give the kind of free expe­ri­ence I wanted for Dream­ing Awake.
• Fudge (and its kin) give the flex­i­bil­ity I wanted (and then some), but seem bet­ter suited for short-term games rather than the epic character-progression in Dream­ing Awake.