Well, what CAN I teach myself and improve upon in dream training?
It's a challenging question and puts things in a difficult spot.
On the one hand, I think it would be entirely inappropriate to allow characters to rest and train at the same time. Time is one of the limitations on training, and if you're going to overcome it there has to be a cost.
On the other hand, I am aware that "dream training" is used in some fiction, and ought to be valid in some context.
I've already decided that you can't actually improve the skill ability level of body-based skills, because the memory of such skills is in the body, in the muscles themselves, and so to improve them you have to train the body--which you can't do in your dreams.
I've also noted that when he is dreaming he can't turn himself into a 3@10 SAL skilled user of anything; he can only make his targets easy to kill.
So the question really is, what can you do in your sleep to improve your abilities, and how do you do it?
--M. J. Young
So the question really is, what can you do in your sleep to improve your abilities, and how do you do it?
That's what I was saying. I've been told that the reason why hypnosis works is because your subconscious mind remembers every nuance, every detail of the event. Your dreaming is your subconscious mind. Every time I ever fired a gun, every time I ever saw one being fired, every movie I ever saw, everything, is stored in there. That's got to be an example bonus or something. My hope is that I can turn this into a poor man's holodeck training simulation.
On the one hand, I think it would be entirely inappropriate to allow characters to rest and train at the same time. Time is one of the limitations on training, and if you're going to overcome it there has to be a cost.
I don't expect to actually improve my skills. I just want to have some kind of a bonus for when I can do it. If I could go from 1@10 to 2@1 in a quarter of the normal practice time even, that would be great. I know that I lost my 2@1 boxing SAL. I've still got that in my mind, and it's a bonus for when the body is ready. I'm not certain what kind of a bonus that is, but that's what I'm going after.
On the other hand, I am aware that "dream training" is used in some fiction, and ought to be valid in some context.
In what context is it valid in the fiction? That's a good place to start, I'd think.
I've already decided that you can't actually improve the skill ability level of body-based skills
As I was saying, every martial arts film I've ever seen is stored in my head. Practice the moves that the Ninja Turtles did whilst dreaming. Have the 2@1 example bonus that I'm going to have when I can box. Something like that.
So I take it you've never before had a player try something like this?
(Doing Therapy)
Two
How about this? I have 1@10 skill in all handguns. I've fired dozens of them, sometimes only for one day when I was out with my friends. However, my brain remembers exactly what it felt like to shoot that Browning 22 target pistol I fired when I was 16. What I would want is that when I shoot one of these guns that I have shot, I will increase skill from 1@10 to 2@1 much, much faster than normal. I would be happy with that. I've 1@10 with all rifles. I've fired dozens of them. Likewise with that. I'm very likely to run into a lot of them in game. That's one thing that I'd want. Something like that would make me happy for the moment.
Any gun I have fired in game or in real life, for which I have a 1@10 SAL, be able to increase it to 2@1 a lot faster.
(Doing Therapy)
On the one hand, I think it would be entirely inappropriate to allow characters to rest and train at the same time. Time is one of the limitations on training, and if you're going to overcome it there has to be a cost.
This seems particularly important to the concept not being abused. Spending the entire night running scenarios over in your head is going to be exhausting. I couldn't see any way you could have a restful night in any sense.
Perhaps having the skill act as having a trainer in the field. The idea being you're looking back on yourself and how you did an action right and how you did it wrong.
I do have a few concerns about how this would be implemented though.
1. Training is skill specific, so would you need a seperate trainer skill for every skill?
2. It can't be dream teaching varient, as by the nature of it being yourself you're going to be trying to raise the pupil's SAL above your own.
3. You traditionally can't use trainer or teacher skills on yourself. If this is allowed at all I imagine there would be a negative sit mod for this?
4. Memory isn't perfect though. How close to the actual action would your preparation have to be? Until you physically try changing there's only so much you can figure out. Also can you practice it in your dreams and then not try it for years and still claim it as the bonus? That doesn't seem right either.
My opinion would be that it would have to happen during the nights the physical training it is augmenting takes place, to hone it each night. I know this isn't exactly what John is aiming for but it is a dream training method and similar to how some fictions depict it. There would have to be a negative sit mod somewhere during the day in my opinion to attribute the exhaustion a continued regiment of dream training would cause.
I would say dream training is almost entirely inappropriate for Bod skills. As MJ suggested, it doesn't matter if your mind knows what you're doing right and what you're doing wrong. You'll be able to mentally correct yourself all you want in practice, but until you get those motions into your body, until your muscles can do them without your mind directing, you're not raising a Bod skill.
However, I could easily see this sort of thing being used for training Mag or Psi skills. Psi skills especially. And... personally I don't think of it as 'training yourself,' I think of it more like... having another 'you' there to train you. Does that make sense? Sort of like receiving training from an Alt of yourself, only, not. Hmm...
I think of it more like... having another 'you' there to train you. Does that make sense? Sort of like receiving training from an Alt of yourself, only, not. Hmm...
A trainer can improve his student to a level higher than his own. I'm getting training from another 1@10. I've 5 years before I'll be able to shoot a gun. There's GOT to be something I can do to improve myself in that time.
After the dream training however how do you know the training advice worked? How do you know it wasn't wrong and leading you in the wrong direction until you test it with the actual skill? This is the problem I see with dream training for 5 years without practicing it during the day.
I see what you're saying. I was told that the answer to the question "Can it be done in Multiverser?" is always "Yes". So, I'm asking "Can I train myself in my sleep?" answer (or so I've been told) is "Yes". Just have to figure out how.
My personal feeling is that dream training will increase any skills used in dreams, but not the real world. It will probably come in handy in a Nightmare on Elm Street world.
Thanks for the input on all sides. I don't know that I've reached any conclusions, but I've gained a lot from it.
John wrote:
I know that I lost my 2@1 boxing SAL. I've still got that in my mind, and it's a bonus for when the body is ready. I'm not certain what kind of a bonus that is, but that's what I'm going after.
The bonus you get in that is an example bonus. It means that when you try to teach this body how to box, in addition to your bod bias, best relevant attribute, and the world area bias, you'll get +21 for having a 2@1 example of how to box. That increases your chance to learn the skill at all by 21 percentage points, and it might give you a chance of success greater than 50% or even greater than 80%, which means that a high roll could mean you start at 1@2 or 1@3. After that, it's nothing. If you have a 5@1 bias before you try to learn it, and you roll a 01 on the learning attempt, you probably did not benefit at all from it; the benefit is thus theoretical, that depending on your skill learning roll you might learn the skill because of the previous example, and you might learn it better than most starting pupils.
The only examples that come to mind all involve using recordings to give theoretical knowledge in the form of information to be repeated later--The Misadventures of Merlin Jones, if I am remembering correctly, used sleep learning to get the football players able to pass their history tests by having them listen to recordings of Merlin's girlfriend when they were going to sleep. (I also remember the goofy part that when they were questioned in oral exams and tried to answer, the answers came out of their mouths in her voice.)On the other hand, I am aware that "dream training" is used in some fiction, and ought to be valid in some context.In what context is it valid in the fiction? That's a good place to start, I'd think.
I expect there are other examples, but I can't recall any at the moment.
As I was saying, every martial arts film I've ever seen is stored in my head. Practice the moves that the Ninja Turtles did whilst dreaming. Have the 2@1 example bonus that I'm going to have when I can box. Something like that.
I have a hard time allowing "saw this in a movie" to be used as an example, and always limit such examples to 1@1. The reason is simple, and I speak from experience. When I was a boy, I saw a lot of Robin Hood and King Arthur stuff, and there were lots of sword fights. My brother and I got play swords or sticks and would sword fight like we saw on television: we bashed at each other's swords. You see, the people fighting on television are trying not to hurt each other. You can even see it when you watch wrestling--that heavy wrestler slamming that other wrestler down on the mat could probably crush him if he didn't break his own fall before he hit the mat. (I'm not saying "wrestling is fake", or that I could do what they do; I'm saying that they pull their punches because they really do not want to kill each other.) Copy the fighters you see in movies and you'll learn how not to hurt someone.
Mike had a lot of good points, and I don't want to minimize them, but I wanted to emphasize this one:
Memory isn't perfect though.
There's a lot to that. We're learning that eye witness accounts are unreliable because people remember very clearly what they thought they saw.
O.K., here's the thing: if this works at all, it is a kind of practice, not a kind of training.
I can go to sleep thinking my way through a song, and wake up still thinking it. It might be that in doing so I reinforce the patterns of the song, the words, the melody, and thus in some sense my ability to play that song. I do not thereby improve my ability to sing or to play the instrument--only to sing that particular song.
I have lain awake in bed tapping out piano parts on my leg or guitar parts on an air guitar, trying to reinforce those parts. They don't improve my ability to play the piano or the guitar, but they reinforce my knowledge of those parts, so I can play that song more reliably.
I can imagine going through the motions of a martial arts maneuver mentally, reinforcing how I would do it physically.
Let me turn it around. If I am practicing my guitar, I play through the parts. Sometimes I stop and go over the same part again. Sometimes I stop and think through the part, moving my fingers slowly or simply looking at the fretboard to imagine where my fingers ought to be. The mental process is thus part of my practice--but not all of my practice.
There was that Stallone/Snipes movie Demolition Man which included sleep teaching; that, however, used high-tech mind/machine interface to copy neural memories from a database into the neural pathways of the unconscious subjects, and doesn't apply here. A lot of high-tech applications could be imagined, but this is not one of those. This comment is entirely out of place in the past because I just remembered it.
So maybe what we're looking at is that someone who has to spend sixty hours over one hundred days practicing can spend one quarter of that time, fifteen of those hours, doing so while asleep. I think, though, that it's more complicated than that--he loses one hour of rest for every hour that he spends practicing and has to be asleep for at least two hours (that is, he is really sleep practicing for two hours, for which he gets one hour of practice and one hour of rest), and the sleep practice must be preceded by real practice and must never exceed twenty-five percent of the total practice time to this point. Thus once he has practiced for three hours awake he can sleep-practice for two hours asleep and count that as an hour of sleep and an hour of practice, but he can't practice for another sleep session until he has put in another three hours of real practice. He could, in theory, practice for real for forty-five hours and then spend thirty hours sleeping from which he would get fifteen hours of sleep and fifteen hours of practice, although I can't imagine too many situations in which you'd do it that way.
The sleep practice requires maintaining a level of consciousness that is not fully asleep nor fully awake. That I think might require a skill check, a P1@0 variant (which is where hypnosis falls).
That looks reasonably fair and balanced to me, but it's not final, so feel free to comment.
--M. J. Young
And all of this puts me where in my game?
So maybe what we're looking at is that someone who has to spend sixty hours over one hundred days practicing can spend one quarter of that time, fifteen of those hours, doing so while asleep. I think, though, that it's more complicated than that--he loses one hour of rest for every hour that he spends practicing and has to be asleep for at least two hours (that is, he is really sleep practicing for two hours, for which he gets one hour of practice and one hour of rest), and the sleep practice must be preceded by real practice and must never exceed twenty-five percent of the total practice time to this point. Thus once he has practiced for three hours awake he can sleep-practice for two hours asleep and count that as an hour of sleep and an hour of practice, but he can't practice for another sleep session until he has put in another three hours of real practice. He could, in theory, practice for real for forty-five hours and then spend thirty hours sleeping from which he would get fifteen hours of sleep and fifteen hours of practice, although I can't imagine too many situations in which you'd do it that way.
This seems to be reasonable, it gives you more effective hours in the day for training at the cost of less recuperative sleep. You don't actually gain hours however, as the hour you save by practicing while you are asleep is still used in a manner not dedicated to getting rest. This is the same as just staying up an extra hour.
The sleep practice requires maintaining a level of consciousness that is not fully asleep nor fully awake. That I think might require a skill check, a P1@0 variant (which is where hypnosis falls).
Would a skill roll for this be needed for every mark improvement then?
My thoughts were that the roll would be needed every time the character wanted to use this ability to practice while abed. That might be a bit harsh, though. I've done something similar with characters trying to use a skill to get eight hours of rest in four hours, such that if they make the roll they meditate and are refreshed in half the normal time, if they fail they simply fall asleep and awaken later, and if they botch they neither rest nor sleep. However, it strikes me that already he's not really getting much benefit from this.
That suggests an adjustment: he must sleep for at least two hours, but if he makes the roll successfully for one of the hours he sleeps he is also practicing, and for all of the time he is also sleeping, so he gets two hours of sleep and one hour of practice for each two hours and a successful roll. All other restrictions would still apply, and if he wanted two hours of practice in four hours of sleep he would have to roll successfully twice--and chaining only works if the first roll is successful (you can't add a second success to a first failure), with chaining penalties applied. I would also note that a professional can get two hours (from four) on a single roll and an expert three (from six) on a single roll--that is, professional and expert at the dream training skill.
Is that better?
--M. J. Young
Looks good in my opinion. What would the botch result in though?
The first thing that comes to mind is the same botch as the meditation.
Another option which I think would be cool would be a partial negation of practice. A botched roll could mean the practice schedule is set backwards dependent on a GE roll perhaps?
Or a botch means I have a terrible nightmare.
I'm going to attempt to summarize the skill that was created here clear to John and everyone who's reading.
I am still far too new to Multiverser to be able to write this in a skill format, but I'll write it to the best of my ability.
Dream Training (Perhaps more appropriately titled Dream Practicing)
1.May only be attempted once per 3 hours of practice in the practiced skill.
2.One successful roll accompanied by 2 hours of sleep results in 2 hours of rest and 1 additional hour of practice.
3.May be chained, with penalties per chaining applied, as long as the number of hours of dream practice doesn't exceed 1/3 the number of hours practiced while awake or 1/2 the number of hours while asleep.
4.At professional level one roll covers 4 hours of sleep (2 effective hours of practice) and at expert level one roll covers 6 hours of sleep (3 effective hours of practice)
I think this is a good summary of what was agreed upon.
So what kind of real-life benefit do I get out of this? Can I raise my SAL with that 9mm carbine to 3@10 before the body is old enough to shoot it? That's what I'm not clear on.
1.May only be attempted once per 3 hours of practice in the practiced skill.
No, for the above reason. The skill gives you more hours that you can practice in a day. That's all.
Well, I've spent thousands of hours practicing my blacksmithing. So, one hour per three hours would be enough dream practice to raise the SAL.
That's probably up to the ref's interpretation. I was just summarizing. I think the intention was that the dream practice go hand in hand with real practice, as in during the night immediately following the day you practiced, but I could be wrong as to how MJ was interpreting it.
Well, I can't practice much of anything at the moment, so it's kind of a useless skill I created.
I think it's a neat skill, wish I'd thought of it to be honest. You may have to just settle for the fact there isn't a huge shortcut to get to 3@10. It's the absolute maximum for a reason.
It's not what I was hoping for. I was hoping to have a way to improve my skills dramatically.
And just because I thought of it first doesn't mean you can't use it. Who is to say your character didn't think of it as well?
Perhaps at some point. I have to convince myself my character would actually think of it first though. I've got plenty of psionic skills to try and learn in my current world first anyway.
I just try to be very careful about whether the actions my character does are reasonable for him to have thought of, without knowledge I've acquired outside the multiverse.
I just try to be very careful about whether the actions my character does are reasonable for him to have thought of, without knowledge I've acquired outside the multiverse.
Here's the problem that I have with that. You aren't there. Your character might see something trivial. See something whilst he's walking to the bus stop, see something on TV, see something somewhere, that you would never see, and the ref would never think to tell you about. That trivial something that you saw might inspire in you a line of thinking that leads to something like this. I mean, tell me you've never gotten inspiration to try something from something trivial. I, who am not in the multiverse, who am not seeing the trivial thing that my character saw, take my inspiration anywhere I can get it.
Two
See if you can explain your intentions better Mr. Young. I've thousands of hours practice driving (used to deliver pizzas) So can I raise my driving SAL in my sleep? One hour dreaming per three practice. Thousands of hours blacksmithing, can I raise my SAL in that? How does this work?
Botch List for Dream Training:
1. Insomnia for 2d10 days afterwards.
2. Narcolepsy. You find yourself dropping asleep for five minute spans during the day without warning for a week afterwards.
3. I've heard 'Practise does not make perfect, it makes permanent.' The next 1d5 (Half rounded up of a d10 if even) times the user uses the skill, he has a -20 Sit-mod as part of his minds wants to do it the wrong way.
4. Not able to use Dream Training for 1d10 weeks afterward.
5. Nightmares, as John said.
6. Sleepwalking, into possibly dangerous areas.
7. Sleepworking (which would mean you're strolling out to the smithery and starting a fire while asleep.)
8. Practise schedule set back by a number of hours per a GE roll as Glantri said.
9. Sleep triggered by doing the activity during the day.
10. I need a really mean one: Accidentally trigger the yogic trick of lowering heart rate. Verses oneself out.
11. Not sure what the meditation botch Glantri was talking about, but here's a spot for it...
12. Lack of REM sleep. This eventually leads to increased irritability, less rationality, and then daytime hallucinations. This is a botch that continues until the player becomes aware of it, and then fixes it. We need regular dreaming.
13. Contact Dream Entities in Visions such as Morpheus, Greek god of sleep, or the Loah, or the Thunderbird and receive a message. This message is usually cryptic. At this point, the entity leaves the situation with the person. He can choose to 'get involved' or find his life and a lot of other peoples' lives messed up as some scenario unwinds to its completion.
14.
Ya know, I was really hoping that nightmares would be the extent of the botch list. I'm trying to teach myself to control dreams. Anything that happens as a result should happen in the dream world, at least I would think. It is, in a nutshell, just finding extra time to think about what I'm doing. Could you stop your heart by thinking too hard? I'd like to think not.
(Doing Therapy)
Two
MJ, what are the three hours per one parameters? I've spent thousands of hours driving a car. I delivered pizzas for over three years. I believe I have a 2@5 driving skill. I've probably got enough "Three to one" hours driving a car to increase that to 2@6 by the time I can drive one. How does that work? Blacksmithing likewise. How does this work, exactly?
(Doing Therapy)
Mike is wrong on one point, but that's not it.
What I don't care about is whether you spend forty-five hours practicing awake and then fifteen hours practicing asleep to reach the next intensity. What I do care about is that the forty-five hours awake and fifteen hours asleep are together as the training for the next intensity, and that the hours asleep never exceed one third the hours awake for the training for that intensity. So you can practice one hour asleep immediately after practicing three hours awake, or you can practice for forty-five hours during shore leave and get the last fifteen hours in the cramped quarters of your bunk aboard the submarine. However, once you advance to the next intensity, you start over at zero for both.
What I would correct in Mike's restatement is that I wouldn't limit it to one attempt, but to one success per three hours of previous practice. That is, if today you practiced for three hours and tonight you failed to sleep-practice, tomorrow night you could try again.
So you have zero hours practicing anything other than the basic baby bod skills and the few psi skills you've been exercising.
--M. J. Young