So let’s say you have a DW character with Dune-style prescience (I just finished Children of Dune).

So let’s say you have a DW character with Dune-style prescience (I just finished Children of Dune).

So let’s say you have a DW character with Dune-style prescience (I just finished Children of Dune). You can see threads of possible futures, which probably means you can force the GM to reveal grim portents and stakes questions, as well as asking your own stakes questions and getting the GM to weigh in on them. Lots of opportunities for making players pony up what they are interested in, etc etc, but hella boring if that’s your only power.

What else would you want to be able to do if this was your character?

24 thoughts on “So let’s say you have a DW character with Dune-style prescience (I just finished Children of Dune).”

  6. Why limit yourself to the prescience? Paul and his kin get all sorts of powers: kungfu, telepathy, the Voice. I can see a move with some horrible trigger like:

    When you forsee the death of an NPC, roll +wis …

    .That alone could be fantastic.

  7. I once had the idea for a mechanic for inviolable prophecy: if your roll’s success would make the foreseen future impossible, it fails. If your roll’s failure would make the foreseen future impossible, you succeed as if a 7-9, with a harder consequence than normal.

    (Mostly I agree with J Walton here, though)

  9. WORSE FATES: If you would die, you may instead receive a vision of some terrible thing that must come to pass first (the GM tells you what), and treat your last breath roll as a 10+. Until that terrible thing either comes to pass or becomes impossible, take -1 ongoing to all rolls.

  11. -1 is a pretty big deal! Especially to all rolls. And it’s not necessarily a trivial escape clause, like imagine the GM says “But first before you die, you must see your hometown in flames.” How do you make that impossible?

    Actually maybe there should be a thing about how the GM  has to add the witnessed terrible thing to the grim portents of a front, or make a front with it as a grim portent right now. Hmmm….

  12. Its not that -1 isn’t severe – it is! But, you also need to remember it each time, it is static, and we can do better. Making the GM add to the grim portents is a good idea!

  13. I wrote a clockpunk playbook which is on http://rpgnow.com. Seeing the future is difficult in an rpg. (Unless you play pathfinder adventure paths…)

    So I limited his prescience to a few moments. It translates into something like jedi reflexes which allows him to reroll dice, have armor based on the fact that he sees a blow before it happens etc. He can also freeze time, jump forward, jump back, see the past, age objects and creatures and rejuvenate objects and creatures. 

  15. Tim Franzke I’m not real worried about how to do prescience, I’m just kind of stuck on what would actually make that character interesting but still unified. So far this thread seems to tell me:

    – super crazy kung-fu (+rerolls and armour)

    – annoy people with spoilers

    – predestinate your projects

    – telepathy

    – Voice

    – time travel

    – control time

    – control entropy

  21. Johnstone Metzger: I don’t think lumping telepathy/time travel stuff in would make for a very interesting playbook, unless you were just making a psion and wanted to cover all of the disciplines (telepathy, telekinetic, augury, matter manipulation), and even then I’d probably leave time travel out of it (it doesn’t seem like it fits the theme). Crazy kung-fu sounds pretty good (but I’d be wary of just making it into another combat class; also, you’d need to call the kung-fu move “Déjà-Fu”).

    Someone did an Augur playbook that is almost entirely the prescience part, if you want to check it out for inspiration: 

    Okasvi’s Augur (with Flavivirus’ edits): https://docs.google.com/document/d/1qxllSnBOZV_1i9TwQ1sba_SiyWUqz156bL5FomAmANE/edit

    And there’s also a Psion playbook:

    TombsGrave’s Psion: http://www.mediafire.com/view/?694weh2292fltbx

  23. Alex Norris Yeah, nothing’s really clicked with me yet, still thinking about it. I want to call it The Interpreter of Shadows, but I can’t give them illusions, so I might go with shadow magic, but I dunno.

  24. Tim Franzke For Dune, the best start is Herbert’s original novel. And avoid the new ones like the plague until the spice that they are.

    Johnstone Metzger You’re joking, but turning into an epic sand god would be amazing. Talk about retiring to safety – and the golden path for all humanity.

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