Dreaming God

Dreaming God Alias: none Alignment: Town Mafia Third-Party Role type: Unpowered Choice: Night

The Dreaming God is a role that possesses a list of many flavor names for one-shot abilities. Pregame and during each Night, it must compulsively choose one ability to use. The Dreaming God is not told what any of their abilities do.

Standard version

A Dreaming God has a list of names for abilities (typically ten of them), chosen by the moderator pregame. Each name corresponds to an ability; however, the Dreaming God does not know the correspondence. (However, the flavour names contain hints for the user to figure out; the choice of action is thus not random, but dependent on how well the Dreaming God can deduce what their actions do.)

The abilities are usually global and untargeted, rather than affecting a particular player; they're more like changes to the game's ruleset. Examples of common Dreaming God abilities include things like deadline changes, and relaxations of the rule against private communication.

Variations

The Dreaming God is effectively a Jack of All Trades who is not self-aware, not even at the time they use their ability.

A Developer is similar to a Dreaming God, being a player who has powers that are unclear until actually used, but a Developer has no influence on the order in which they gain their powers, and normally gains passive abilities affecting themself rather than causing global effects that affect everyone.

Use & Balance

Dreaming God's power is entirely dependent on which abilities it chooses. Since it is not necessarily obvious what each ability does, this makes its performance somewhat random. Thus, it adds swing and unpredictability to the setup. Care should be taken that the effects of the Dreaming God's actions do not result in a role becoming overpowered to the point of breaking the setup.

Play Advice

You might not be able to work out what your abilities do, but you may be able to work out what part of the game they affect. Abilities that, e.g., change the deadline are not likely to be particularly powerful for Town, so you might want to look for an ability that at least has a chance of contributing in a more useful way.

Sample Role PMs

The standardized Role PM for "Dreaming God" describes the action as follows:

• As an active action: you must use one of the following abilities: list. You may choose each ability only once, and will not know what the ability does until you use it. (edit)

Example (simplest form)

Welcome to game! You are a Town Dreaming God.

You have the following active ability:

• Each Night, you must use one of the following abilities: list. You may choose each ability only once, and will not know what the ability does until you use it.

You win if all threats to the town are eliminated and at least one town-aligned player is alive.

Confirm by replying to this PM with a summary of your role.

Example (with modifiers)

Welcome to game! You are a Town 1-shot Dreaming God.

You have the following active ability:

• Once in the game at Night, you must use one of the following abilities: list. You may choose each ability only once, and will not know what the ability does until you use it.

You win if all threats to the town are eliminated and at least one town-aligned player is alive.

Confirm by replying to this PM with a summary of your role.

See also

Dreaming God won the Best New Role Scummy in 2008. Its name comes from its original flavor in Mind Screw Mafia, where it was the role name of Haruhi Suzumiya.