Some questions were PM'ed to me that required public answers.

[quote]So assuming this all works like an encounter, I assume anyone that's not partying with you has to essentially run their own adventure? For instance, if me and two others joined up and decided to investigate some strange fantasy zone, it would be up to us to decide how it goes along, yeah? In which case, I assume we should stick to having it be individual artifacts about some random nutter rather than hints at the 'plot'. Well, you could let us investigate plot important places, but you would either have to provide one person with something relevant to present at the end, or just allow us to make stuff up, which would take the story out of your hands a little.[/quote]

That sounds about right. I'll handle anything about the 'plot' later and give you guys the heads up as to what I'm hinting towards in story (read below for some prelim ideas). For now, yes, we would form parties D&D style and investigate different areas to find artifacts related to one character's history, thus cleansing the location. For now, I want us to focus on character development and making our characters closer to each other in preparation for the finale. So you and a fellow RP'er or two or three or whatever can figure out what you guys want to investigate, while I would do the same with different RP'ers. From the number of characters we have, there may need to be two or three parties going at once. We might repeat this process a few times as long as the investigations are kept short, or we could expand this concept into finding multiple artifacts in one location to save time.

Yes, these separate investigations will involve taking some of the story out of my hands, but I will monitor what's going on via the compilation and raise any concerns as I see them.

[quote]By the way, how do physical matters work in Vivi-Dream, anyway? Are Oneiros capable of feeling pain, losing limbs, bleeding and even dying? Or is that all handwaved by it just being a dream? Assuming an Oneiros could be killed by a monster, is it permanent, or does it just do something like making the dreamer wake up in a cold sweat and just having to go to sleep again to put the Oneiros back in the Vivi-Dream?[/quote]

I'm not fond of the whole 'die in the dream, die in the real world' concept, so I propose that while Oneiros can feel pain and bleed like in real life, if a monster 'kills' them during a battle, the Oneiros is 'kicked out' of Vivi-Dream and the dreamer wakes up from a horrible nightmare. They could go back to sleep and re-enter Vivi-Dream, but they would have to restart at Remniche, leaving the rest of the party to handle the monsters. If this happens to all of the party members, the mission is a failure and another group would need to handle the monsters before the location can corrupt Vivi-Dream entirely.

Yes, I've thought of what happens to a 'killed' Oneiros if the person is in a coma, since they can't wake up from their nightmare. Those who are comatose would immediately restart at Remniche rather than awakening, but they need some time to heal their injuries and get over the shock of 'dying', thus they wouldn't be able to immediately re-adventure. As the story progresses, I'll have Lin explain these facts to your characters and have her distribute information pamphlets to those she and Hez won't meet right away.

You could think of this whole setup as an MMO, with dead party members reloading in the capital city. In fact, I hope to lean Vivi-Dream towards a secret nanomachine program that interconnects people's brains much like how the Internet connects computers. The negative emotions would be equivalent to viruses, and the Oneiros would function like anti-virus programs. If the viruses in Vivi-Dream aren't repaired, the entire network would be infected, and that would harm everyone's brains directly.