What constitutes a divine vision? Is it strictly writhing around on the floor and speaking in tounges, a favored animal/color/stone, or flash in your stream of consciousness? Does it include dreams as well?

It seems that most clerics would spend a great deal of time thinking about their god, which would make dreams about him and his religious trappings rather common. How would a priest know whether what he saw was a divinely inspired or simply inspired by the divine?

Edmund is my first cleric, and any help would be greatly appreciated.

A divine vision is exactly that, a vision (waking or asleep) that results from your god giving you that information in that manner. A dream may be a vehicle for a divine message, but more often than not is your mind working through things while it sleeps. It may be hard to tell the difference at times.

DON'T TAKE CHANCES!!!

Upon waking, simple nod your head and affirm that you 'Hear and Obey' and then commence with your routine of converting the heathen non-believers to your righteous ways. Harangue them incessently until they prostrate themselves before your deity and accept his ways as their own.

There can be no other way. Yours is the path of righteousness. The wicked will fall before you.

Dream...

Then do.

[quote="Jayde Moon"] Dream...

Then do.

The Ef-Noob got it.

It may be ambigious or it may be highly specific. A brief flicker in your stream of consciousness certainly could be.

And let's not discount those crazies that just simply think they saw a divine vision when it was something mundane and go off starting a crusade or revolutions on it. Joan of Arc, anyone?

Divine=god dream= human imagination upon the relevance of daily events in your clerics life. don't mix the two up. you're gonna regret it.

I think the ambiguity should be necessary. The existance of the gods has obviously been confirmed in the setting, but it's still a fine line between visionary and madman.

Thomas_Not_very_wise Divine=god dream= human imagination upon the relevance of daily events in your clerics life. don't mix the two up. you're gonna regret it.

Divine Dream = A dream controlled/effected by your god/some other god.

I don't see reason why couldn't you see a dream which is as well a vision from your god. Most likely the people in FR do not understand the dream as we do. They think, it's just dream. We have physichs and such which tell us why the sleep comes, why is it necessary and so on. They (at least I think so) don't know what dreams are. Maybe dreams are really different in FR. They understand and comprehend dreams with different kind of world view as well. Your character could very easily take something is from your god, but I think in FR it's very clear when the sign comes from the gods and I think that's why we have DMs.

Although, I still think we could/should be able to play our characters dreams if those sound reasonable. Some exciting has happened in his life and he goes to sleep, maybe he will see nightmares tonight. Those are just maybies and shouldn't be used as "If this happened then I see this in my dream". Use your imagination and the brains you got like always in everyday RP. But gods interfering your dreams; That's something for DMs.

I'm actually not sure about that. If your cleric presumably dreams most nights, sooner or later they're going to have one of those incredibly vivid dreams and sooner or later it's going to be on a religious subject. What's to stop your cleric deciding that that was a message from the gods? Just because it isn't, doesn't mean they can't assume it was. Obviously, if they specifically get one from the DMs that's going to feel real and they'll know it was more than a normal dream, but that doesn't mean they can't take up a real dream as a vision too. I could see that leading to some quite interesting RP, too, depending on the dream.

DMs?

Yep, not saying they can't -think- it's a dream send by gods. That's always possible and suitable and will most likely lead to an interesting RP as well. However, saying that your character really got a sign is another thing. I'm quite sure DMs(or any other game leader) only handle these here as in any RPG game where gods do exist. Players can not decide for the choices of other parts than the mind and actions of his character. This would eventually lead into total chaos and it would be most likely against the reality of that world and the decisions of the gods(or any other NPCs).

The thing I'm interested is how the DMs feel about we figuring dreams for our characters?(if those just are normal dreams, nightmares or hallucinations)

A vision is usually a deity telling your cleric to go on some noble quest and killing or retrieving something.

A dream is ((see above on my last post)).

Paladins...I would think would get more divine dreams since they are so more heroic than a cleric.

Stereotype!

Yep.

Remind me to make all my characters faithless from now on.