Currently playing in my friends campaign and we worked on a character set up based on being able to pop in and out of existence due to me having kids.
My character is a dreamwalker class with the following traits:
- she can pop in and out of existence for no reason.
- She can only teleport within 15ft of two players who have an item on them.
- the players were not and still not aware why she can teleport to them yet and it's making a fun d&d roleplay mechanism for why she's constantly popping up.
- she has two HP's, her dream hp which is just a little lower to the other players. It takes all damage except phyc. Her second HP is her real body hp which is very low and only impacted by phyc damage. When her dream hp is gone, she'll pop out of existence and will not be able to pop back for a set amount of time set out by the DM (we have it this way so if I suddenly have a kid based emergency I can accidentally get squished by some thing and then instantly pop back vs also having some risk in terms of time my character would be able to come back. She's waking up so this could be a dice roll to whether she instantly falls back to sleep or if she can't get back to sleep.
- Any revive spells will effect her real body. Healing will only effect her dream body so if she takes phyc damage, she needs to wake up for a long period to reset it.
- as she's making a dream self appear, she feels no pain so walks into stupid situations. She also believes it is a dream but if things go really sour that it's a nightmare and either will pop out of existence or start to take phyc damage. My character is a kid who believes everyone is just in her dream so she just pops out of existence thinking the other characters will just be fine, when she works out they are real but just in another plane, she's going to probably start sticking around.
- because she's dreaming, she can't take items with her when she pops out of existence. It will just fall to the floor. Means the players can game break by having her carry things.
- when she appears she can appear wearing whatever she wants so I will often have her appear in an array of crazy hairstyles and hats. None of it has magic capability. It also means she can shapeshift but she doesn't get changes to her stats. As she's dreaming, she can fly or float but it has to make sense or she'll feel gravity. Means when she appears sometimes she'll appear sat upside down on the ceiling or stood on a wall and fall when seen as she realises gravity.
- she can't feel pain but it also means when she takes damage she bleeds ice cream or rose petals and other werid things. Makes it fun for the DM to mess with their minds but also have a character who appears to have no physical pain but is very emotionally vulnerable.
- she can't upgrade her weaponry or skills unless levelling up because she can't carry anything with her and it's her own dreaming capacity. If other dream based things give her things but this is very rare.
- as she believes that the other players are just in her dream, she keeps going "ohhhhh You're aunt Sally... I can tell because of the big noise" or "you totally must be my mum, I love you!"
We went through a lot of ideas to why she could be dreaming and how this came about and I won't share my character but you could have lots of fun.
Love it though because I can pop in and out instantly with kids, it doesn't break the game and causes a lot of roleplay with the other characters.
If you have a parent who has kids so has to flit in and out of sessions, I definitely recommend a dreamwalker character.
