Ever since the 2.0 update, slumbers feel very irrelevant. just walking on dream gates you could get the dogs, shop guy, wraith, and delinquants, all of whom are easily disposable, and then you have enough keys to enter the dreamgate with essentially no effort.
the delta phase becomes not only unnecessary, but barely a concern. it just goes too far in the other direction to be any fun.
is there some way, like in Tainted Grail, where we can modulate this difficulty? Make it so slumbers are more frequent without becoming so all-consuming as they were in the 1.0 map? Or at least have it so you keys aren’t just handed to you without any real risk involved?
maybe something like, you have to complete the slumber map before you can gain keys from walking on gates, and maybe the key you get is located on the slumber map, and you have to get to it and you need to spend ether to obtain it or else dedicate 1+number of obtained keys x player worth of resources (green/red/yellow) to “unlock” the key from that slumber.
It was after the middle of the 1st campaign that I started to feel that the slumbers were too consuming for my taste and I started to try out a number of house-rules to reduce the time spent between dreams. I' ll post 3 of them here, maybe you'll find one that you'd like to try out and see how it goes (note that all of them use the 1.0 dreamworld map)
1) Resolve a Slumber tile every 2 "!" icons in the Dreamworld map. The most simple one. Reduces the number of slumbers you encounter in half.
2) When you enter a space with both "?" and "!" icons, you can choose which one to resolve. Similar to the previous house-rule but gives more control to the players. If you want to reach the Delta phase or proceed with the mystery path, you may choose to resolve slumber tiles, if you want to enter the next dream or travel somewhere quickly, you may choose to resolve fate cards.
3) Remove the Delta phase tile from the slumber deck and put it in your storage. ONCE between dreams, when you enter a "!" space, you may choose to resolve the Delta phase tile instead of the top Slumber tile. This is by far the most drastic change among the 3, but it was the one that I end up using. The reason was that, all too frequently, I happened to have the required # of keys, but I had too many sealed cards and/or distress to enter the next dream. So I was forced to take long trips in the dreamwolrd in order to reach the Delta phase or heal myself by other means (not mentioned here because, spoilers!). That's why I decided to make the Delta phase independent of the cycling of the slumber deck.