In my dream last night I tried reality checks, none of them worked so I presumed it wasn’t a dream, but now that I have woken up I see that it was a dream, how come my reality checks didn’t work?
Also, when you have ludicity in a dream, how clear is it in the dream, does it depend on how long you’ve been doing it or just if you get lucky, would it be as clear as a RL day?
PS. Hi I’m new 
RC’s aren’t garenteed to work every time. Most work most of the time, but every now and then they simply don’t. I have had 1 dream where I did atleast 4 or 5 RC’s and they all failed me.
Theoretically, all dreams are just as vivid as a real day. They just seem less vivid due to a bad memory of them. LD’s tend to be easier to remember, and thus, more vivid.
Hope that helped
PS. 
Welcome to LD4All Alecto! I’m pretty new as well.
Reality checks are not always 100%. If you have the spare time IRL, try developing some new ones. Find things that might possibly change in a dream if you will them too. A member not too long ago suggested a RC for people who wear glasses. I’ve been trying it out. I haven’t done the RC during a dream, but then again I forget to do it a lot as well.
This part interests me a lot, because I experience it frequently in my NDs. A common DS of mine is me doing something unusually risky. Something I wouldn’t dare try IRL. Like theft. In my dream, I’ll think I’m awake after I just shoplifted something, and I’ll get very nervous of getting caught. About five minutes after I wake up, I still feel nervous until the “dream” part hits me. It’s not really relevant to your topic but it’s just something that intrigues me 
Best RC is If you think you might be dreaming - You ARE.
Otherwise there are many different RCs described in threads here. Experiment with what works for you. My personal favourite is hop in air and see if I float. But I rarely need to RC now. Generally once lucidity pops up, I know I’m dreaming.
Welcome, Alecto \o/
Well, RC’s outcomes are nothing but your expectation of it IRL. When you do a RC IRL, you get the result that you’re awake, but your RC isn’t over yet! The outcome of a RC in a dream is what you expect it to be. So, if you do a RC IRL, you see you’re awake and that’s all, the RC will have the same effect in your dream as IRL. You have to ‘define’ what the outcome of a RC will be in a dream.
Putting it to practical words: when you finish doing a reality check IRL and you say/think “Oh, I’m awake”, you have to then define what it would be like in a dream: “but if I was dreaming, then this and that would’ve happened”.
I started having problems with RC’s failing me, then I started doing like this and they never failed again 
This way it’s also easy to define your own RC’s. My personal one is to stretch my finger. That’s very funny lol XD
I find the nose-plugging RC and text-changing RC to be particularly reliable ones, especially when used repeatedly and in conjunction with each other.
When you’re dreaming, the amount of detail and the realistic quality of everything around you are incredibly convincing. This is why we spend so much time dreaming non-lucidly. When you become lucid, take a moment to just observe the intricately detailed world around you. Whether if it’s a real place or an imagined one, the detail level and the clarity should be amazing. When you wake up, the details will of course fade in your memory–but you’ll remember that feeling of shock at the realism of it all.