How would you work with time travel in your campaigns, if at all? Something akin to "The Time Machine" where the future is next to impossible to change? Or maybe like "A Sound of Thunder", where a simple change in the past completely alters the future?
Time Travel gets complicated. Fast. Really fast.
>>43797912
Make it up as you go along. Throw in time zombies, unknowable gods that see backwards and forwards in time and general fuckery to make it sure to the players that they don't know it works, have no hope of finding out how it works and their characters should be glad they have no idea how it works.
Then when they point out that two time travel events happened when they contradict each other, stroke your DM (neck)beard and go "Yes.. that is interesting, isn't it?"
Then try to work it into the plot later on somehow so they feel smart for noticing your "hint". My advice? Shapeshifters.
Time travel works. Don't think about, in fact it probably only works because people don't think about it.
By following that rule it allows me to include all the "fun" bits of time travel without getting super bogged down in the "how".
>>43797912
Time travel involves unshackling yourself from the rules of temporal coherence.
Reality shifts to reflect what you do in the past, however no matter how much you fuck with reality, no facet of your existence will change as a result of this.
>>43797912
Continuum.
>>43798018
Literally everything this anon said. Time travel gets fucked real fast if you aren't interested in railroading hard, and unless you're ready for anything and everything, it'll get away from you very quickly. I love time travel as a plot device in the stories I write, but I would be very hesitant before using it in a campaign. I'd have to know my players and make sure they're not going to go "This is too complicated, I'm killing everyone now instead."
You need people who want to roleplay as time travelers and you need a decent timeline of events. I'd advise having both a map of the world and a timeline of the world, and the willingness to change both given the occurrence of various events.
Also: never go full Dr Who.
>>43797912
>time travel
Not even once
>>43800485
Eh. You can restrict time travel as an option without railroading. One-time events, for instance.
>>43797912
I'm a big fan of the John Titor style of time travel, where travelling into the past caused a new timeline to come into existence. In order to return to your own time you then have to wind back to before you arrived, then follow the timeline back away from the one that temporarily had you in it
Go full Legacy of Kain
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=00efdE5CD7A
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nl0X_-qejD8
History has a shape it likes and it will always try and bounce back into that shape.
Throwing reality distorting paradoxes around is about the only thing that can get it to change. But that also runs the risk of attracting things from outside reality that are best not attracted.
>>43797912
In my party's campaign we got to the end of it, flubbed it, and the bbeg sent us back in time to when the campaign first started. Characters could only remember as much as the players themselves could. It was simple enough, gave us a chance to fix mistakes and carve out a better worls/game.
>>43797930
No kidding.
About halfway through planning my current campaign, I stopped, looked over my notes and despaired. My next thought was "Let's take this as far as it goes and see what happens."
I tried drawing a timeline and just stopped. It's fucking confusing. It also helps that the original plans went out the window after contact with the PCs, so I'm just flying by the seat of my pants at the moment.
>>43805027
You can plan your campaign for anything, except for PCs.
>>43797912
Any scientific based time travel going back in time irrevocably destroys your current timeline. No takebacks, no nothing. Your physical self stays intact as you're separated from your timeline.
Things initially remain much the same, but all births from your point of arrival will change, as the precise nature of people's births will be different - everyone who fucks after even being in the same area at you at some point, or being around someone who was near you or anything in an ever expanding circle of change growing outwards -
A few seconds of difference while having sex means a different sperm will fertilize any one egg and a different kid will be born.
One generation later and all the people are unrecognisable. Two and political landscapes are greatly different, and three all sorts of things will have changed.
No amount of fudging will change this.
>>43798124
You still need to find an answer to the grandfather paradox.
>>43798124
Di you ever watch the film Looper?
Because that's a Looper explanation.
Looper was shit. Not Twilight "oh god this is fucking torture" levels of shit but still pretty shit.
>>43797912
Ran a campaign with lots of timetravel.
We used a Quantum Leap style limitation that you could only move within your lifetime. Going backwards was fine but going forwards was very risky because you couldn't be sure when you died. Trying to travel beyond your lifetime would just erase you. There was also a goddess of the timeline that went around fixing paradoxes with the outcomes always suiting her needs.
>>43797912
The device/magic gathers up a small amount of time around the traveller, then severs a small bubble of spacetime from the Universe.
The precision of the journey depends on how much time you can spool to allow the spell/computer to figure out how to reintroduce you in the right space/time. For you, it seems instant, because you don't need to do anything but exist and having only a fraction of time allows you to not worry about oxygen, food or rest.
When the Traveler breaks away from the Universe, causality for them is severed outside of the small bubble of time they exist in.
So you can, in fact, go back in time and kill your grandfather, destroy Hitler, etc. But you aren't causally connected to that Universe, so nothing changes in your memory or existence. When you came back in the Universe, you just appeared, a being with a certain configuration of energy and matter, which was grafted into the existing space-time. That's when causality starts back up for you.
You aren't the only one who can do this, and there's a couple of bubble universes where people keep track of how the Universe is being mucked about. Most Time Lords (Dr Who reference unintended) live in a private Time bubble from where they can monitor places of interest and intervene if they feel like it.
Changes in time tend to make less of a difference, not more. Shit's the way it is because the outcome is statistically likely to occur, so you'd have to do many changes to actually shift something big, like making Hitler not just get into Art School, but ensure fascists don't start up anyway.
Space Time heals really well, but multiple forays to the same place wears it out. To avoid problems, safety measures are placed for Time Machines to avoid those places. Ignoring these has some pretty bad consequences: your time machine can fuck up when it reintegrates into the Universe, bumping a couple of atoms together and unleashing a nuclear explosion, or worse.
LOS MAGOS DEL TIEMPOOOOOO!
>>43805538
Going to a patchy bit of space time might mean you miss the mark and your device has to go into emergency mode to try and put you *anywhere*, but that kind of on the fly calculation rarely succeeds. Nobody has survived that kind of re-entry, but at least their techniques were good enough to get *some* kind of landing. There are tiny bubbled folks who are zipping by for eternity, living the same seconds over and over, who don't know they're never going anywhere. The Lost are too small to be noticed by anything but a fantastic coincidence, so rescue is unlikely. If their machines are very good, they stay on loop until the Universe implodes and they're smashed, or perhaps even more tragically, their machines very slowly break down and the space time around them dissipates. Nobody knows what happens to them in that scenario, but we pray they are dead.
You can mess around with people, creating small bumps along the projected space-time, enough to meddle with their destination but not actively hurt them. A lot of chrono-anarchists do this, dreaming themselves as the Guardians of Time and laying detours only they can navigate. It's also possible (though exceedingly difficult) to create big enough waves to actually make a destination impossible to get to directly.
Nobody knows who first came up with the technology, but it's generally believed that a Time Machine just gets found by someone frustrated by their ancestors lack of progress in the field.
