Let's talk timey-wimey stuff /tg/
I'm mainly focused on travel to the past, but future stuff's fine too.
Ever ran or played in a game that used time travel as a mechanic or a plot device?
How did it apply to Pic related?
Given the unpredictability of PCs, how much of a headache can giving them such unmitigated control of a setting end up being? How could you include this without railroading the shit out of everyone or time paradoxing the plot out of existence?
Basically how does one into time travel in a game without it devolving into a logistical nightmare?
>>43526492
I've never implemented it in a game.
I had plans to once, but the game fell apart before the pcs reached the time travel part.
I consider myself, however, an armchair expert on time travel theory in fiction.
I took part in a thread we had a while ago that came to the consensus that the amount of control and access your pcs have to time travel was directly proportional to how completely screwed the game gets.
Limited time travel is good.
Send them forward or back and then they have to quest to travel again: Samurai Jack or TMNT3.
Very limited time length travel: Galaxy Quest or Seven Days.
Or the power source is rare, restricted, or limited: Prince of Persia
Ritual based time travel in a specific time and place only: Back to the Future I.
In short, limited time travel can be added to a game easily and add plot and fun but giving your pcs a fully functional time machine can kill your game worse than a Deck of Many Things.
>>43527106
Thanks for the solid reply.
In my particular scenario I'm hoping for a fixed-timeline situation in which at a fiven point in the future of the campaign, time travel is used in order to set up the chain of events that leads the party together in the first place. I plan this all out while being fully aware that there is a very slim chance of the PCs actually behaving in a proper manner to 'close the loop'. I've implied through the narrative that they're dealing with time-travel fuckery and so it won't be too left field when the event happens, if it even does. With that in mind what would be an interesting consequence of the paradox that would ensue? How could the timeline try to 'right' itself in an interesting way, withiut resorting to branching timelines in which X did or did not occur?
>>43528349
I have some tips and ideas but I have to go to work in 30 mins so I'll ask questions first:
>time travel is used in order to set up the chain of events
Is this a plan by a character in the game or just a sequence of events that lead to the time travel Event that triggers the chain of events leading to the party forming?
Are you planning on the Event being a simple trigger (Dr. McCoy saves a kind girl, therefore the Nazis win) or a planned scheme to orchestrate the party forming?
Are you planning on undoing the forming of the party or a different paradox?
How are you expecting the timeline to change?
>>43527106
Are there any other methods of time travelling that there is to know?
>>43529159
Methods?
Way too many.
Magic, science, divine power, fate, causality of your own time travel actions, and every imaginable variation of implementing those, from ancient powerful monoliths to cybernetic chipmunks.
As far as travel, there is the forward/back with or without separate timelines.
There is the skip back a few seconds.
There is the Slow-Minute-Watch or time-stop
There is the Groundhogs Day.
There is the metaphysically weird like the Langoliers,
There is the out of phase time or time is moving super-fast or super-slow locally.
And I'm sure there are many more, but that's the bulk of them.
>>43529071
>>43528349
Some tips:
>The event
Keep the event that starts the time travel very, very simple.
Like breaking the jar of magical time sand.
It should be something that could be triggered by an NPC or enemy if you can't manuver the pcs into doing it.
If the pcs decide to preemptively attack the BBEG, the jar could be in the room of the battle, for example.
The more things that have to happen for the trigger to occur, the more opportunites your players will have to take a different path.
>With that in mind what would be an interesting consequence of the paradox that would ensue?
If the Party is unformed, ideally you should reshape the events in their campaign to the worst case scenario if they had never met.
People are unsaved, villains are triumphant, the guy they tried to save, but died anyway is alive but corrupted, their dog is dead, etc.
But don't change anything that would not have been logically effected, like natural disasters.
Beyond that, I'd need examples.
>How could the timeline try to 'right' itself in an interesting way, withiut resorting to branching timelines in which X did or did not occur?
Yeah, branches suck.
A sort of entropic field that will set thing back to how they were.
Like Final Destination only with events beyond people dying.
Lovers keep meeting, devices keep breaking.
Or alternatively, time police.
A race of people solely devoting to restoring the balance.
A mad time traveler setting things right for his own reasons.
Cybernetic chipmunks working to restore the timeline to preserve their stash of acorns.
>>43529071
Concise reply because phone's gon die but I want to save the thread.
Its part of a character's plan, but the plan itself depends on knowledge that could only be obtained by the time loop having actually occurred.
The scheme itself is somewhat elaborate but is based on knowledge of how events are most likely to play out, and theres some wiggle room as far as specifics go.
I had a though about the time loop failing to occur and the timeline 'snapping' back to the moment where it began to affect things, with the party seperate but retaining vestiges of their memories from the 'correct' timeline.
>>43531420
Also sorry for vagueness but I don't want to risk my players stumbling on this and figuring something out.
One thing I just have to get off my chest.
Looper was self consistent. If you change the future, people and things will change to reflect it, but only *after* you've made the change to current timeline.
It's not logical at all but it is consistent throughout the movie.
Man oh man do I like me time travel conversations.
One I'm particularly interested in is a biological type of time travel, like esp or mutant power influenced that would allow one person, from their perspective, reverse time to any point within their perceived time they had already experienced. A rewind button for them self. The benefit to it is that they may retain knowledge from whenever they are rewinding from, however, remembering anything is limited to normal cognitive ability.
As an added bonus, you can return to a point you had been to previously in the "future" and continue living it out. If you've ever played Radiant Historia on the gameboy advance, I'm going for the thought process that you can learn things in an alternate timeline to help you advance through challenges in the standard timeline, and vice versa.
Then to expand on the time travel conversation in general, what would it be like if a time traveler was friends with a psychic? I think its kind of fun to think that the time traveler can experience multiple timelines while the psychic would never be left out of the loop on the time traveler's adventures.
>>43532793
>Radiant Historia on the gameboy advance
I came here to correct you. That was the DS.
I'm actually working on a setting that involves time travel whose rules are similar to what you described. The loops are designed to help someone whose death will trigger a new loop. The flexibility of the setup allows development of the society around that target.
---
None shall die alone or unknown.
To hear these words in your mind is to suffer the Confidant’s Curse. The bearer of the curse, now considered a Confidant, experiences as a daydream a record of the last 24 hours of a person before their death, after which the Confidant’s clock is rewound to that point in time. If the Confidant was unconscious at that “checkpoint”, they will wake up at same moment they originally did before the rewinding.
After the first loop, the Confidant’s daydream of that record can be manipulated like a video, with rewind, pause, and fast-forward functions. Everything that person saw, heard, smelled, tasted, and touched is available for analysis, but their thoughts cannot be accessed.
To solve that person’s death, one of two outcomes must happen:
Delay: if the original death can be averted, the curse will lock onto any other deaths that happen in the interim.
Awareness: if the original death cannot be averted, the Confidant must inform the person of that fact. Only when that person dies with zero regrets will the curse lock onto a new person.
The dying person’s last 24 hours before the curse activates is recorded; any changes that occur to it before Delay or Awareness is accomplished will not change that record.
If the Confidant’s knowledge of the events that will come to pass is actively used to allow the death of the fated person, the Confidant themselves, or an unrelated person, the consequences will play out until the original time of death, after which the Confidant’s clock will be reversed regardless of the final outcome.
Played an Epic level Time-based Psion in D&D 4e once. A future historian who went back in time to a major event, since the details of what exactly happened during said event was lost to the pages of history.
The DM used my, eventual, mastery of time as a plot point a few times, once bypassing what would have been weeks of bureaucratic bullshit to meet a major player in the Nine Hells by revealing I had apparently made an appointment months ago(even though we literally only got there that day).
Later when we fought Baal, I blasted him out of the timestream when we beat him, and he came back as a cyborg with his own time magic, which the DM dubbed Meta-Baal.
We ended up barely escaping with our lives that fight, only winning because we shoved him off a cliff(though I felt a surge of time magic afterwards, so he definitely didn't die).
Due to most of the group moving away, the game kinda died and nothing really came of it, which was a shame. It was pretty damn good.
>>43532990
>Nintendo DS
aaaand yep. I derped.
>Confidant Curse
Fuckin neat
>>43532793
>>43532990
>Radiant Historia
Pretty good game.
Shame we never got a sequel where youfight the eldritch horror causing the desertification in the first place.
>>43533308
Was it really an existence at fault? It felt more like a natural disaster (whose permanent solution was in one of the sidequests).
Unless you're talking about death via Sand Plague,which was all Heiss's doing.
>>43533402
It's not really mentioned in the game itself, but the land turning to desert is the result ofI'm not 100% sure, but apparently one of the royal family in the past screwed up using the Black Chronicle and ended up creating an Eldritch monstrosity that's literally draining the life out of the land, and is sealed inside of Historia, the place you use to time travel
bumping with screencap
>>43531453
I appreciate your need for vagueness and I will try to provide a broad insight.
>>43531420
Its part of a character's plan, but the plan itself depends on knowledge that could only be obtained by the time loop having actually occurred.
Okay so, a time loop happened that gave an npc advanced knowledge of the future, using this knowledge he put forth a plan either anticipating or creating the events foretold.
Then the meddling PCs get involved and the Event happens that prevents the time loop.
>I had a thought about the time loop failing to occur and the timeline 'snapping' back to the moment where it began to affect things
There are three ways I've seen this "snapping to the new timeline" done:
The first and least appropriate is snapping back to the beginning of the narrative, which in this case would be the beginning of the campaign.
Lame idea for a game.
The second is, like you said, snapping to when the time loop first affected the past.
The issue here is how far back in the past this would go.
It stands to reason that the npc's plans began before the campaign, therefore the time loop first affected the past before the campaign even started, or even before the PCs were born.
To jump back to when the PCs were low level or weak is lame.
If you do this, I would suggest a mechanism to either transport the PCs back in time, or have their past selves suddenly be stronger and have these new abilities along with memory fragments from the original timeline.
The third way, & my suggestion, is to snap the timeline around the PCs in the present of wherever & whenever they are when the Event happens.
It's the same time, but the world is different.
I like this because it is the least jarring for the players.
If they have traveled, or been displaced, in time, they might be immune to the effects of the change which would explain their remembering just the original world or both.
(These memory issues are the functional reason Sam Beckett's memory was Swiss cheesed)
>>43537639
>>43528349
>How could the timeline try to 'right' itself in an interesting way, without resorting to branching timelines in which X did or did not occur?
As an addition to what I said about fate or time police earlier, I remembered a good example.
In the Supernatural episode where the Titanic is prevented from sinking, an angel of Fate sets about killing the descendants of all those that weren't meant to survive, in oddly contrived accidents.
Whatever the origin of the power behind your time loop, perhaps there are related powers?
Perhaps intelligent forces connected to these related powers seek to restore the original timeline but, as they lack the power to time loop, they work in other ways to put things back the way they were.
Killing survivors, grooming replacements for important people lost, forging new artifacts for those destroyed, seeking knowledge lost.
Depending on their abilities, they might not have the best plan, but there efforts can be noticed by the PCs to learn more about the nature of the time loop.
>>43532793
>Man oh man do I like me time travel conversations.
Ditto my friend.
Your idea reminds me of Slaughterhouse Five or Mr. Richardson from Firestarter Rekindled, but that's with a Fixed Timeline.
In a game, you would want to be able to change the outcome.
I didn't see all of Edge of Tomorrow, but that seemed a bit like it.
I don't think I've seen an idea quite like what you've suggested.
But then, I never played Radiant Historia either.
>>43532990
I hereby echo the others praise your idea.
It's good.
>>43533002
Good GM, doing it right.
It's a pity that all good things must come to an end.
