5 out of 5 rating for TimeWatch
Timewatch is part of the ever growing Gumshoe ecosystem and at the time of its launch one of the most successful kick-starters from Pelgrane Press. The base game is heavily influenced by a pulp / action aesthetic where the players form a roving team of highly-competent investigators from all parts of history (the iconic characters include a victorian big-game hunter, a shapeshifting assassin robot and a psychic dinosaur from an alternative time stream). The intended play is that there is a mission of the week style approach with the team sent backwards or forwards into a history that has been altered where they have to investigate to work out what has changed, travel backwards to the earliest cause, prevent the change and save time itself! There are a number of ways that Timewatch makes time travel actually work as a game element. Firstly the Gumshoe rules as they have developed include mechanisms that easily hand wave equipment acquisition, in Timewatch this is taken a step further to allow Bill & Ted style "we'll come back after this fight and leave a spare ammo clip in this desk drawer" [opens drawer] "Hey whaddya know!". Secondly the risk of paradox is addressed through a Paradox Prevention skill and each character having a pool of Chronal Stability. The more blatant or careless the players are in using time travel the more likely they are to create a situation where they never existed and are wiped from time itself. Finally the game setting is created to explicitly enable the investigation of time travel mysteries, so you'll never have a situation where the players are struggling to recognise the subtle clues of what has changed and missing the mystery!
Of course, a pulp action game may not be to everybody's taste and thanks to this being a successful kickstarter there are a number of alternative campaign styles provided. These range from the obligatory Cthulhu cross-over, to classic TV series settings with the IP removed (as you would expect there is a campaign style for a shared Time Machine run by a time traveller with his or her companions, there is also a parallel realities setting where the investigators travel into new bodies each session). If you have ever had a desire to run a mystery focussed time travel or parallel reality game then TimeWatch has you covered.
So what are the drawbacks? The potential biggest flaw with the game is the Gumshoe core, in that the central premise seems to put a lot of GMs and players off. In Gumshoe the intention is that any player in the right place with an appropriate skill automatically finds the clues that are there to be found. I took to this intuitively as a GM as it bypassed most of my GMing frustrations with trying to run mystery games and have the players constantly unable to get the clues because of a missed roll. However, the TimeWatch game doesn't have many examples of play which would help groups new to the system understand how this is expected to work in practice. It took a long while to train my players into realise that they weren't cheating by just asking for clues. The other potential drawback for the GM is that Timewatch adventures are not easy to ad-lib. You need to have some basic prep done to understand what has changed and then to run that forwards into some suitably dramatic opening scene. It is obviously easier to run far future scenarios from a purely ad-lib perspective but generally this is a game that requires the GM to prepare fully before each session and probably do more research than most other genres.
Overall - this is the best implementation of time travel I've seen in an RPG, being simple and light-weight to run. If you are already comfortable with Gumshoe then you can be up an running really quickly and the line is already well supported with a couple of scenario packs and a GM screen.
