A question about time travel

[Jd Smith1]

I'm kicked around ideas for future campaigns, which I usually do about the time my current campaign reaches the mid-point.

The point I'm currently considering is this:

Say time travel into the past is possible, with a max 'depth' of two hundred years.

I was considering how, and why, this could be used. If changing the past immediately changes the future/present, then there would be motivation for extremist groups to desire the tech so they could re-order history; for an example, modern-day Nazis sending a team back in time to aid the Third Reich in winning WW2. However, this would also wipe out the persons who undertook this plot, because as history adjusted itself, the scope of changes such an alteration of history would have would mean that the plotters would be facing the possibility of not having been born, or having been born to such radically changed circumstances as to be completely different people.

That would seem to be a deterrent to all but the most devoted fanatic.

I'm also considering issues such as cropped up in the TV series 13 Monkeys:

Spoiler: Spolier Alert!

Where their efforts to prevent a plague ultimately causes the plague by accidentally sending back the corpse of a future person into the past, which it is found as part of an archaeological dig and the plague being harvested from the body.

I know this is rambling and foggy, but I'm going around and around in circles: to change the past would take a motivated and professional (and thus intelligent) team; changing the past would mean the undoing of those same team members.

Am I looking at this wrong?

 

[MarkB]

You're looking at the change of a person's entire circumstances as a bug. Consider those for whom it's a feature.

Start with someone who's dying of a disease that is currently incurable - or whose loved one is dying / has died of one. There's been research into a cure that's very promising, but there's no way it will be completed in time.

So, give it a head start. Make a record of all the available research materials, and just drop them through a time portal into the lobby of a major medical research lab. Doesn't matter if your past and memories will change if it means escaping the horror of your present.

Also, you're looking from the viewpoint of someone changing things and then coming back, only to be wiped from the timeline in favour of their alt-history equivalent. What if someone goes back in time with the intention of simply staying there, living out their life in luxury thanks to their knowledge of events, and maybe resolving the odd global crisis or two along the way.

 

[Ed_Laprade]

Congrats, you've discovered the bugaboo of all 'go back to the past' stories: Paradox. That's why alt history works better, no paradoxes. Unfortunately, I can't think of many ways to make it work that don't involve GM fiat. "That's the way it works, because I said so!" Of course, if you're ok with that, it solves a lot of problems. (Say, the PCs are part of an organization that is HQed in a time bubble that is 'outside the time stream'. That's been used a few times with reasonable effect.)

 

[ninjayeti]

Time travel is inherently paradoxical. it is also totally fictional so you can make up whatever "temporal physics" you want without anyone telling you "that's not how time travel works."

If you go with the Marty McFly approach, then your time traveler fades out of existence once he changes the timeline. Or you could say that changing the time line can't affect the time traveler because it is HIS past even if it is everyone else's future ("temporal relativity"). Or the act of changing the past creates an alternate timeline but the old one still exists. Or maybe you can't actually change the past because the forces of temporal inertia keep pushing things back to their original path.

So bottom line: do what is going to work best for your story, make up some psudo-scientific rules for how time travel works, and don't think too hard about it.

 

[aco175]

This sounds like this book I read where white South Africans travel back to American Civil War and give machine guns to the South.

I would be more interested in planting a seed from the future adventure where the current group sees the new group do something and them later they come to the same scene as the new group, kind of like in Harry Potter when he is waiting for his father to come and cast the white light, then realizes it was himself all along.

 

[aramis erak]

The issue has been treated extensively in several RPG sourcebooks, and several more RPGs...

Basically, the design space for time travel has some important scales
TImeline as elastic to fragile
Timelines single, several, many, infinite
Key events protected vs unprotected
Traveler's knowledge as independent vs changed.

Elastic timelines: total elastic, any change made makes zero difference in the end.
Fragile timelines: just going makes meaningful changes; you'll never recognize your source time when you get there.

Number of timelines... in some schemes, there is only one timeline; any change propagates completely. If you manage to make a change, when you get back, it's guaranteed to have been there.
Several timelines, certain events are powerful enough branches to forge off. In such systems, the branch lines may not even be real time travel, but merely alternate universes
Many means most time travel is going to be to "wrong times"
Infinite? Time travel is irrelevant, you're never find your way home, because you branched off into your own private timeline; it's the form for those who want to live before some X happened, and have no plans to return.

Protection: Unprotected - you go back in time, and kill hitler.
Parallel protected: you go back in time, kill hitler as a child. His next door neighbor takes up his role in history.
Failure Protected: you go back in time, cut hitler's throat... but manage to miss the major blood vessels. You shoot him during WW I, but you firearm jams every time you target him. (Or Goebbels, Heydrich, Goering...)
Inaccessible protection: You go back in time, sure... but you can't get where you could make a difference of note.

Personal memory:
If they make a change, do they remember the time they came from as they initially experienced it? Or do they, as a product of the timeline, change their own memories, too? Or do they remember both?

Fragility is irrelevant if the timeline is protected.
Elasticity and protection do the same thing; they're strongly interrelated.

A totally elastic past, you go back, and make no difference; the timeline adjusts to make you irrelevant. Very unsatisfying.
A totally fragile past? amusing, but problematic. Kill a butterfly in the cenzoic, and humanity never arrises.
A totally inifinite timeline series? You never go home. Any home you go to is one unique to the travel team.

The most amusing to play are neither highly elastic nor terribly fragile, very limited to no protection of key events, allowing for several stable timelines, and with personal memory of prior and current state of one's home line.

 

[Umbran]

That would seem to be a deterrent to all but the most devoted fanatic.

So, have you watched the TV series, "Timeless"? It is, if I recall correctly, currently available on Hulu.

Spoiler: The basic premise of Timeless

A cabal (named "Rittenhouse") that wants to control the United States, and perhaps the world, funds the construction of a time machine.

In an unrelated, entirely mundane event, a government agent catches wind of the existence of Rittenhouse. Rittenhouse tries to kill the agent before he can reveal them, but only manages to kill his wife and kid. He escapes, and then learns about the time machine project. Before the time machine can be put to use, he steals it, and tries to eradicate Rittenhouse from history to save his family.

Our heroes use a prototype of the machine to chase the agent, who is doing terrible things to the timestream for reasons they don't understand. In the process they learn about Rittenhouse. They then have to stop the agent and Rittenhouse. Wackiness ensues for two seasons.

Am I looking at this wrong?

No so much wrong as... you have to identity the rules of your time travel before you can start figuring out how it can be used. And you have to identify how the universe reacts to attempts to break the rules.

So, "realistically" (which is a funny idea to apply to time travel stories, but hey) you might feel that a character could travel in time, and risk eradicating themselves. Games have two basic ways to handle this:

1) It just doesn't happen. The fact that you existed to travel back in time means that this travel back in time cannot eliminate you from the timestream. It may eliminate people you care about, but not you. Whatever changes you make, it will turn out that you will continue to exist.

2) There's some notion of "paradox" - in games, you might have a paradox score or rating, for example. As you do really impactful things, your paradox score goes up or changes. If it gets textreme, or you fail some check, or something, yes, you get eliminated from the time stream - thus you must be very careful about what you do, and you pick your battles. And yes, this means that you may cease to exist. But... doesn't every soldier face that same possibility going on deployment? Loads of people are willing to risk an end to their existence.

I recommend to you a game about time travel - TimeWatch, by Kevin Kulp, available on RPGNow and from Pelgrane Press. Whether you like the system for your own use, it will allow you to see how such things can be handled in a game, and adapt concepts to your own as you see fit.

TimeWatch and Backstory Cards

by Eric Paquette During my first TimeWatch campaign, I decided to use Backstory Cards to help define the group. Backstory Cards are a rpg tool which helps to

site.pelgranepress.com

DriveThruRPG

www.drivethrurpg.com

 

[Thomas Shey]

So, "realistically" (which is a funny idea to apply to time travel stories, but hey) you might feel that a character could travel in time, and risk eradicating themselves. Games have two basic ways to handle this:

1) It just doesn't happen. The fact that you existed to travel back in time means that this travel back in time cannot eliminate you from the timestream. It may eliminate people you care about, but not you. Whatever changes you make, it will turn out that you will continue to exist.

2) There's some notion of "paradox" - in games, you might have a paradox score or rating, for example. As you do really impactful things, your paradox score goes up or changes. If it gets textreme, or you fail some check, or something, yes, you get eliminated from the time stream - thus you must be very careful about what you do, and you pick your battles. And yes, this means that you may cease to exist. But... doesn't every soldier face that same possibility going on deployment? Loads of people are willing to risk an end to their existence.

How do you class "privledged frame of reference" in this? In other words, you go back and do something to eradicate yourself--and your back history just disappears. You're now an entity without, as far as anyone can tell, antecedent; no one who is not with you at the time you make the change has ever heard about you or knows you (there can be exceptions to this to information and people who exist either outside of the normal timestream, or prior to your change point). Is that your first case, or something else?

 

[Umbran]

How do you class "privledged frame of reference" in this?

I don't, in general. As I laid out, maybe that exists, maybe it doesn't.

In other words, you go back and do something to eradicate yourself--and your back history just disappears.

So, if you are using (1) above, then this just does not happen.

There are some variations to this in fiction.

Variation 1: The universe does not allow you to make changes that result in you not existing, or not being able to time travel. You were born in 1979. In 2020, you step into a time machine and go back to 1970, and try to kill your father... and fail. The gun jams. the car you planned to hit him with breaks down. Whatever. The idea being that the fact you exist means that you didn't eradicate yourself. In fact, you already tried! Your Dad may have this story he never told you where, back in 1970, some psychopath followed him around for a week, trying to hurt him, but luckily didn't manage it....

In this variation, in a game, so long as you aren't directly interacting with your personal events, the GM can handwave it. You were born in 1979. If you go back to WWII and change stuff, fine. Your parents still end up existing, meeting under remarkably different circumstances, maybe, but they still have you as a kid. No big deal.

Variation 2: You can make changes you think should end you, but don't. You were born in 1979. In 2020, you step into a time machine and go back to 1970, and kill your father. Time rolls forward... and you're still born in 1979. The guy you thought was your father... wasn't. Maybe, in fact, he never was your father, and your mom didn't tell you about the guy she had a one-night stand with. Maybe she never even told your dad. Or, your Mom meets some other guy, and a genetic combination just like yours happens to result anyway. The universe manages. There is a backstory.

Now, when you come back, there is a question. You left one timeline, and changed it. You hop back into your time machine. And the timeline rolls forward. You get born in 1979. You grow up. You have some history appropriate enough that you get into a time machine in 2020. And then the original you comes back... possibly with a different memory of history. If you killed Hitler as a baby, you come back and the WWII you expect... didn't happen. You come back and think that the Red Sox broke the curse, but in the new timeline they never did. If you talk about breaking the curse, or talk about this guy Hitler, everyone looks at you funny. Maybe you different body scars, or tattoos, or whatever. There's a discontinuity. What do you do with it?

Well, there's no actual answer to that in physics. So, as a game designer, what do you want to do with it? Maybe it just sucks that you don't know the new timeline - perhaps after repeated trips, you don't know what you should change, becuse your knowledge of history is out of date. Maybe in the act of travel, your old character memory is lost, repleaced with the new memory - perhaps, depending on how big the change is, you get to rewrite and restat your character? You can, in the act of travel, layer new memories on the old - perhaps until after repeated trips time travelers go insane, not knowing what history is what?

What's most fun for you?

 

[JiffyPopTart]

I planned to have a "time travel" adventure in my campaign. I had the PCs gathered at an important event, which was the leader of the Hobgoblin nations signing an official peace treaty to end the fantasy equivalent of WW2. There was a HUGE crowd gathered around the building the event was being held in...but most of the crowd (PCs included) were unable to make it into the actual conference room where the high level delegates were doing the signing/ceremony. All heck broke loose and word spread through the crowd that some unknown assassins has broken into the signing room, killed all the hobgoblins, and escaped before the guards outside could get into the room to stop them.

Many real world months later the PCs ended up in a demiplane where time travelled very slowly. They fought and killed a dragon that was there, but when they emerged from the plane back to their own world time had moved forward thousands of years. I used this "in the future" adventure to show the PCs what would happen if they didn't act to solve a couple major issues that were happening in the world. They were able to track down an important PC who was able to send them back to their correct time using a combination of futuristic technology and old lost elven magic.

When they were sent back there was a small error in the calculations and the PCs ended up a couple years before "their time" and emerged inside the conference room just as the hobgoblin leader (a loose fantasy Hitleresque villain the PCs hated) was getting ready to sign the peace accords. The players took advantage of the situation by blasting/slashing/destroying the crap out of all the hobgoblins in the room and then jumping back into the time portal to return to the future. Once they did so the NPC helping them out fixed his calculations and returned them to the time in the campaign just after they entered the demiplane that sent them on the time romp in the first place.

So, to pull it off, I had to have some actions take place out of the players sight, but actions that I knew the players were jealous of having not done themselves. I also limited the "messing with history" to one very small area (a single room) and made sure the result (killing the hobgoblins and escaping right away) was something that was going to happen even when the players had freewill during the scene.

I think it would be impossible to have a "go back in time" game without also having to refigure the future as a result unless you very much limit PC freedom of action.