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Message: <blockquote data-quote="aramis erak" data-source="post: 8113324" data-attributes="member: 6779310">The issue has been treated extensively in several RPG sourcebooks, and several more RPGs...Basically, the design space for time travel has some important scalesTImeline  as elastic to fragileTimelines single, several, many, infiniteKey events protected vs unprotectedTraveler'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 universesMany 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.</blockquote>

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