Adventuring in multiple timelines

[Sir Robilar]

Hi there,
I was thinking about a concept I'd like to try for our next campaign. So I thought, hey, why not bombard EnWorld with the idea and see what people think?

It's going to be a D&D campaign, probably fourth edition, but maybe third. The special thing is that every player will be able to play his character both at the start of his adventures at level 1 in a "past" timeline and as a mighty and established lord, lady or even king at level 20 in a "future" timeline. There is some kind of magical artifact in the posession of the PCs that is present in each timeline which can be used to switch from one time to the other. Then there is a threat that is taking over the world or kingdom or whatever in the future timeline. In order to find a way to defeat this threat the PC's have to switch timelines now and then, change things in the past to influence the future, find clues about the threat in the past so they can use them in the future or reverse. You probably get the idea...

Has anyone ever tried a game like this?

What do you think of the concept? And how could it work?

 

[weem]

Well, first of all, that sounds like a blast!

I have done the time travel thing in a few campaigns (though in a different way) - I love it.

So it sounds like, when the 20th level PC's travel back to, say, level 1 time, they will be within the bodies of themselves back then while still retaining their knowledge.

While physically I can see this working... for example, the fighter was simply not as strong at level 1 as he is at level 20. But, a Wizard going back (since he retains his memories, etc) should theoretically still retain his arcana knowledge (since he is retaining all of his memories). And a level 1 Wizard with his level 20 knowledge/arcana etc would be a bit much.

Maybe they (memories/intellect) become foggy when he goes back... "I am certain I know this where(when) we came from... but I can not recall it here" - but I don't know... seems odd to recall the events of the future time, but not other things you knew.

Maybe you had an idea for this already, or didn't intend on their travel to work this way?

 

[MarkB]

It sounds like a good concept, if tough to manage. I'd recommend spending each session in a single timeline, so that you have plenty of time to update their effects on the other timeline during downtime. Or maybe start each session in the 20th level timeline, have it culminate in some insurmountable problem, then switch back to the 1st level timeline for the second half of the session in order to resolve the problem.


Also, the question that occurs immediately is: What if one of the 1st-level Past PCs dies? Does that erase only his current actions, or anything he was ever going to do to influence the future?

 

[Sir Robilar]

Maybe you had an idea for this already, or didn't intend on their travel to work this way?

Good question!

I wanted to start the campaign by saying: "Please create a level 1 character with his/her background. Also answer this question: Where does this character see himself in 25 years? Then - just out of fun, you know - level him up to level 20."

The campaign would start in the past timeline with the characters discovering the artifact. They'd use it and find themselves 25 years in the future, their wishes fullfilled, but without any knowledge of the past 25 years. After a short time they would find out about their own powers and how to use them by instinct but wouldn't regain any other memories of the past 25 years. For a wizard I'd go with "you have the feeling you should move your fingers like that and chant this tune that's buzzing in your head when suddenly - BOOM! - you cast meteorite swarm."

 

[Sir Robilar]

It sounds like a good concept, if tough to manage. I'd recommend spending each session in a single timeline, so that you have plenty of time to update their effects on the other timeline during downtime. Or maybe start each session in the 20th level timeline, have it culminate in some insurmountable problem, then switch back to the 1st level timeline for the second half of the session in order to resolve the problem.

I'd prefer if the PC's had free choice about when to change timelines but I'll have to think about that.

Also, the question that occurs immediately is: What if one of the 1st-level Past PCs dies? Does that erase only his current actions, or anything he was ever going to do to influence the future?

I'd say the future is changed instantly with the Level 20 character also dead. The future timeline is changed accordingly but that doesn't dramatically change the current actions of the other PC's. The players and their characters would notice the change but no one else would (as with all past/future changes). Since this would be a major suck for the player I'd say Raise Dead is an option in the past timeline.

 

[Umbran]

Since this would be a major suck for the player I'd say Raise Dead is an option in the past timeline.

Is an option? But the character already exists in the future timeline, but he's dead in the past. That means that either you have paradox, or it is more than an option, but is in fact a requirement.

There are many more paradoxes that are possible - like what happens if in the future some major power is used to complete some task, but in the past, the character never takes that power? Your continuity ends up full of holes. Whenever you have a predetermined future you run the risk of having player action and decisions not matter, because the future is now fixed.

This can be handled, but you ought to decide how you're going to handle it beforehand.

 

[Turtlejay]

For the wizard knowing spells problem that weem brought up, you could flavor it just like the figher. Whereas the fighter has not developed his muscle memory, or learned his katas yet, the wizard has not developed his mental strength or his memory yet.

In fact, let him try it. And when he does, his PC falls unconscious, and the other players see him crumple down with blood coming from his nose, ears and eyes.

This sounds like an *awesome* idea. I would be to afraid to attempt something like this, with the impetuousness and impulsiveness of PC's. You never know what they would try to do on their quest to save the future. Kill infants that grow to be tyrants? Start some hairbrained money-making scheme?

You'll have to let us know how this turns out.

Jay

 

[MarkB]

Is an option? But the character already exists in the future timeline, but he's dead in the past. That means that either you have paradox, or it is more than an option, but is in fact a requirement.

There are many more paradoxes that are possible - like what happens if in the future some major power is used to complete some task, but in the past, the character never takes that power? Your continuity ends up full of holes. Whenever you have a predetermined future you run the risk of having player action and decisions not matter, because the future is now fixed.

This can be handled, but you ought to decide how you're going to handle it beforehand.

Since changing the past to influence the future is a stated design goal, paradoxes like this wouldn't be an uniintended side-effect - they'd be entirely in keeping with the campaign as a whole.

So long as the characters' internal continuity of memory remains intact, everything else can change to accomodate past actions. On the other hand, they might have some trouble reconciling their recollections with their altered reality - it'd be fun to throw in the odd unexpected consequence as a twist now and then, maybe an unexpected pet lizard or a change in clothing style trends.

 

[Janx]

The idea has some merit. Here's how I'd approach it.

Have the PCs start at 1st level. Run a few sessions. Ask them "where do they see themselves in 25 years". Don't tell them to make a 20th level PC yet. Get them the artifact. Perhaps make it one they all have to use together (thus they all must shift timeframes).

Shifting a time frame moves their conciousness to the future and their future bodies that have improved physically and their neural networks have advanced enough to enable casting the higher level spells.

Thus, the PCs are "low levels" occupying the bodies of high levels, but getting access to the high level's capabilities. Neural networks and muscle memory basically is the pseudo-science to explain why in the future they can cast high level spells, and in the past, they cannot.

This also explains why if the high-levels shifted to the past, the lack of muscle memory and neural network patterns prevents the use of advanced abilities. The key is you can only use the abilities of the PC from that timeframe.

Now to solve the "changing events causes paradoxes" problem, aka killing your grandfather before your dad is concieved causes complications.

First off, nothing the PCs in the future is going to affect the past. At least not in the direct sense (beyond "let's go back to the past and change it!"). The key problem is what happens when the PCs in the past change something that we already know the state of in the future.

In old school time travel, when things in the past changes, everybody's memories change to contain the new version of history.

However, quantum theory, and some other stuff changed the way we look at time travel. Oddly enough, season 5 of Lost actually touched on that in a conversation Hurley and Miles had.

Consider time travel from the perspective of the traveller. To them, their memories are static, fixed, unchanging. When they change history, they remember the original version as they experienced it (or from history class). If they jump back to the present, they will NOT know what happened in the new timeline, because they did not live in the new timeline.

Here's an example:
In your origin timeline it's December 19th 2009, you travel back to 1963 to stop the JFK assassination. For non-travellers in the origin 2009, they probably wonder where you went as weeks go by. You remember learning about JFK dying in school and think that's where America went wrong, so you're committed to this plan. You save JFK and verify it by waiting a week to see the news. Nothing bad happens. You even take a newspaper showing that JFK survived an assasination attempt. You then return to December 19th 2009 (perhaps a few minutes after you left). At this point, for non-travellers, you were never missing. All non-travellers have no memory of JFK dying, there's no conspiracy theories about anything. You have no knowledge of the invasion of China after we dropped a Nuke on Saigon, nor do you know that Ronald Reagon was never president. When you come out of your secret lab, whatever changes happened in the world may be very disorienting to you. If you only made a minor change, then you probably won't notice any difference, or only have small moments where you encounter a difference in what you remember, versus what has now "actually" happened.

If you're just moving your conciousness, things can be as simple as that. There's no you to run into, because you never physically moved. If you physically move, things can get a little more interesting.

Sticking with our JFK example, if saving JFK prevented the invention of your time machine (but you still get born and are alive on December 19th 2009), when you get back you can effectively find yourself. The one who time travelled will be older, by however long he spent travelling (which in our example, was about a week). If your change in the past prevented your birth (or you died before December 19th 2009), then you will return to a world that doesn't know you.

Basically, approach things from the perspective that the PC's mind is from the past version. So when they jump to the future, they are "surprised" by the environment they find themselves in, and will have to deal with seeming confused or odd when they run into changes.

Now if a PC dies in the future, no problem. Bounce them back to the past (perhaps the entire party, or freeze their game time until the party returns to the past). Now the party has an excellent mission in the past, which is to change something so the PC won't die in the future. If a PC dies in the past, that causes big changes in the future. Basically, with 1 PC dead, if the party goes to the future, the see the big changes that happened. Make them negative, and the PCs will hop back to the past to raise the fallen PC. Thus making "yet another quest" for the PCs.

 

[Jack7]

SR, many people have already mentioned the some of the more obvious examples of "linear time travel," forwards or backwards along a predetermined and basically linearly straight path of temporal displacement. (In vectors or direction of motion I mean, not as regards actual events - the truth is the real problem with linear time travel is that you keep moving along the same basic path, which is linear, when real events have yet to be settled, and real-world unknown events are more like a quantum cloud of possibilities and probabilities. Real-world unknown events are not linearly distributed at all, but consist of multi-directional clouds of probabilities until actually settled by action.)

Think of it this way. Suppose you give a kid a ball, and say, go play soccer on that large field over there. He's gonna move in every and any direction possible (because few kicks - or actions - will be perfectly linear), given the geometry of the environment. But with linear time travel you are insisting he do this by basically playing ball only along a straight line, up and down the field, yet somehow maintain the appearance of "free movement through his environment."

So, my suggestion, and the way I have played this in the past (and I have played this type of campaign, see here or here for one example), is to avoid linear time travel along a single axis, especially if you travel both forwards and backwards along the same exact axis. So with my system players do not move forwards and backwards through time (along different points of their own history), but rather move through time as themselves in different times.

Fr instance they start out at a particular spot or moment in time, and accomplish whatever it is they must accomplish at that point. They then (whenever time travel is needed for the plot to progress) move either forwards or backwards in time relative to their original starting position.

As an example say a party plays their first adventure in the year 1210. The next adventure they play in 895 (I am assuming a forward progression of time form 1 upwards is standard, so moving form 1210 to 895 is to go backwards in time). The third in 1463. (And so forth and so on.) They do not have to worry, and neither do you, if they are playing in past or future relative to themselves, only that they are playing past or future relative to the external, or objective world.

If they travel back in time they do not travel back to a younger Self, they travel back to a younger World. If they travel forwards in time they travel to a more developed (or possibly wasted or regressed, depending upon circumstances) World, not to a more developed Self.

Basically their personal development runs parallel to the campaign development or progression, but remains "out of phase" relative to the normal progression or regression of time in comparison to the world in general. This also provides some problems, such as, what if they "become famous at some point in the past, and then show up at some point in the future when their fame is still popularly recorded or re-counted." But those kinds of problems, if they become real problems, can rather easily be addressed with things like disguises and false identities. With linear time travel you have far more fundamental and difficult problems to resolve.

Now with all of that being said I would say that from personal experience the single most important thing to consider with any time travel scenario, either small scale and tactical, or large-scale and strategic, is consistency of Setting, World, and Milieu. Without a stable (I did not say unchanging, but rather stable) background it is nearly impossible to run a meaningful time travel scenario. If your intention however is to run a time travel scenario which is not so much focused on the time travel aspect, but upon the "Self-Travel aspect, with time-travel being the mere modus operandi of how the 'Self-Travel' is operated" then you can still do it but a number of additional problems will have to be addressed, either in the initial planning stages, or ad hoc (because things will happen you did not anticipate, because of the natural paradoxes inherent when combing Self-Travel with Time-Travel), or both.

My suggestion is pursue the angle of either Time-Travel, or Self-Travel, but not necessarily both, or both at the same time. However your intention might specifically be to pursue both in conjunction, and in that case I'd say do what you wish to do. Just be aware you will face various problems with both Character and World consistency, and will need some method of squaring these natural conflicts, unless of course you do not intend to (just let things go as they go, without an attempt to explain them - since it's D&D it is after all I assume a magical environment and not a scientific one - therefore you don't need logical or scientific consistency if you don't want it).

I know a lot of people think magic should work like science, I'm not one of them, and wouldn't even worry about it if my players are not conditioned to think that magic must work like science (when is the last time one of your players whipped out their Staff of the Magi and their slide rule at the same instance to make sure that the magical formula they are using to incite their spell power is calculated correctly? - for those of you who don't know what a slide rule is, just think of a flattened wand of wonder filled with stars and numbers). If they are conditioned to think of magic as pre-programmed computation and trigonomic functionality, then you have consistency problems, if not, then you don't. It's up to you and your party.

In any case these are some of the things I have found worked well in time Travel scenarios, and that make campaigns like that far more fun.

1. A "Relative Adversary." That is to say an adversary or a group of them who can also move through time and who the players keep running into consistently, though unexpectedly, and who use similar time travel methods to thwart, reverse, undo, or sabotage the prior efforts of the party. this forces the party to start to think like 3 and 4 dimensional chess players, where they not only consider what they are doing at any particular point in time, but must also consider how what they are doing might be undone or sabotaged by their enemies. It makes people think much harder and become much more creative and clever about their objectives and actions.

2. A Tesseract. I have used this in two forms. It is either a place or a space or a time where anything can happen (within the predetermined boundaries) but nothing happens relative to the normal world. You go in at 12:15 on Tuesday the 14th of May in the year 1215 and come out at exactly the same time as you went in, even though within the boundary you may have spent 7 years or so. (Escape of a Tesseract is a very difficult feat, it I much easier to enter, than to exit.)

And Secondly, a Tesseract may be a place where numerous times and spaces overlap, so that taking any action within the tesseract may have numerous ripple like motions or effects through several different timelines or period of time, booth forwards and backwards in relation to the present moment. Sow within the tesseract you can change not just events in the present, but within the past and future as well, and even simultaneously and also even in opposition to one another. Again, magic does not have to follow the normal rules of physics in regards to temporal displacement or disruption (assuming we would know what they would be in regards to these issues, which we don't).

3. An (Agenda) Artifact capable of maneuvering through time or displacing one through time might also very well be capable of calculating time to its own advantage, and manipulating the players and their characters, not just their place in time and space. In other words I have played artifacts with agendas of their own. Secret agendas of their own. Agendas which might very well be in opposition to the seeming intended or apparent agenda, or even an agenda or set of agendas in opposition to that of the players.

4. Mis-placed Replay - Once I had players replay an adventure they had previously played at another earlier time, only this time they were level 7 instead of level 3. They arrived at exactly the same time and place as earlier, but four levels higher. They expected their second time through would be much easier since they barely survived the previous attempt but to their surprise when they arrived most of the occupants of the place were completely different and much deadlier. This only became apparent as they got farther into the dungeon. The geography, the geometry, the topography, the design, and the time-frame were exactly the same, but the dungeon was now being used for a completely different purpose and was occupied by vastly different creatures.

5. Timed Dead-Zones - When certain things happen that are outside of time or when time is being manipulated then "Dead-Zones" develop that might effect physical objects, normal space, the ordinary flow of time, magical effects, or even supernatural influences.

6. Time-Curses - Small things happen which are odd, but only later are understood to be curses placed upon the party or upon individuals because of some event related to the manipulation of time.

7. Bad Hoodoo- The manipulation of time attracts creatures like Demons and Devils, or monsters or NPCs (liches, powerful Wizards, etc) who are particularly sensitive to or good at manipulating time, or are expert practitioners of time magic. It might also attract Good Hoodoo, like Angels or Ki-Rin. Those who can help or offer wise advice.

8. Time Traps - These may be something complicated like the Tesseract (in one game I designed a huge underground library which was in reality a tesseract), or may be a simple "repeat same action" or "be teleported to the same spot over and over again" until you figure out how to escape the trap.

9. New and Old - The discovery of new spells, magics, body parts (of creatures), substances, etc. which allow time to be manipulated in interesting ways. Even old spells, or perhaps powers nowadays, can be retasked or restructured to have totally different effects.

10. Slippage of the Veil of Time - Being around time magic or manipulation makes one or more party members sensitive to it, and that person then develops the ability to see forwards or backwards in time, and to make prophecies about events likely to occur, though these prophecies are never easy to understand and more often than not have multiple meanings or appear as riddles or visions. These abilities that result from being exposed to time manipulations can be magical, supernatural, or psychic in origin.

And so forth and so on.

Speaking of time, I'm out of it.
Good luck with your efforts.