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Message: <blockquote data-quote="TwinBahamut" data-source="post: 4592431" data-attributes="member: 32536">The important thing for time travel adventures and campaigns is to lay down basic ground rules for yourself about how time travel works, so you can avoid the worst-case situations that can so easily occur if you are not careful (characters sending 100 copies of themselves to the same place and time in order to beat down the BBEG, the Butterfly effect, etc).My favorite time travel rules are what I think of as the Chrono Trigger Rules.1) Time is broken up into a series of steps, each of which is moving forward at the same rate. Time travel can only occur between these set steps. If you time travel backwards 500 years, and spend 15 days in that era, then 15 days will have passed in your original time.2) Most of these time steps (time planes?) are significantly far apart, usually a few hundred years or more. It is incredibly rare for an individual to be able to go back or forwards in time to a place where his future or past self still exists.3) Time is malleable, but it also resist change. In other words, there is a principle of "time inertia", in which the timeline wants to continue on the path it is currently traveling on. The difficulty of changing the timeline is entirely dependent on how big of a change is being attempted. It is easy to cause minor change, but it is difficult to affect great change.The third rule is a bit tricky, but it is fairly important so I will give some examples...For example, it is pretty easy to change something minor, like what a king's portrait looks like. If a group of time travelers go back and shave the king's beard right before he has a famous portrait done, then he won't have a beard in the portrait when they return. In fact, such a change may end up altering fashion styles for royalty for some time to come, since that is still a minor (and fun) change.If a group of time travelers go back into history and participate in a major military battle that is significant to later history, then things become more complicated. If they turn what was a loss into a victory, then that change will be recorded, but a critical later battle may reverse it. If they saved the life of someone who was supposed to die, that person will still be saved, but that person's survival will probably not change the population of the modern era in the slightest. However, the characters may be recorded as the person who saved the life of a modern person's ancestor, which may have other benefits.If a group of time travelers go back 500 years and try to prevent the collapse of a kingdom, and spend a lot of effort in doing so, including changing the tide of a number of major battles and taking down an evil demon lord who is manipulating events from the shadows, and perhaps even fulfilling their epic destinies in the process, then that kingdom should be spared destruction.In other words, a group of time traveling PCs should get exactly the results and rewards that their actions have earned, and this reward should not be unduly exaggerated or mitigated just because of the flow of time.And now, the final, and most important rule:4) Time travelers are immune to paradox. Anyone who goes backwards or forwards in time will always remember the timeline as he experienced it, even if that timeline is later rewritten. If a time traveler goes back in time and changes something, he will remember exactly why he went back and what he changed, and what his modern era was like before it was changed as a consequence of the change to the past. This immunity may even apply to the actions of other time travelers.</blockquote>

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