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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Cerebral Paladin" data-source="post: 4845233" data-attributes="member: 3448">I've played in a Groundhog Day style game (years ago, at some con in the Northeast), and discussed similar ideas with other GMs.  I would suggest either having all of the PCs aware of the loop, or none of them explicitly aware but with some feedback, like what the Enterprise crew experiences in the Next Gen episode "Cause and Effect."  (In a nutshell, they are unaware of the loop but experience deja vu and can gradually introduce information from previous iterations of the loop.)  The players will inevitably metagame to some extent, as there are limits to the distinctions between player and character knowledge, so it's best to incorporate that directly into the game design rather than fighting it.  I don't see why having the whole party aware of the loop would be a problem-- yes, in some examples from fiction only one person is aware, but RPGs tend towards a more ensemble feel anyway.The classic design for this sort of story in an RPG has some explicit problem causing the loop-- maybe the monster in the corner is doing it, or maybe it's an effect of the evil ritual, or maybe it's triggered by the interaction between something good that the PCs are doing and some wacky magic.  The PCs then need to figure out what's causing the problem, and then resolve it.  Nicely, that allows them to take on challenges that might be beyond their capabilities, because they just reset when they fail (so if they need to kill the monster before it activates the effect, a TPK the first time they fight it isn't a disaster-- they get a bunch of information about its capabilities, reset at the beginning of the loop, and can now plan what they need to do to beat it next time.)So yeah.  It's a fun, interesting design.  i would suggest aiming for about three or four times through the loop-- not so many that it gets stale, but enough that it's not just repeating the experience once.  Also, feel free to telescope later cycles-- to the extent that they do the same thing as a previous time, you can simply cut to the divergence point instead of playing through everything again.</blockquote>

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