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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Piratecat" data-source="post: 6128341" data-attributes="member: 2">Henry, I've heard great things about Continuum but have never played. Now I need to find someone with a copy... We came up with TimeWatch after considering Pacesetter's game Timemaster and thinking "Man, I loved every bit of that game except for the rules." GUMSHOE turns out to be a really good fit for time travel.RW, making foes took me quite literally a minute and a half. My generic Mongol stat block for unnamed characters looks something like: Seasoned Mongol warriors: Hit threshold 4, Athletics 6, Shoot 6, Scuffle 6 (2-2-2), Health 4. If using the spreadsheet so that I don't have to count build points, I'd say making a PC takes about 10-15 minutes. The hard part of building a PC is avoiding analysis paralysis; with every profession and all of time and Earth to choose from, I think it's always better to have a strong concept going in. I'll have a much easier time making "Roman spy for Emperor Caligula" than I will "some guy. A Roman, maybe?"The 45 minutes of game prep was spent trolling Wikipedia, writing down the bad guy's plan and figuring out the relevant dates and facts that surround it. I will eventually do some of this work for the GM, but I wanted to make sure I had a rough understanding of how things should have gone so that I knew what would happen when they screwed up. It's interesting to note that if we'd had more time to play, capturing the bad guy wouldn't have initially solved the problem because *before* he encountered the PCs he probably went and killed the messengers sent to warn the western army about the great Khan's death. As a result, if the PCs had captured/killed him and allowed the Khan to die normally, the western army still wouldn't have heard for another year or two and would have sacked western Europe anyways!History is a little simplified here; for instance, the Mongols did manage to rule China for about 100 years before plague and in-fighting did a number on them. My scenario predicated that Ogedai would have solved the "let's carve the empire into many pieces" problem, and would have resulted in a more genocidal army. I'm definitely not shooting for a simulation here. GMs want enough history and alt-history for an adventure to be fun and plausible, not necessarily for it to be precisely accurate. When a game starts feeling like a history lesson instead of an adventure, it's strayed too far.Interestingly, my initial playtest limited how much fuel the PCs had for their time machines (which at the moment look a little bit like the light cycles from TRON 2: a single person rod which generates a coherent sphere of light and hyper-time around them.) I've tossed the fuel limit. In the game detailed above, the PCs jumped in time probably 15 times or more, and that just made the game cooler. It'd be a shame to limit strategies based on an arbitrary amount of fuel, unless I want to encourage turtling down to figure out a strategic plan that they then finally head off to carry out ("the Shadowrun method"). That's actually the approach I don't want, because it's boring for half the game and always falls apart anyways.Russ, I think I'm going with the "the farther in time you travel, the less accurate your arrival location is," with the PCs having precise control of the arrival time and date. Pcs have control of their time machines. Although the time machines (right now) are single person occupancy, I have a mechanic in place to allow PCs to (say) capture the T-Rex that somehow ended up at the Battle of Waterloo, or to chase someone fleeing through time.</blockquote>

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