Time Travel!! (2 reviews inside!!)

[Henry]

Let me second Aetherco's Continuum. To me, it's one of the best time travel games designed, for it's treatment of the way time works, and it's incorporation of all aspects of their rules into the societies that permeate the game.

I disliked their Narcissist product, because I've always been more of a "community" kinda guy, but I liked how they worked two different theories of time travel into the observable rules that the "spanners" like by.

 

[glass]

Oh? So what happens if you go back and shoot your infant self in the head with a .44 magnum? Short of creating a new timeline every time someone or something goes back in time, there just isn't any way to eliminate the possibility of creating paradoxes.

The gun jams, of you miss, or you are instantly transported back to your own time the moment you start to squeeze the trigger (or come into visual range), or you can't time travel within your own life-time (and maybe a few hundred years before it). There are lots of ways these things can be dealt with.


glass.

 

[glass]

So, anyone else use time travel in their games or have experience with any of the books I've mentioned or others? I'm finishing up reviews on both new PDFs and I'll post and tell people about them later in this thread.

There is a chapter on time travel in GURPS Infinite Worlds (the 4e book), but that is just basically an abridged version of the 3e Time Travel book you have already mentioned, AFAICT. I believe there was a Dr Who game at one point, but I don't know the details.


glass.

 

[Nomad4life]

Was there a Doctor Who RPG? There was a mention of it on the Full Frontal Nerdity comic a while back, but I had never heard of it. That would probably have some stuff involving time travel.

I can’t believe more people aren’t talking about the Dr. Who RPG in a time travel thread!

As fanatics of the show, we used to time travel quite a lot in that game- In fact, one of my favorite things about the Dr.WRPG was that it had some kind of “time travel misshap” chart. If not careful, you could end up centuries off target, or in the smack middle of some historical catastrophic event!

In that game was the Grandfather Paradox Rule, which pretty much went like this: If you were to go back in time and kill your own grandfather, you would theoretically cease to have ever existed. However, the moment this happened, you would then never have existed to go back in time and kill your grandfather! Thus, such a paradox is absolutely impossible. Furthermore, time is fluid in nature, and strongly resistant to change (So if you were to go back in time and kill Hitler as a child, someone else would have been there to take his place historically.) Additionally, each TARDIS (the time travel vehicles) are hard-programed to avoid bringing the pilot within any close proximity to his “old selves” of the past. This can be overridden with effort, but the results never quite turn out the way the Time Lord intended. (And indeed, there were a few episodes of the show that centered around this.)

If absolutely necessary, the Celestial Intervention Agency (the regulators of time travel) will set about the creation of an alternate timeline (say, to prevent the destruction of the entire universe.) Then you have one timeline that terminates at a certain point, and another that continues on. Such intentional creation of alternate timelines are never taken lightly, and it is not possible to reach one alternate timeline from another through the use of the TARDIS.

See, now the fond memories of that game have been stirred up. I wonder where those old books are now...

 

[Shade]

WotC had a small time travel scenario on their website awhile back. It includes a teleport through time spell and an epic feat for creating time portals:

Here's the link: http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/pg/20030402x

 

[painandgreed]

The only time travel game I've owned was Time & Time Again which is by the same people who did Morrow Project (which means combat was probably pretty realistic and gritty). Time travel was possible but there were centain rules, one being that you couldn't send large concentrations of metal back in time, although they could come forward. And since as anybody who has watched the history channel knows, the past is nothing but a colelction of wars and otherwise a dangerous place so they had to send back military personel trained in the target time period just to survive. Thus you play a military guy, going back in time to answer some question about history, or possibly to preform some task such as rescue scolls from the burning Library of Alexandria, and then you got to come forward and keep any loot of non-historical value (gold & gems). IIRC, you couldn't change history only fulfill it which was a problem left for the GM. Of course, it was mainly concentrated on the ancient world and pointed out that the historical records for those time periods was often missing or even could be flat out wrong.

 

[paradox42]

Let me second Aetherco's Continuum. To me, it's one of the best time travel games designed, for it's treatment of the way time works, and it's incorporation of all aspects of their rules into the societies that permeate the game.

I disliked their Narcissist product, because I've always been more of a "community" kinda guy, but I liked how they worked two different theories of time travel into the observable rules that the "spanners" like by.

Fascinating to see this- I'm precisely the opposite, the Spanner community described in the base book struck me as totalitarian, monstrously tradition-bound, and beyond loathsome and wrong- while the Narcissists, acknowledging that the timelines they leave behind are typically worse off for it, are still doing things "correctly" since time travel's very existence implies that causality is an illusion (or at the very least a flawed concept). I've been a believer in what the wikipedia article on the Grandfather Paradox the Relative Timelines theory for years now- to me it seems the only truly logical method of resolution.

And yes, as I mentioned in previous threads on this subject, I use time travel in my games frequently. The most recent use in my Epic game is one the PCs haven't even confirmed is a case of time travel yet; basically, they met a being they knew was from the Far Realm (which is beyond time, and therefore can allow time travel in ordinary reality as a trivial matter) which greeted them as though it already knew them, and thanked them for information they hadn't given it (yet). The point of this is that, unbeknownst to them, that same being is going to appear after they defeat a BBEG critter from the Far Realm that the party's slated to fight soon (presuming, of course, that they don't screw up and lose the fight ). During that meeting, the entity they met will be meeting them for the first time from its own perspective. I know my players rather well at this point, since this game's been going from 1st level and is now at 25th-26th, so I'm quite confident that at least one of them will divulge precisely the information that led the being to travel to the past and meet them there.

And really, even if it doesn't, the fact that I postulate (in my campaign) the existence of multiple timestreams and multiple "real" futures as possibilities at any given point in time, mean that they do not in fact have to give the entity what they're expected to- the fact that it was even possible for them to give it means that the entity can have it. It just happened to travel back from the timeline in which they gave it what they were expected to give it. I love playing with causality this way.

 

[GQuail]

WotC had a small time travel scenario on their website awhile back. It includes a teleport through time spell and an epic feat for creating time portals:

Here's the link: http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/pg/20030402x

I'm going to give this a proper read through tonight. I had considered a D&D scenario using time travel, albeit I think it was the Create Time Gate spell from D20 Call of Cthulhu I was using as a base. This might prove useful.

My idea was to basically throw my group into the future to show a world where the BBEG makes his big move and conquers the plane... except they haven't met the BBEG yet. So the first ime they see him is ruling the future, only to come back to their own world and find the begginings of his plan in motion: perhaps they'll hear about Dracoliches which ravaged the land, for example, and return to hear the Cult of the Dragon in the present have been seen to be contacting Necromancers around the land. I thought it would be an interesting solution to the "why are we fighting this guy?" questions: I'm going to show them what happens if they don't first. ;-)

Another idea which might fit the laws of physics better is to have an ancient tomb they are raiding be the home of a Vampire. In battling him and his spawn they come across a magical item... which looks exactly like one /they have crafted/, or some other obvious unique sign of their presence. Play it as a random oddity at first, but when a later adventure tears them back in time and they meet the NPC who will become that Vampire... I dunno quite how some groups would handle a predestination paradox, but I'd love to set a situation up where one of them fears that he won't leave this time travel adventure alive because they found The Axe He Would Never Part With there, or where they lose a PC and have to abandon his body, but find his remains in the present and try to work out if any Clerics can raise him still. :>

 

[ashockney]

I had a player play a Chronomancer in one of my campaigns. I've got to admit, I'm no fan of time travel. I enjoy it conceptually, however, I have two really big problems with it:

1. The impossibility (this is a big one in my mind)
2. It's a cheap crutch used by writers to get out of otherwise very entertaining stories! Star Trek is notorious for this, and it drives me CRAZY!!!!

Having said that, there is some excellent fiction out there that elegantly addresses and clearly casts itself as "time travel." I was always a fan of Quantum Leap!

The Chronomancer was pretty good, and used some innovative techniques to drum up unique effects. The moral to the story is, any good treatment of time travel (fiction, scifi, or gaming) should be built ENTIRELY around the concept of time travel, and should certainly include it's own conclusions on how, why, and dealing with the paradoxes to be uncovered.

 

[Crothian]

Temporality


Time Travel for the d20 game. I’ve always enjoyed time travel and it seems more then not Time Travel books are for modern or future games and not so much for the fantasy game. Temporality is designed for the Fantasy game but can be used in modern and future games. Some mechanical changes might be in order and some sections like in the spells will need more changes then others. But for the most part the book will be good for most d20 games.

Temporality is by Dark Quest Games. They have been making solid PDFs for a while and they got Brett Boyd to write this. Bret Boyd is a talented writer that has been doing some good work on a variety of products from a variety of publishers. The writing is solid but the look of the PDF is a bit less then I would have liked. They have a funky border on the pages of odd symbols and numbers. The art is black and white and there is not much of it. The monster section of the book is where art is really missed. The book is well book marked.

Temporality has a good mix of ideas and mechanics. There is a lot of information packed into this one hundred and sixty page PDF. The book approaches Time Travel very well. It just does not assume that someone knows what they are doing. The book literally has a section about where to begin. I think such sections are missing all too often from books. The book really has a good understand of time travel and deals with such things as languages, natives, dealing with not changing or changing time, and other such important aspects. There is a nice section on reincarnated characters. I like this bit as it really fits well into the idea of Time Travel and give the players the potential for more character depth.

The spell section has some nice creative spells in it. There is a little bit for everyone who uses spells. There are spells like Damage Ward that prevent something from happening to you once like in the case making the first attack that hits you miss. Count a very useful cantrip that allows one to magically know how much of something is there. It is very useful for counting treasury coins. Defy Chance is a powerful spell that requires XP as a casting cost but can assure that when something needs done it will be on a roll of a die. Erase Memories is a spell that does just that. It is very useful as a second level Bard spell. Exhaust others is nice but I was surprised it did not give the exhausted condition to people effected by the spell. Force Deformity is a nasty and powerful spell. Keep Fresh is another simple Cantrip that helps keep food and other things from spoiling. And the last spell I will mention, Pulsing Fireball is cool as a Fireball that keeps going off in the same place as it slowly weakens.

The other real strength of the book is the chapters on using time travel in one’s own game, the geography of time chapter, and the ideas for adventures and campaigns that are written in here. The geography bit deals with places in and out of time as well for the plane of time. There are some good ways to alter the worlds the players visit by having magic work differently and there are many pages that really go into depth on how this all works. It is a very well thought out idea.

Temporality does a good job of really showing the benefits and the potential of Time Travel in a game. Bret Boyd obviously put some time and thought in this book and really filled it out with ideas and good solid writing. There are some mistakes here and there but for the most part nothing jumped out at me as a killer error. Temporality is the book for time travel in d20.