Time Travel in yourgame?

[Thomas Bowman]

True enough, the Gm should never reveal the precise rules of time travel to the players, there are two extremes which don't really work in a role playing game.
1) History can never be changed
2) Whenever history is changed you always create an alternate timeline, even if you do the slightest thing, such as simply travel to the past, the butterfly effect will lead to different historic outcomes when you return to the present.

If you can never change history, why bother going into the past, one has to be careful never to get in a situation where your presence may potentially be recorded in history books, because then something happens to you to make sure that it isn't, since you were not found in the history books before you made the trip, and what was written in the history books cannot change as a result of your traveling into the past, this also goes as far as leaving no trace of your existence. You can perhaps go back and hunt dinosaurs, but if you try to go to the Moon and leave footprints on the site of the Apollo 11 landing, then the timeline will stop you from doing that, you will never get there, you will be hit by a meteor or something like that to prevent you from ever making footprints on the Moon.

if you are always creating an alternate timeline, then you can't return to your present unless you use wormholes, as wormholes can connect two different timelines and two different universes in fact. But if you go back in time and mess around in the past creating another timeline which has no bearing on the present you left, but can return to, then what's the point in making the trip?

 

[Blue]

Just remembered a bit of time travel in a less than serious game with rotating DMs. The party was in an inter-dimensional bazaar where anything was for sale, and they needed to be able to time travel (I don't remember why). So they tracked down a lead where to go and are heading there, when across a busy street they see themselves. The other set of them wave and yell out over the traffic "don't forget to get reverse time batteries!".

So they get there to the place, a demo of the device puts them back in time 10 minutes. They purchase a new one in box, are about to walk out when on goes "oh wait, we need batteries". *ka-ching* They get those, walk out and I describe how the clock nearby was earlier then when they went in (because of the demo).

One of the players says "I look around for us" heading there.
"You see you."
"I wave and call out 'Don't forget to get reverse time batteries'."

Ah, I loved my players.

 

[lowkey13]

*Deleted by user*

 

[Umbran]

If you can never change history, why bother going into the past

Oh, this is simple - to get information that is relevant to the present. I mean, you can do this with a postcognition spell too, but if you are there, and can interact, but nothing will change, you can probably get more information.

Imagine you are tasked with catching a murderer. Go back in time to the last known murder, watch, and *tada!* you get to see who did it. Come back to the present, and nail their sorry butts to the wall for what they did.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

I played in a Pathfinder adventure path, where I was eventually allowed access to the Scepter of Ages, on the strict condition that I only go back one month in order to buy enough time for everyone to recover from their negative levels. That worked out well enough.

Later, I ran a 5E campaign where the BBEG acquired the Scepter of Ages at some point during her infinite wish scheme, and used it to take over the world thirty years ago. When the party woke up, the day after the BBEG had acquired the artifact necessary to put her scheme into action, they realized that the whole world was not as they remembered it. They eventually found their way back to the past, and defeated the BBEG, whereupon she dropped the Scepter as loot. Although I was prepared for them to go anywhere else in history that they might want to visit, they decided to just go back to the beginning of the world in order to stop the Sealed Evil before it was sealed in the first place, thus re-writing all of history for the better.

In my opinion, tabletop RPGs are the best way to explore the concept of time travel, since anything can happen as long as the GM can envision it. Novels and movies are too limited, since you only get to see what the author wants you to see, and video games would require everything to be programmed in advance.

 

[Imaculata]

True enough, the Gm should never reveal the precise rules of time travel to the players,

When I ran my Call of Cthulhu campaign, a lot of the plot revolved around the players figuring out how time travel worked in the campaign. First it manifested itself as a series of bizarre and spooky events. But eventually they came to understand the phenomenon, and started testing the rules, which uncovered even more spooky things in the process.

 

[Bedrockgames]

What are your thoughts about including time travel in your game?

I use it all the time. I think it can be a great deal of fun.

 

[Eltab]

In backstory, before the series begins, Wyatt's wife Jessica is murdered. Wyatt is told a man who is in jail for two other murders did it. So, Wyatt goes back in time to make sure this serial killer is never born. He *succeeds*, by killing the murderer's father, the murderer is never born. When he returns, the two other women are alive, but Wyatt's wife is still dead.

Now we need several trips back, not a 'time-lock'.
- Stop previous time-tripping self mid-mission; I am pursuing the wrong person.
- Trip to scene of Jessica's death, to find out who really killed her.
- Research that person's backstory
- Stop real killer in some other crime (catch him red-handed would be best) that he committed prior to killing Jessica.
- NOW I am ready to go back to Timeline Prime and reunite with (now-living) Jessica.

 

[Thomas Bowman]

There is the rule that you can't go back to a time when you are already alive, but it turns out that rule was only a suggestion anyway. If you wait long enough, you can send a kid back in a time machine who wasn't born yet to gather information.

 

[hawkeyefan]

So I had an interesting idea come to me for my 5E campaign that has time travel shenanigans.

The party Fighter recently had a final showdown with his one time mentor, an aged mercenary who’s sided with the villains because he thinks they’re bound to win. So the Fighter killed the Mercenary...and I had the Merc’s last words be “Now we’re even”.

The idea is that the Merc is at a past event where the bad guys kill some of the PCs allies. The campaign has been going toward the idea that the PCs will go back in time to save those allies. When they do so, they’ll fight the Mercenary and the other villains in their past.

So if/when that happens....the Mercenary could kill the Fighter. So each of them is the other’s killer. It’s the kind of whacky concept that can only come up when time travel is involved.

The idea popped into my head when the Fighter finished him off, so I threw that dialogue out there....and the player definitely took notice. It’ll be interesting to see how it may play out.