Thomas Bowman
First Post
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?
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?