Time Travel?

[Grumpy RPG Reviews]

Have you ever used time travel in a game, or been part of a game where time travel was used? How did it go? What do you think of it? Would you do it again?

 

[Nagol]

Have you ever used time travel in a game, or been part of a game where time travel was used? How did it go? What do you think of it? Would you do it again?

As a GM, I use time travel sparingly, but it has happened. I’ve also been a player of time travel scenarios.

It can be fun, it can be dramatically appropriate, it can be freaking annoying, it can be a campaign-ender.

Here are my main thoughts for a GM/scenario designer:

• Pick a philosophy for how the travel works and stick to it. Can you change the past or is the visit informational only?
  How are paradoxes handled? If changes are possible, do the PCs have an opportunity to correct/invalidate them or does the time change happen instantaneously? Does anyone “remember” the original past?
  
• Do not try to get cute and make the reason for the time travel is because the PCs “will do something” that causes the necessity.
  As a player in a superhero campaign, we were confronted with a bunch of “time rifts” dumping nasty things into the city. Investigation found a researcher who entered a time machine about the same time set for mid WWII era. Our group gets to the time machine, sends the wife home and proceeds to investigate what if anything the researcher changed in the past (pretty much nothing – he became the owner of a small high-tech defence firm, but by the time he got rolling the war was effectively over. The wife is named in his will and was set to inherit a small fortune). Our only concern became determining what the time rifts were and closing them. The GM threw in the tool at that point. The designer expected the PCs to immediately jump into the machine operated by his wife to go after him, causing the machine to explode killing her. The researcher gets seriously pissed at the PCs and creates the rifts to “punish” them thus starting our involvement.
  
• Limit the areas/actions the PCs can take in the past.
  Some campaign secrets are best left undisturbed; some villains are best allowed to mature. It is hard to determine the whole set of changes associated with the effects of a change in the past – where do the ripples stop? If the area and actions can be limited in scope it making adjudicating the result much simpler. In many ways, traveling farther in time is less dangerous to a campaign than smaller jumps. The PCs can become ‘lost to history’ and have a very small effect -- assuming the action taken doesn’t substantially change the basis of civilisation as they know it! Jumping forward into a possible future and returning is a great hook for the PCs.
  
• PCs that get general access to time travel can destroy campaigns unless the campaign is built on that premise to begin with.
  Time war; the rest is best left unsaid.

 

[DanotheSlender]

Oh yes..once played in a game where we bounced around in time to retreive the Rod of Seven parts...it was great fun..we were given a lantern that was both our portal, and which showed people/NPCs we could not kill to avoid paradox...we had to subdue damn near a whole tribe of kobolds because they were all ancestors of 1 kobold in the future who had to be born..sleep spells nd scrolls ruled the day in that game!

Game On!!

 

[Gorgon Zee]

I run a Doctor Who Adventures in Time and Space game. EVERY session has time travel, most of them with strong in-game effects

 

[Jhaelen]

Only once, and it didn't go well. I avoided it ever since. What I did use to good effect, though, was a session that was set in the past in which the pcs met and the campaign background was established. I could imagine running more sessions to let the players experience historical events first-hand, using different pcs.

 

[Evilhalfling]

In the campaign that I just wrapped up, there was a hallway of endless doors. In a previous campaign it dropped the PCs 900 years into the past, They skipped forward through time, but never made it back to the present. In the past they managed to inspire a chivalrous order of knights, ~500 years too early.
they also go a niche dragon god elevated to a full member of the pantheon.

In the last campaign the hallway was broken, but it still allowed traveling 1-3 years into the future. The biggest change they made was too grab the dead body of a friend from another adventuring group off a battlefield and raise him from the dead in the present. Making small careful changes, they discovered that their actions did not change his memories. He kept to vague warnings and eventually snuck off to wait for a crucial point he knew was coming, he didn't want to change the original events too much, until they reached the crisis point he remembered.

I have been sticking to the theory that time travel creates branches in time stream, so paradox is mostly prevented, they just end up in a new reality. That way they can't "Bill and Ted" their way out of problems.
Eventually they skipped over several months, when an enemy destroyed the door behind them.

Three months after the campaign ended the characters plan to get back together and attack an enemy general, as they know precisely where he will be. On one trip into a future battlefield, they found out who was the most important figure in the war, and asked about the last time there was a confirmed sighting of him. (He liked to sneak around)

I went into both games with the assumption that PCs would alter the world, and being Ok with that. I would do it again (although probably not for a few years so it regains its novelty)
The time branches does not really address the grandfather paradox. If a PC killed his own grandfather he would continue to exist, but the new reality branch would have no memories of him.

 

[FoolishFrost]

Actually, I gamemastered a 'time campaign' story that the players didn't even know they were a part of. Not until very near the climax, anyway.

I would tell the story, but nobody likes hearing about other people's campaigns. (you just had to be there).

The main point of the story is, the player's characters had been looping the same period of time (About one year) over and over, for thousands/millions/nobody knew how many times. Each time, they're memories would reset, BUT things would leak through, especially when events synchronized to perfectly replicate a previous timeloop they knew.

Over the campaign, clues were dropped as to the nature of the story, but not until the climax of the first part, where the players got to utterly fail to stop just about the "destruction of everything", did they find out about the timeloop.

Took them about ten minutes to look back on the story and growl endlessly how it had all been so doggon obvious.

Then they looped, and this time... They remembered the last loop, and knew exactly what they had to do.

And suddenly the players were temporal gods.

They even found out that no matter how much they messed with things, time tended to flow in the same way when allowed to drift without interference.

Anyway, moral of the story: Foreshadowing is king. Even with time-travel.

"What do we want? TIME TRAVEL! When do we want it? IRRELEVANT!"

 

[Lwaxy]

Doing it all the time, and not only in SF scenarios. Great fun.