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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Nagol" data-source="post: 6105382" data-attributes="member: 23935">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:<ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">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? </li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">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. </li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">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. </li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">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.</li> </ul></blockquote>

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