Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="The Grackle" data-source="post: 1822694" data-attributes="member: 23976">back to the futureraaaaugh... it makes my brain hurt just thinking about this.Okay wait.   The characters can reach back from their future selves to the present?  So basically they can do X number of cool things as long as they can explain it later. Or do they travel even further into the past & then set things up for their earlier selves to encounter? or both of those?I'd say you have to make some rule/guideline that the further you reach back the more of these points yr spending.  Otherwise the first thing everyone will do is ask for really high end magic items and/or loads of cash. One way to do this is my increments of time, which seems more feasible, or by difference in character level, which is easier to balance.  That way they could ask for 10 favors from their level 2 selves or 1 favor from their level 20 selves (but you would probalbly want to weight them on a curve).  A cool thing is if they waited to throw that example fireball until the wizard was 6th level it would cost extra- so they'd want to pay off their future-debt promptly.If you did it by time it would require more guessing about where they're going to be and what they'll be capable of.Besides being able to call their future selves they should be able to send "unrequested" aid to their historic selves too.   Like they figure out some mystery, or discover someone's not to be trusted, etc. and then they send a letter to their old selves.  The world changes b/c of it, but maybe not how they expected.  It would be risky b/c everything that happened between the two points would happen differently this time.  Maybe they avoided dangers the first time they didn't even know about.So it would be safe to grant requests from your past self, but dangerous to send things back w/o being asked. Another way you could really mess with their heads would be to have a request from their past selves come in, but it's a request they don't remember making...  Implying that the past will soon be changed in the near future... Whoa.One thing you should do is make the characters in the unique position that they are somewhat unaffected by the alterations in time- at least their own memory should be unaltered.  That way each time there's a shift they have to figure out what happened differently in the new time line they now inhabit- why they have this scar, who this new guy in the party is, why they're now a ranger, etc.Have you ever read "transdimesional turtles" for the TMNT RPG?  It had a good time travel system, but not really applicable for what you've got going here.  One thing about it was if someone altered the past, the future got edited in waves.  The first waves were detectable only by time-travel tech, letting people know that someone had altered the past.  In successive waves, bigger and bigger alterations would take place until everything would be changed to fit the new timeline.  In the last waves people would start fading away and everyone's memory would be altered to match the new past.  It's cool and it gives the players time to react to enemies trying to cut them out of history or time to patch up something that turns out to be a huge mistake. They might even send a message to their past selves not to mess with their past selves!What would be crazy about a game like this is you would have a totally fluid history and past.  Only the present would really exist. It's like some Zen meditation exercise for RPGs.Whoever the BBEG is, he should be able to do this time manipulation stuff too.  So occasionally horrible things from the future fly back at the PCs trying to kill them or make life difficult.  At first they don't even know where this stuff is coming from b/c, after all, they haven't even met the guy yet.  Despite all the wacky time flow stuff they would have one thing that remained a constant- the enemy. Okay.  That's all I've got for the moment.  I'm gonna go take some aspirin.</blockquote>

Verification