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12:27, 29th March 2024 (GMT+0)

Complicated Time Travel.

Posted by Lancebreaker
Lancebreaker
member, 169 posts
Sat 13 Aug 2016
at 02:40
  • msg #1

Complicated Time Travel

Have you ever run or played in a game which involved complicated time travel within your own timelines?

I may have gone a step too far in my game involving time travel. It is possible I may have left some of my players a little confused.

Early in the game the characters had brief run ins with older versions of themselves.

Flash forward to after the apocalypse (of sorts), when they meet one of these older versions again who explains that they are from a previous iteration of the timeline and had come back to try and avert the apocalypse (and failed). These versions are then dubbed the Prime versions.

The characters then find a scientist who has built a time machine in the aftermath of the apocalypse, and wants to send them back with a biological message to himself in the form of an eggplant (for lack of a better term).

This particular Prime isn't to keen on the idea of the group ending their current timeline by travelling back, so she hunts them down, kills the scientist, and sends them back to 10,000 BC to freeze to death instead, and destroys the time machine.

Years later the Prime regrets her decision, fixes the time machine (poorly), and sends back an immortal (Did I mention superpowers?) to save them from freezing to death on a glacier.

The characters arrive in 10,000 B.C., just after witnessing the Prime kill the scientist, and begin to freeze to death (no non-living material) on a glacier.

Tribal people find the characters and take them back to their village which they find out was formed by the immortal sent to save them. They worship her as a goddess.

After some time living in "Eden", the characters initiate a plan to save the tribe from destruction. The event would be too destructive to the timeline, and have too great an impact on later history, so a time cop from an extra-dimensional agency comes to stop them.

They defeat the time cop and instead force it to take them to the agency's home dimension.

The agency reviews their case, seeing the catastrophic effects of their apocalypse and gives them a chance to go back and avert it, else they will be cut off from infecting any of the other "officially recognized" timelines.

The agency has a device with paradox dampeners that can interpolate them into their own timestream without fracturing a new one (like the primes had).

Now, as soon as the Primes show up, there will be three versions of each character about five years prior to the events at the beginning of the game. A Prime, the characters, and the alternate/original versions of themselves from five years before the start of the game.

...and that is the simplified version of the events.

Make sense? How have you experienced time travel in games? Am I crazy for making something this complex?
facemaker329
member, 6840 posts
Gaming for over 30
years, and counting!
Sat 13 Aug 2016
at 05:19
  • msg #2

Complicated Time Travel

Short answer?  Yes, you're crazy.  *grin*

I've never been in a game where time travel was the central plotline...had a couple of games where it was part of a story arc that was central to the game for a few months, but that was along the lines of, say, warning the Rebellion that the Empire was about to attack Hoth, early enough that by the time the Empire got there, all they found was an empty base...(yeah, one of them was in a Star Wars game...)

The GM built an alternate timeline from there that ended up with the Empire achieving total dominance in the galaxy, and our group were celebrated as heroes for being part of that victory.  Someone from that future came back and abducted my character immediately before what should have been a certain death (the GM let the rest of the group think my character really had died, it was several weeks before they learned he was still alive).  Once my character realized what had happened, he learned how to operate the time machine they'd used to come save him, went back to the past, and meddled in a way that prevented the group from warning the Rebels...the timeline reverted, that version of my character vanished in a paradox loop (or whatever you want to call it), and the game continued.  That's as complex as my time travel gaming has gotten.
Kid_Midnite
member, 119 posts
Scanning For Solution Now
This Just Might Work.
Sun 14 Aug 2016
at 18:35
  • msg #3

Complicated Time Travel

I think it helps to consider/explain the time travel in waves. All Primes would be considered first wave time travelers. Your main characters are considered second wave. The next iteration considered third wave travelers.

No matter how many more times each group time travels, whether forward or back, they will always belong to the same wave. Each timeline, no matter which wave came from there, would be considered "in flux" until there is definitely no more time shifting from travelers.

Any more travel by the main characters won't necessarily define a specific timeline since they are in flux, but there are points (hard points, strong points) where they can insert themselves to affect the greatest areas of certain probabilities.

Just my two cents. Happy gaming. :)
Lancebreaker
member, 171 posts
Sun 14 Aug 2016
at 19:49
  • msg #4

Re: Complicated Time Travel

facemaker329:
Short answer?  Yes, you're crazy.  *grin*

Pretty much already knew that! :D

facemaker329:
I've never been in a game where time travel was the central plotline... ...That's as complex as my time travel gaming has gotten.

That sounds like a lot of fun! It is interesting to have some insight into how it has been handled in other games. I haven't had the characters destroy their own timeline (yet) to revert back to an alternate "fixed" timeline, but that is something to consider for an endgame scenario.

Kid_Midnite:
I think it helps to consider/explain the time travel in waves. All Primes would be considered first wave time travelers. Your main characters are considered second wave. The next iteration considered third wave travelers.

Prime is actually a misnomer in the game. Primes are simply from a previous iteration. There could well have been a hundred or a thousand previous iterations of the causal loop, and there is an entity which has successfully traversed from iteration to iteration alongside each "wave" of "primes".

The causal loop has previously meant that any given iteration of time only had two versions of each character. Simply put, Primes are the characters from iteration "N" in iteration "N+1". The "N-1" iteration ceases to exist as the "N" iteration passes into (and creates) the "N+1" iteration.

Player characters met their "N-1" selves (the primes), and have now been inserted into their own "N" iteration, meaning there are now two "N" iteration versions of each character, one set living an alternate series of events from the ones they experienced.

I'm not actually sure that I've made anything clearer here, but the "wave" theory/explanation actually helps a lot.

Kid_Midnite:
Just my two cents. Happy gaming. :)

I appreciate it!
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