So I have decided that I would like to add time traveling adventures and experiences to my campaign. I have started reading through an old 2nd Edition PDF, Chronomancer, that describes a plane called Temporal Prime. Via Temporal Prime, time traveling wizards called, Chronmancers, are able to literally walk forward or backward through time.
I am liking this book... but when it starts talking about Paradoxes (i.e. changing something important in the past that alteres the future), their explination begins to get a bit too wordy. Suffice it to say that paradoxes are something Temporal Prime attempts to correct, so that the overall outcome in the future is the same as it once was (or close to it anyway).
Time traveling is not the main theme of my campaign (though perhapse this could be an interesting campaign theme). I want to show the players that it is possible, and I want them to be able to experience some adventures with time travel. I am not going to bring the Chronomancers into my game, but I think I do like the idea of Temporal Prime as a plane that can be accessed where you can thereby time travel through. In my game I may restrict time travel to major artifacts that can allow it. Then the characters may have to go on adventures to get something or change something that helps them in the current time line of their world.
What are your experiences with Time Travel in your games. How have you dealt with the challenges of making it all work? Any advice or anecdotes that could shed some insight would help!
Happy Holidays!
You need to speak with The Doctor, Doctor Who.
It could be possible that any time a time traveler goes back in time and changes something from history, it was already accounted for so when they go back to their present time the present is the same. Basically, the time traveler was destined to do what he or she did. This is the easiest explanation. But, if a key NPC is killed in the past the DM will have to revise the present accordingly. I think this can work if time travel is not done too often.
Your best bet is to limit time travel so that you can use it as a plot device for specific adventures. I've never tinkered with it, but it seems like it could be fun.
Another option is to have alternate co-existing planes. If npc or pc messes with time, it merely shifts them into a parallel plane that has a different timeline. Of course, you don't even need to explain this to players. They will just experience the new timeline as if it were the only timeline.
I've done it as alternate timelines, once someone goes into the past, the time that they came from no longer exists.
Unlike "Back to the Future" there are no paradoxes - if you go back in time and kill your grandfather you still exist because there's still cause and effect. Your father (who did not go back in time) does not exist, but you still exist because you existed in the timeline where your grandfather was murdered.
Whether the "original" timeline still exists or was simply erased is up to you. In my case there was no way of going back to the original timeline so it didn't matter.
I explained it as firing an arrow from a bow and then immediately destroying the bow. The arrow is still in motion even though the bow that sent it flying no longer exists.
How big the change is can vary ... minor random changes can have a ripple effect while killing your version of Hitler may have little effect as another leader merely stepped into his place, and actually was a better leader.
This can cause odd consequences of course, like returning to the same time you left only to find that the "you" in that timeline did not go back in time so you have a slightly different twin, etc.
Basically, you'll never get the One True Answer to this, so I would suggest keeping it as simple as possible for the PCs: whatever changes they make in the past tangentalizes into a new timeline -- sans paradox. They come back and they'll find that everything moved forward without them. For example: if you murder your grandfather (well, THAT escalated quickly) and your father wasn't born... it won't affect you in the new timeline because you've essentially hopped over from another one in which those things didn't happen. In the new timeline, you are now a Time Traveler, as opposed to having any true connection to that 'line and 'verse. You could essentially use this as a campaign re-boot (seeing as the new timeline didn't include your characters or their actions... the big bad villian may have run rampant without your heroes to stop it!) but you may also use it to remove any ties your characters had -- after all, if you're not actually IN the timeline anymore (assuming the grandfather example) then nobody will know you.
What MIGHT be interesting (and this is simply off-the-cuff) is that if your characters perform an action that actually happened in another alternate timeline, and then EVERYTHING changes when they "go back". This might be the chance for a re-boot on a grand scale; i.e., one change collides your timeline with another, and they meld into one where a drastic change of events turns the world into a Darksun setting, or something like that. For such a situation to take place, you may need to go much further back than just a generation, but you get the idea!
Using IRL history, events can be grouped into three types:
(1) Not alterable
- A very old man (Abraham) and his equally old life-long-barren wife will have a son, clearly due to Divine intervention.
- Jesus of Nazareth must die a painful torture-filled humiliating disgraceful death in public
- The flight of the Goeben leads to Russia's economic isolation; the Dardanelles Campaign (1915) fails to break the siege
- General George Washington refuses multiple offers to be acclaimed King of America; he is inspired by Cincinnatus' biography
(2) Time 'heals' itself to continue along a similar and parallel course
- Kill baby Hitler in his cradle but some other super-nationalist leads 1930s Germany to revenge the Great War's outcome
- Marco Polo's extended family writes a journal of travel tales that becomes widely read in 1400s Europe
- A German theology professor writes 95 Theses about how the Church's doctrine and practice do not match, c. 1500
- Alexander the Great dies young without an heir: food poisoning, malaria, measles, combat, assassination attempt, accidental drowning, heart attack
(3) Doesn't matter
Only a very few people have the special 'spark' that enables them to alter the course of History. For the vast majority (99.9999%), their lives will be mundane and typical; like drops of water in a flowing river. Whatever you do to them, there is an easy way to replace them in the Flow of Time.
Despite advice above, DO watch the Back to the Future series and graph out the alternate timelines / pardoxes. The exercise will help you organize your own thoughts.
I find the Doctor Who timelines and alternate worlds enlessly confusing; YMMV.
I like to use the Law of Conservation of History.
History likes to take the same path. It takes a significant change to alter it.
In other words, killing baby Hitler isn't enough to prevent WW2. In order to prevent WW2, you need to change the conditions that caused it to happen (mostly the Treaty of Versailles, but that wasn't the only source of the lousy conditions in Germany.)
The result is that basically, time-traveling PCs don't need to worry about butterly effects, but they have to exert significant effort to change the thing they actually want to change.
The most recent campaign I ran was a time travel campaign using Chronomancer. Like you are considering, I used Temporal Prime and the concepts therein, but I didn't bring in the chronomancer NPCs or anything (the PCs had an artifact). Nodes and temporal storms at or near timelines can be used to give PCs a hint what is going on while they're in Temporal Prime.
For people who have not read Chronomancer: Temporal Prime is a plane that exists outside of time and links alternate realities and timelines. As a result, it means that paradoxes are only paradoxes from the point of view of a single timeline; they aren't actually unexplainable from the point of view of the greater whole. It is entirely possible to meet yourself on Temporal Prime, and this is not a paradox, because Temporal Prime is not connected to the linear time of any given timeline; it's like how an earthquake on Mars does not affect us here on Earth, because our tectonic plates are not connected.
However, any given timeline does resist paradox, which is why you can't meet yourself inside a timeline. Lesser paradoxes are covered by conservation of history (an example would be if you go back in time and kill your grandfather, you find out that he was not actually your grandfather; the smallest change possible is made to account for the new timeline.)
I've used time travel twice, in two different campaign. In one campaign, the players went back in time to prevent themselves from killing an important villain. Because as it turned out, the villain was actually an important key player, and the fate of the world depended on him surviving. One of the players played a drow, who used to be an elf. But the player has deliberately left it open why she became a drow. So that seemed like a great opportunity for some time travel shennanigans. I allowed the player to meet herself, back when she was still an elf. As the two identical souls met, the soul of the elf automatically moved to the newer body, thus robbing the elf of the other timeline, of her soul, and turning her into a drow. So the player was directly responsible for her own transformation, thanks to a time paradox. The rest of the campaign then revolved around fixing that paradox.
In another campaign, a D20 Call of Cthulhu campaign, I also used time travel. The players entered a city that was a few minutes ahead in time. There was a tangible field surrounding the city, that caused sanity damage whenever the players traveled through it. The time difference also caused problems with electronics. The players would often get phone calls from the future. And whenever they made a phonecall from inside the city, to an outside source, they would instantly hear the answer to questions before they asked them. With each day the time difference started to increase, and traveling through the field became more dangerous. Strange events started happening, such as the players seeing ghostly images of future events in the city. Or having the feeling that an invisible person crawled into bed with them at night (their future self in fact). After a few days, the city was several days ahead in time, and things started really getting out of control. The source of the time disturbance was starting to draw another world closer to this one, to the point where the two realities would soon merge. The anomaly also attracted various frightening creatures from beyond time and space, who live in between the folds of dimensions.
ankiyavon wrote:
BRJN wrote:
Sands666 wrote:
I would recommend reading Rant, by Chuck Palahniuk, for a neat take on the subject.
Reius wrote:
Reius wrote:
In our current 4e campaign the party has encountered a time/space traveller and he pretty much handles things exactly like this:
http://klipd.com/watch/bill--teds-excellent-adventure/bend-time-and-space-to-their-will-scene
Another suggestion (which I cannot properly give credit alas) is that Time Travel doesn't work back into recorded History, but you can travel back into pre-history / anthropology.
(So if you visit prehistoric Gaul, stay far away from Julius Caesar; when he makes entries in his diary, you will be trapped in place.)
Or a power-up can take you to the Age of Myths and Legends (top-end: even events such as the Dawn War?).
In which case, when you return to present time and home, one of the Classic Greek Myths has YOUR name on it.
I incoporate the basic concept from the Dr Who mythos that a character cannot go back into their own timeline. Besides paradox issues, it can make time travel way to powerful. "I go back in time befre that bad thing happened" is just game breaking and not fun.
Also speaking od Dr Who, and I did mention this a while ago on another thread, but I have been known to have the good Doctor drop in on an adventuring party for a fun fantasy/sci-fi crossover. You can drop in the Dr Who Adventures in Time and Space rules for that portion of the adventure, as they are all story based and problem solving, with no real combat involved.
BRJN wrote:
My favorite resolution method: yes, you can change the past. Strain the fabric of causality too much, though, and the Time Weevils show up to eliminate the disturbance of reality. And it's not always obvious what changes are significant and which are sufficiently inconsequential as to be safe.
Oh, changing your own history in a notable way? That's always paradoxical, but if the consequences are otherwise trivial, the only problem is the existence of your time-traveling self - which means the paradox can be dealt with if you're removed. Say, by Time Weevils dragging you into the Beyond. Do you value the changed course of your alternate self's life enough to sentence your current self to whatever lies outside of Time? Better consider your position carefully...
BRJN wrote:
Undrhil wrote:
Sands666 wrote:
I think if you are going to use time travel the GM and players need to be on the same page. I don't think its something you spring on the players as a campaign twist.
Archon007 wrote:
demon_idol wrote:
Archon007 wrote: