[hal]

What I was trying to avoid doing, but will now do, despite my best intentions...

This space is for spoiler protection for the movie NEXT starring Nicolas Cage, Julliane Moore, and Jessica Biel...



Spoiler - don't read if you might want to watch the movie someday.... (that includes the original poster. My advice is - WATCH the movie and then come back to this if you need to!)


Spoiler space - do not read future unless you really want to spoil things for yourself if you haven't watched the movie NEXT.










Ok, consider yourselves warned.


In NEXT, the precognative individual, who can CHANGE the future based upon what he sees - has the ability to follow every single THREAD of possible future, until he can select the ONE future where things happen as he desires it. In one instance, he has something like 9 possible directions he can go in an effort to rescue his lady love, and the movie shows him actively splitting into essentially 9 separate analogs of himself. Each one then attempts to handle the circumstances of the path they've chosen, and then the knowledge that is gained by all of his analogs, convene back within himself. He KNOWS the future, every single permutation of it, and selects the future he wants. For his lady love, he can try some 1,000 opening lines trying to figure out which one will work on his love to get the response he wants. So - we in the audience got to see every single episode of "failed attempts" until we find the one in which it works, and he gets his lady love interested in him despite his being a total stranger to her. Think "GROUNDHOG DAY" as it is the same variation.


Now, that divination spell indicates that it will be the most LIKELY figure, or A likely future. That divination would have to sort through all of the low order possibilities in order to "select" THE or A likely future no? Likewise, no matter WHAT possible future Bob could have chosen, Al's divination would have spotted that choice, and Al would have gotten the divination that outlined that specific path to that specific future.

In the end? If any possibility could be selected by the divination, then the spell is automatically useless simply because - there will always be a huge number of possibilities the future from the diviner's present you go into the future. That means that what ever future the spell picked to show the diviner - is statistically low in probability as to be the one that will really happen in the eyes of the diviner asking for the vision/answer/results.

So, my point that was made earlier is this:

Divinations don't generally show the movie reel of all events that lead to a given specific moment. They show the moment of interest to the peeker - but doen't usually show the steps that lead up to it. The only REAL problem with peeking into the future is that pesky thing called "Free will." If you're looking at the future as if it had already happened - then there is NO free will possible. Something that is FATED to happen, WILL happen. If divinatory peeks do not permit free will to change the future, then not a problem, and players should be warned that...

"Nothing good ever comes of peering into the future, it is best left alone."

Unfortunately? As I have come to see MANY times in my campaigns - if you put something in your game that reads "Touch this and die", invariably, someone HAS to touch it to see if their character dies. It NEVER fails. I guess it has to do with the idea "I'm smarter than that and can win" ;)

In any event. If someone has the opportunity to cast DIVINATION 9 times about something that will happen in the future - and someone else can see ALL of those 9 attempts at divination with a SINGLE divination attempt because they have the temporal high ground advantage as it were - then that one divination will see all 9 possibilities available to poor Bob, and then pick the one future that Bob will select because of his nine divinations. It isn't a retroactive thing at all, because Al's divination at T-100 will see all 9 of those divinations that occurred at T-50 and later. In fact - Al's divination at T-100 will see every possible future that is available to Bob regarding the one event, and select that one event as the most probable based on Bob's nature and capabilities.

Now, let's ask ourselves one MAJOR question as a GM and then decide on how to progess from there...

Are we, as GM's - willing to handle the extra skull sweat involved in Time Travel?

Perfect example of the law of unintended consequences of temporal paradoxes with the least of intentions - in my next post.