Steve Jackson Games - Site Navigation
Home General Info Follow Us Search Illuminator Store Forums What's New Other Games Ogre GURPS Munchkin Our Games: Home

Go Back   Steve Jackson Games Forums > Roleplaying > Roleplaying in General

Reply
 
Thread Tools Display Modes
Old 01-12-2013, 08:44 AM   #1
Koshka
 
Join Date: Jul 2007
Location: Omaha NE
Default Time travel gaming -- Time Cops or Freelance?

My Sunday group rotates the GM seat, and I'm thinking of putting together a time travel adventure for them. I'm trying to decide between having everyone as agents of a time patrol organization and having them be "freelance" time travelers with their own machine.

I have plenty of time to plan this out, I don't want to run it until after a convention I'm going to in May. I'd appreciate some help brainstorming this, though.

Advantages of time patrol: There's no problem with having everyone run characters from different time periods, because the patrol already took care of how they all met. This group can go running off the wrong way when they just have three dimensions to worry about, having bosses tell them when they're supposed to be will reduce headaches.

Disadvantages of time patrol: Based on some previous games, the players will expect more of a "safety net" in the form of backup and loads of high-tech gear than I'd like to give them.

Advantages of freelance: It's just the PCs, I don't have to worry about supply requisitions or calls for help -- if they don't have it, they don't have it.

Disadvantages of freelance: If everyone is from the same project that created the time machine, we're probably looking at vanilla PCs -- there won't be a lot of variety. If everyone is from different times, we could blow a month of play time just getting all the PCs in the same time/space.
Koshka is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 01-12-2013, 09:00 AM   #2
malloyd
 
Join Date: Jun 2006
Default Re: Time travel gaming -- Time Cops or Freelance?

Quote:
Originally Posted by Koshka View Post
Disadvantages of time patrol: Based on some previous games, the players will expect more of a "safety net" in the form of backup and loads of high-tech gear than I'd like to give them.
This can be overcome by having a reason the Time Patrol doesn't *have* those resources, and making it obvious the whole thing operates on a shoestring. Whatever excuse you'd be using for the freelance game to prevent the PCs from becoming insanely rich from time travel should also work to keep the Patrol from doing so. High tech is best restricted by having nothing ever come from the "future" of when the time machine is invented for some reason - an Absolute Now works, though I admire all time machines are inevitably in a loop which *has* almost no future, since the time travellers are destined to erase themselves from history within a few years of discovering the device...
__________________
--
MA Lloyd
malloyd is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 01-12-2013, 09:03 AM   #3
Murrkon5
 
Murrkon5's Avatar
 
Join Date: Feb 2006
Location: Saskatoon, Saskatchewan
Default Re: Time travel gaming -- Time Cops or Freelance?

"Accidental travellers" isn't an option for you?

I'm suddenly having a whole scenario ripped off from "Flash Gordon".

Instead of mysterious natural disasters, the players are told of accumulating head-scratching news items of a canoe full of antique Hawaiian warriors paddling into Honolulu. Wyoming cattle ranchers claiming to have seen a woolly mammoth. And other highly suggestive anachronisms.

The PCs are designed to be fit and capable. Some may be military-based, but as long as they're ready for action, like Flash, that's all that's required.

The PCs probably should know each other ahead of game start, if only casually. Possibly they are all currently working at the same wilderness mine/oilfield in (somewhere remote). They, and a bunch of other coworkers are being flown back to the site after two weeks R&R.

A pteranodon gets into a fight with the plane. It goes down hard in the bush, but does not crash. The least damaged people are, by chance, the PCs. Lights and a building were seen as the plane went down. The PCs are volunteered to hike to this mystery building for help.

And meet Dr. Zarkov, crazy mad scientist who is out here in the wilderness for privacy. He reckons the anachronisms have a source and is going to go fix things. And Our Heroes get sucked along thru time with him.

I may have to do this myself!
__________________
============
"HEY, today you're thinking with your whole head!"
-- Spike (of "Sugar & Spike")
============
for a rootin' tootin' good read: Home on the Strange: A Brewster and Brewster Adventure

Last edited by Murrkon5; 01-12-2013 at 09:07 AM.
Murrkon5 is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 01-12-2013, 09:52 AM   #4
Hans Rancke-Madsen
 
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: Copenhagen, Denmark
Default Re: Time travel gaming -- Time Cops or Freelance?

I ran a time patrol campaign for about a decade. The standard excuse I had for limited logistical support was that the more anachronistic material you used, the likelier a 'timequake' was. I had a way to calculate the changes the time agents made to the timestream and to sum them up into a percentage chance that the whole event had to be revised (by another team). After a mission I'd calculate the chance, announce it to the players, and roll percentage dice. If the chance came out, the PCs got a black mark and no promotion bennies (And an NPC team would fix the problem off-stage).

I varied this setup in various ways. Occasionally someone else had already introduced a 125% chance of a timequake and the agents were sent to reduce that chance by eliminating the disturbance. One time the agents were allowed to revise their own mess.


Hans
Hans Rancke-Madsen is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 01-13-2013, 01:42 AM   #5
Ed the Coastie
 
Ed the Coastie's Avatar
 
Join Date: Oct 2004
Location: Sierra Vista, Arizona
Default Re: Time travel gaming -- Time Cops or Freelance?

Although I have used both, I tend to favor the "Time Corps" format. However, my players know that they are not exactly receiving "freebie" tech...with one or two exceptions, all equipment that they take on an assignment has to be native to that time. If they want anything "high tech", they must construct it themselves. (A couple of my players have taken to calling it the "Stone Knives & Bearskins" rule.)
__________________
"It's never to early to start beefing up your obituary." -- The Most Interesting Man in the World
Ed the Coastie is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 01-13-2013, 09:53 AM   #6
Anaraxes
 
Join Date: Sep 2007
Default Re: Time travel gaming -- Time Cops or Freelance?

Is it a one-shot or an ongoing campaign? What sort of story do you want to tell? Something about time travel itself, or dropping in on interesting times in the past, or a "fish out of water"?
Anaraxes is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 01-13-2013, 10:33 AM   #7
johndallman
Night Watchman
 
Join Date: Oct 2010
Location: Cambridge, UK
Default Re: Time travel gaming -- Time Cops or Freelance?

An important advantage of a mission-based time-travel campaign is that you know when they're going, and can prepare in advance. If the PCs have freedom to wander the timestream, it gets hard for the places they go to have any depth of detail.
johndallman is online now   Reply With Quote
Old 01-13-2013, 12:25 PM   #8
panton41
 
panton41's Avatar
 
Join Date: Jul 2005
Location: Jeffersonville, Ind.
Default Re: Time travel gaming -- Time Cops or Freelance?

I like Connie Willis' approach to time travel stories. Her time travelers tend to be historians who are studying the era they travel to. The adventure in the story either comes from things like arriving in London during the Blitz or the Oxford region in December 1348, having a plague hit both in the past and future AND having one of the casualties in the future be the time machine operator who's last words (before becoming too sick to be useful) was something to the effect of "uh, oh" (the target year for study was 1320 and they "missed").
__________________
The user formerly known as ciaran_skye.

__________________

Quirks: Doesn't proofread forum posts before clicking "Submit". [-1]

Quote:
"My mace speaks Goblin." Antoni Ten Monros
panton41 is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 01-13-2013, 01:37 PM   #9
David Johnston2
 
Join Date: Dec 2007
Default Re: Time travel gaming -- Time Cops or Freelance?

Quote:
Originally Posted by johndallman View Post
An important advantage of a mission-based time-travel campaign is that you know when they're going, and can prepare in advance. If the PCs have freedom to wander the timestream, it gets hard for the places they go to have any depth of detail.
One approach is the Feng Shui one, where there are specific holes in time leading to specific times and places. (with both sides of the holes moving forward in time at the same rate to keep it simple)
David Johnston2 is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 01-13-2013, 02:59 PM   #10
martin_rook
 
Join Date: Mar 2006
Default Re: Time travel gaming -- Time Cops or Freelance?

How about use both? There is (or was) a Time Patrol, but some catastrophe resulted in a time-rip that left the PCs with a working time machine but no way to get in touch with HQ -- maybe they can't return to their own era, or maybe when they do the Time Patrol no longer exists! PCs can also be characters from different eras who got sucked along in the time machine's "wake" and are now displaced.

The down side is that the adventures will likely be more about what happened and how to fix it, since something has clearly gone wrong -- which you may not want.
martin_rook is offline   Reply With Quote
Reply

Thread Tools
Display Modes

Posting Rules
You may not post new threads
You may not post replies
You may not post attachments
You may not edit your posts

BB code is On
Fnords are Off
[IMG] code is Off
HTML code is Off

Forum Jump


All times are GMT -6. The time now is 05:43 AM.


Powered by vBulletin® Version 3.8.9
Copyright ©2000 - 2024, vBulletin Solutions, Inc.