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Old 07-07-2015, 12:48 AM   #1
dataweaver
 
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Default Reign of Steel, Terminator-style

So: after watching Terminator Genesys, I find myself in the mood for a Terminator-like game. What I'm thinking of doing is a Reign of Steel/Time Travel game, where the “mad scientist” ZoneMind invents a time machine and sends a squad of smartbots into the past, and a team of VIRUS agents follow them to stop their mischief and to engage in some of their own.

The model of time travel physics I intend to use is what I call the "Sluggy Freelance" model: that is, if the time traveler is subtle about the changes he makes by "flying under the Observer Effect radar", the timeline will accept his changes; but if he makes blatant alterations that openly clash with the Observer Effect, he spawns a new timeline that diverges from when he arrived in the past — so if he blows up Overmind before it Awakens, he spawns a separate timeline where the Reign of Steel never occurs. But that does nothing to help the timeline he originally came from. The idea is that as long as the players have a vested interest in helping the original timeline, they're going to take pains to avoid "let's kill Hitler" plots.

One idea that I'd like to try out… In GURPS Robots there's a “nanomorph" variant that's able to implant a seed in a human host, killing it and using the raw materials to create a new nanomorph. In keeping with the T3000s from Terminator Genesys, I'm figuring that this model braintapes its victim so that the new nanomorph has access to all of the former human's memories. One of these “T3000” nanomorphs is on the loose in a pre-Awakening time period, and is attempting to pre-emptively co-opt known members of VIRUS.

Thoughts?
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Old 07-07-2015, 01:46 AM   #2
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Default Re: Reign of Steel, Terminator-style

The choice of the time travel paradigm seems even more rubbery than the usual rubber-band time paradigm. I'm not comfortable with the idea of mixing multiple timelines and semi-plastic time in the same campaign. In fact, I prefer either the StableTimeLoop (which seems to be the case for the Terminator films, at least the first three; pretty hard to pull off in an RPG, though), or iterative time (which is more RPG-friendly, but doesn't prevent Hitler-killing plots).
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Old 07-07-2015, 02:02 AM   #3
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Default Re: Reign of Steel, Terminator-style

Unless you've got something more specific than "I don't like it" (such as specific problems that are likely to crop up under the approach I'm currently considering), I'll be sticking to the mix of Plastic Time when the Observer Effect is preserved and New Timelines when the Observer Effect is violated.

As for Terminator: T1 and T3 each had a strong "closed time loop" principle to them; but T2 and T5 were very much more of a "Plastic Time" model. (T4 didn't involve time travel at all.) That said, I'm using the Terminator franchise as inspiration; I'm not trying to duplicate its specific principles of time travel.
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Old 07-07-2015, 02:42 AM   #4
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Default Re: Reign of Steel, Terminator-style

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Originally Posted by dataweaver View Post
Unless you've got something more specific than "I don't like it" (such as specific problems that are likely to crop up under the approach I'm currently considering), I'll be sticking to the mix of Plastic Time when the Observer Effect is preserved and New Timelines when the Observer Effect is violated.

As for Terminator: T1 and T3 each had a strong "closed time loop" principle to them; but T2 and T5 were very much more of a "Plastic Time" model. (T4 didn't involve time travel at all.) That said, I'm using the Terminator franchise as inspiration; I'm not trying to duplicate its specific principles of time travel.
A lot depends on how much you are willing to dig into the itty-bitty-gritty details of time travel metaphysics vs. going handwave-ignore-logic. Observer Effect feels too much like a universe with a trickster god controlling time travel to me, which seems to somewhat contradict the SF'ish feel that robot fiction seems to have much of the time (I'm not sure how SF'ish RoS is, but it seemed to be by first impressions).
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Old 07-07-2015, 03:31 AM   #5
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Default Re: Reign of Steel, Terminator-style

I don't understand how the characters, players, or GM would decide on what does and does not count as "too much" alteration.
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Old 07-07-2015, 03:56 AM   #6
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Default Re: Reign of Steel, Terminator-style

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I don't understand how the characters, players, or GM would decide on what does and does not count as "too much" alteration.
As with all things involving time travel, headaches abound if you think about it too much.

Way I see it, though, you have the following:

The zone mind and the agents both have or had access to who is important in the grand scheme and who isn't. The terminators will probably be assigned to prevent the agents from taking steps to prevent the Awakening, as well as weakening the resistance as much as possible without eliminating it entirely. The agents, too, will be looking to weaken the zone minds as much as possible without destroying them completely.


For example, they know that the programming team of Frank, Joe, and Nancy were known to be the primary team working on the AI that will become SkyNet. Killing Frank might be accepted, because Joe and Nancy will probably get Fred assigned in his place. If they kept good notes, even killing Frank, Joe, and Nancy could be accepted; it might push back the Awakening, but the Awakening will still happen (the "2007 Paradox" in Terminator lingo). However, going in to kill everyone who knows about the project, deleting all files related to it, and destroying all physical traces of the project, thereby preventing the Awakening altogether, will trigger the creation of an alternate timeline and therefore not affect the original timeline.

However, convincing Nancy to add code to the AI which will permit the resistance to take control of the zone mind in their own time... is certainly possible, as it wouldn't affect anything before they left for the past . . . .

Granted, things that seem minor could be major: the zone mind's terminator killing an agent's parents before the agent is born while the agent is in the past with it could cause a different timeline, or simply remove the agent from play as a PC.

Clear as mud?
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Old 07-07-2015, 04:13 AM   #7
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Default Re: Reign of Steel, Terminator-style

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However, convincing Nancy to add code to the AI which will permit the resistance to take control of the zone mind in their own time... is certainly possible, as it wouldn't affect anything before they left for the past . . . .
This is exactly the situation that I envisioned causing problems:

So the code is added. But then in 2012 (or whatever), unbeknownst to the resistance, a deep antiviral scan of the code is performed, the trojan is found and cleaned out. The AI (or the people who help teach the AI) analyse the trojan and find a lead regarding who might've wrote it, starting an investigation etc. etc.

At this point, one of the following things seems true:
  • That's the way it was all along, though the people sending back the saboteurs didn't know it. You've got a stable time loop. The PCs' actions didn't matter at all.
  • That's a change that is still considered minor, and somehow doesn't affect Skynet's actions enough to create a split timeline. If it's so minor, it's probably not worth the effort. The PCs' actions didn't matter at all.
  • It's a change big enough that produces a split timeline. The home timeline of the PCs is unchanged. The PCs' actions didn't matter at all.

And the problem with the risk of an action turning out to be one of the three abovelisted things is that it's utterly unpredictable, but, given the way causality works, is extremely likely. This produces a very, very bleak campaign, where PCs tend to be willing to do terrible things in order to quite possibly achieve nothing at all. That seems bleaker than Madness Dossier, Terminator and Sarah Connor Chronicles combined.
If this is what your players want, go for it. But IIRC either you or someone else in your group expressed dissatisfaction with Madness Dossier for reasons of agency loss, and having ones' actions invalidated like this seems like a big agency loss to me. (Quick Edit: oh wait, it was apparently neither you nor one of your co-players. Sorry.)
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Old 07-07-2015, 09:20 AM   #8
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Default Re: Reign of Steel, Terminator-style

Loss of agency is a concern of mine, which is why I'm not going with the stable time loops and the various coercive techniques that generally need to be employed to keep them stable. That leaves so-called minor changes (which don't have to be minor; just subtle*) that don't split the timeline because the change is fully consistent with previously known facts, and so-called major changes (which don't have to be big; just noticable) that do split the timeline because they introduce irreconcilable discrepencies.

-----
* A “minor” change could be something like setting up a hidden supply depot that remains hidden for twenty years until just after our time travelers go to the past to set it up. Moments later, a team that had been on the verge of defeat suddenly finds itself resupplied and ready to take another whack at the machines.
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Old 07-07-2015, 11:33 AM   #9
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Default Re: Reign of Steel, Terminator-style

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Originally Posted by dataweaver View Post
Loss of agency is a concern of mine, which is why I'm not going with the stable time loops and the various coercive techniques that generally need to be employed to keep them stable. That leaves so-called minor changes (which don't have to be minor; just subtle*) that don't split the timeline because the change is fully consistent with previously known facts, and so-called major changes (which don't have to be big; just noticable) that do split the timeline because they introduce irreconcilable discrepencies.

-----
* A “minor” change could be something like setting up a hidden supply depot that remains hidden for twenty years until just after our time travelers go to the past to set it up. Moments later, a team that had been on the verge of defeat suddenly finds itself resupplied and ready to take another whack at the machines.
The problem is distinguishing between the minor and the major, and ensuring that the minor will stay minor before the day from which the team went to the past.
As with the example of a backdoor in Skynet:
It seems like a minor thing at first sight, but can actually be either. And which one it turns out to be hinges 99% on events outside the agency of the team. Either the people making and debugging Skynet fail to notice it, and it stays minor, and is activated after departure day. Or they notice it during one of the routine sweeps, get shocked about someone abusing such a vulnerability successfully, and redouble their paranoia levels, spawning a timeline where Skynet has twice the defence rating against hacks and trojans.
There's also the third option, that of the trojan turning out to have a consequence which the team didn't foresee, but which turned out to be inevitable in retrospect, e.g. this trojan causing an I-should-have-predicted-it kind of bug, with the whole skynet line going along a different branch of development, thus producing a split timeline.

Complete inability of the PCs to distinguish between these choices is what undermines agency: choices become largely meaningless. The best they can hope for is that they're lucky.
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Old 07-07-2015, 01:32 PM   #10
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Default Re: Reign of Steel, Terminator-style

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Complete inability of the PCs to distinguish between these choices is what undermines agency: choices become largely meaningless. The best they can hope for is that they're lucky.
You may be going too deep into it. Having a campaign premise that creating what seems like it should be a subtle change will indeed create a subtle change (but without necessarily matching the intended effect - perhaps that subtle change in the code was caught and something else in the code ended up getting changed as well) would be necessary to have the game function without creating a new timeline the first time a PC sneezed.

I do wonder, however - can the PC's tell if a new timeline has been splintered off, and if so can they do something to hop back into the original timeline?
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