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 08-23-2020, 11:13 AM   #11
Irish Wolf
 
Irish Wolf's Avatar
 
Join Date: Jun 2006
Location: Earth, mostly
Default Re: TTRPG Time Travel?

I've only essayed time travel in one adventure for tabletop Champions. I swiped an idea from an old story (can't recall author or title), that had time set up in a "helix" of sorts; one could go from the current "bend" to a point in the future or past that is a specific number of "coils" from one's current point, but cannot travel truly freely through it. The bad guys of the adventure (made up of the stupidest, most insane villains in the books, led by Foxbat) were convinced that if they could alter history to prevent the signing of the Magna Carta in 1215, this would alter the world such that when they returned to their proper time they'd be kings, or at least high-ranking nobility. When Our Heroes find the facility where the inventors of the time machine were held and forced to create the device, said inventors gladly send them to stop the villains.

Boiling it down, it ended with the meeting at Runnymeade involving a combat of champions, the heroes defeating the villains, and the only alterations to history being some folk tales of supernatural beings forcing John to realize the need to surrender to the barons and a "new" museum exhibit featuring what turned out to be one hero's belt buckle (he'd given it to a young man, one Robin of Locksley, the night before Runnymeade, as a memento).

I posited that time was high-inertia, and that minor changes would wind up papered over. I also did enough research on the topic to find that without the Magna Carta being signed, and later expanded, the United States might not exist, and the Constitution almost certainly would be very different even if it did. (A great deal of the support the rebels managed to whip up was based on the fact that they had previously appealed to the King based on their rights under the Magna Carta as Englishmen; it's unclear whether George III himself authored the reply, or it was one of his underlings, but the government replied that as colonists, they had no Magna Carta rights. The rebels used that to point out to their fellow colonists that if they had no such rights, then they weren't considered English, in which case why were they still subjects of the Crown, paying their taxes but given no say?) So had the villains succeeded, the world would have been very different indeed; I never did finish making the alternate history of a world where the Charter was never written down, merely announced by each new King, but I suspect the British Empire would never have solidified the way it did in our world.
__________________
If you break the laws of Man, you go to prison.

If you break the laws of God, you go to Hell.

If you break the laws of Physics, you go to Sweden and receive a Nobel Prize.
Irish Wolf is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 08-23-2020, 04:28 PM   #12
lordabdul
 
lordabdul's Avatar
 
Join Date: Sep 2004
Location: Vancouver, BC, Canada
Default Re: TTRPG Time Travel?

Quote:
Originally Posted by C-Moon View Post
How do you deal with time-travel / time-bending adventures in your TTRPGs? Or how would you if it came up?

Going to different centuries isn't compulsory but it's a great option to have, I just wondered if anyone has any tips!
It depends... if it's about going to different, far-apart eras across history, with only one time-jump every adventure or so, then I think it can be handled narratively by the GM. Think of Chrono-Trigger or Back To The Future or other similar time-travel stories: you let the players do whatever in one era, figure out what kind of consequence that might have on the future, let them jump to the future, do a cliffhanger at the end of the session as you unveil how they ****ed up the timeline. Then you have until the next sessions to flesh out this new time and place.

If, however, it's a "free for all/high action" game where the players can time-travel every 5 minutes if they want, going anywhere in the timeline (10 centuries in the future to grab a plasma gun, or just 30 seconds in the past to knock the guard on the head), then I recommend you check out the Chronal Stability rules in TimeWatch, these are the best mechanic I've seen to handle this kind of crazyness in a TTRPG.
lordabdul is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 08-24-2020, 12:29 AM   #13
Celjabba
 
Join Date: Sep 2006
Location: Luxembourg
Default Re: TTRPG Time Travel?

I like playing with time travel !
A few examples in my games :

-visiting other eras, sometimes by design as "time-patrol", sometimes by accident : many adventures (often with the French game MEGA).
Either real history or alternates.
Not much to say, time travel is just the travel between adventures.

-Fantasy Groundhog day : the player visit a castle, interrupt a dark ritual and get looped back a couple hours in the past, as they cross the property border.
Repeat until they find the way to break the loop.
The key was to keep the story simple (you have to repeat everything many times, and remember key details) and fast paced : roll and shout !
Keep an eye on the watch. Once the looping is started, every 20 minutes of real time on the dot, loop, even (especially !) if in the middle of something.

-In my last fantasy campaign, the player got sent 30 years into the past by accident (along with those who would become the villains,but as 2 separate groups).
They were informed (divine message) that they couldn't change anything about what they personally had observed in the present. (like killing someone they had met)
Any attempt would fail and, if they were very very lucky, bounce the guilty character(s) to the present. They were more likely to be destroyed .
Small changes didn't matter (no butterfly effect).
They used their time to learn and observe, plant explosives under a key location, and one of them stayed in the past and travelled to the present the slow way in order to build a flying ship (zeppelin) and an arsenal in a recluse location.
It was the start of that campaign "endgame".
That also explained how the story started, and why the big bad knew about them but didn't do anything (she had been travelling with them and couldn't change what she had seen).

-travelling to ancient Egypt (or other very ancient times) (bodily, by mind transfer, in dreams, or in one case playing as the characters ancestors) is a staple of many Call of Cthulhu campaigns.

-a variant in a Cthulhu adventure based on "The Case of Charles Dexter Ward":
At one time, when the players learn of the past raid on Curwen's farm I give them new characters sheets and have them play it.

-I also had a campaign were the players and an enemy faction made war in the past, altering events to change the future.
At first the players were only reacting, travelling back to undo enemy interventions.
Further on, they took initiative and started to plot modification themselves.
That campaign was the most heavy in Time travel, but it was also very early in my GM career and I was not exactly consistent in temporal mechanics ...
Celjabba is offline   Reply With Quote
Reply

Tags
suzerain, swade, time travel, timetravel

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 07:52 PM.


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