Time Travel in RPGs

>>49267039

1) Have good players. Lolsorandums and morons will ruin even the best premise.

2) Use a multiverse model so that paradoxes are easily dealt with. i.e if you go back in time and kill your grandfather, you don't disappear because a new timeline branches off from that point, and you exist in it as an element from another one.

3) Alternatively do a pulp/soft sci-fi version that either has bullshit timeline physics (like S;G), or is a single timeline complete where you handwave away any chaos theory effects and trust your players not to derp away their own characters' existences.


The usual reasons for time travel in adventures are:

>prevent something bad happening by altering the past
>gain knowledge from the past to use in the future, without altering the past
>accidental time travel, resulting in a struggle to return to the present
>some kind of sentimental reason like meeting the father you never knew because he died before you were born (probably not compelling in a TTRPG though)

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>>49267039

This is something I've given consideration, but never put into practice.

First, I assume that you want a story actually "about" time travel. That's not the only time travel story you can do: you can also do stories about very distant eras, basically exotic locales or show pieces (Doctor Who does this a lot), in which case something has to be history-making to even risk paradox.

If you do actually want a story "about" the possibilities and paradoxes of time travel, you have to decide how "realistic" (logical) you want to be about it. More paradoxical forms of travel make room for more types of stories, but may strain player's belied, and are open to abuse by really clever players. In order from least to most paradoxical:
0. Impossible
1. Realistic
2. Roughly consistent
3. Mutable with stationary points
4. branching
5. bubbles of time
6. narrative time

1. Realistic: nothing moves in space time. Paradoxes are avoided: you will never succeed in killing your own grandfather, or even a young Hitler. You will not be able to pick yourself up by your bootstraps and "invent" something no one else ever thought of by waiting for your future self to send the plans back in a time machine (because then how did he get it?). You will never own an impossible object that is immune to entropy (the pocket watch your future self gave you... that he got in his past from his future self... who is him. Wait, who made the watch again?)

This doesn't mean that you can't have the flexibility to tell stories: maybe your players don't know and must discover the rules. Maybe they put enough time between points of interest that nothing they do in Camelot can realistically affect what happens in Chicago 2340 AD. Maybe they "change" history by proving that history as they know it is bunk. But it does mean if they go off the rails, there's something that goes wrong and prevents them from killing Hitler/saving Lincoln/etc. No matter how many times they try. That's a big burden for Fate (you).

>>49267944
Realistic time travel has a lot of opportunities for feedback loops that force you to either admit a paradox (bad for believability/consistent player expectations), or to force things to turn out the way they already turned out (bad for player agency).

2. Roughly consistent is sort of fudging. Things are pre-determined, but the players and exact dates may change. Stop Hilter in '35, and you have to deal with the same Nazi's under Kornfleish in '63 instead. Honestly, this is mostly a sign the author wanted a sequel, reason be damned. (Looking at you, Terminator)

3. Mutable stationary points carries this further: history is a collection of big moments that will always turn out roughly the same way. All the small stuff in between is up for negotiation. (Armstrong will always walk on the moon. Whether he eats cornflakes or fruit loops for breakfast that day is mutable.) Again, Doctor Who uses this.

>>49267944
I was always a fan of how Gargoyles did time travel, where you couldn't change time, but there were usually enough loopholes that you could do something with it.

>Archmage travels back in time, gets a bunch of overpowered epic artifacts to boost his power, then sends him back in time to do the same thing.
>Xanatos is a self-made millionaire who went back in time, sent himself something to get his fortune started, followed by a letter later telling him to go back in time.
>People think Goliath killed someone in the past, so he goes back to make sure he doesn't die. Events contrive to stop him from not getting killed in the past, so Goliath gets around it by bringing him to the present, making Goliath responsible for him disappearing suddenly.

>>49268047
Branching universes/alternate realities fix the problem with paradoxes: any time there's a paradox, what _really_ happened is that the timeline split in two, BOTH ways occurred in their separate universes, and the time travel was people from one "original" universe interacting with the other, "altered" universe's past. marvel comics uses this a lot. Again, it's best if you only split timelines for big events (Armstrong). not little ones (his cereal choice), or you'll have infinitely many but mostly tediously identical realities.

>>49267944
>realistic time travel

>>49267039
Do what FF XIII-2 did, don't give a shit about the nitty gritty specifics and have fun with it. Also what >>49267267 said. Multiverse solves a lot of headaches.

>>49268110
5. bubbles of time is something I wouldn't have thought of, because it throws logical straight out the window. Apparently the Flash falls into this camp. Once you change history, you really change history, like recording over an old VHS with new data. But if anything was away from that time at the moment, it becomes stranded and gets to stick around.

So you can clone yourself by getting your future self to come over for beer, then wipe his timeline (stranding him) by calling his slightly earlier self over for beer, and so on until you have arbitrarily many clones. Or you could Rob Fort Knox infinitely many times. Or whatever.

Finally, we have to accept the end-all/be-all of time travel models; narrative time. There is a privileged version of time that exists in the mind of the reader/viewer/player. Your characters timelines may get over-written, invalidated characters may get to stick around after their past never happens because we've already met them, and all sorts of weird shit that makes no sense in real life... but is easy to miss because it makes sense to a privileged observer who's not paying that much attention. You can do some fun stories with this, but if you're not careful the illusion collapses in a fit of arguments about what actually happened five sessions ago, and how after a little thought it makes no sense.

>>49267039
I had a Chronowizard who was the distant relative from the future of one of the players who started to fuck up his ancestors time lines and indirectly started fucking up himself. It was the overarching plot of the game and while the players thought they were hunting a BBEG who was trying to rule time, turned out it was just a srupid fucking punk in way over his head. Mind you, they still had to find a way to change back everything he had fucked up.

>>49268151
as I said, the trivial case (time travel isn't possible, so it doesn't happen) is an option.

But if you admit the possibility of travel by unknown physical means, there are perfectly logical (realistic) constraints that are placed on it.

You basically create a feedback loop of information (including matter and energy). Things always turn out exactly the same. That means certain other things are either impossible, or are bound by the topology of the problem.

For example, suppose you start an experiment where you attempt to create a small paradox: your future self will send you a photo back in time. When you receive it, you will take a photo of your photo, except in negative (white becomes black, black becomes white), and that negative image is what you will send back to your past self. This experiment can only turn out one way: the photo is perfectly grey, and the inverse photo is also perfectly grey, and so is identical. With a continuously-varying variable (the color of any pixel/spot), such a solution is always possible.

There's a more complicated experiment involving discrete steps (a knob), but the solution there is genuinely deep mathematics

It absolutely requires your whole table to be nothing but cool people.
Even one tiny shard of fuckwit in the mix and you invite a spiral of smartassery that cannot end well for your game.
No exceptions.

The whole table needs to:
-Be cool with minor inconsistencies.
-Be able to take decisions that might not benefit their own character or the group, for the sake of holding together the plot.
-NOT BE SMARTASSES (very important).

If everyone's on board then those things are best discussed as a group to make sure everything's in order from start to finish and then you play it out according to what was agreed.
So yes that also requires a non-smartass GM.

One time travel mechanic that I liked was in a French indie game called L'Horlogerie des Mondes, where you can pull an improbable object or hint from somewhere, which means you're creating an obligation for yourself or someone else to come back in time and plant what you're pulling out later in the scenario. If you fail to make it happen, you're stuck in a paradox and cannot go back to home base, your character has a good chance to be lost.
It works for light-hearted fairy tale fantasy where super powers can fuck things up royally and the purpose of the game is to fix things. You have great power, including time fuckery, but you should try to make things LESS chaotic, and you have to clean up after yourself. That's a smart way to get across the idea of time travel without tempting players into the usual nonsense.

most time travel stories involve some component of figuring out "the rules". Do I need to make sure not to touch anything (unless I was supposed to touch it?), or can I rely on the universe preventing paradox? Can I change history?

In games as in stories, you want to make it clear that this component exists. "There are rules, but your character has to figure them out". Why? Because everyone is going to bring a different mental model of how it _should_ work. And if you don't have some sort of warning up front, someone is going to grind the game to a halt arguing over what does ot does not make logical sense.

>>49267039
Only instance of time travel my games have had was one where I played a Chronomancer.

He was part of some temporal cult/group that basically tasked themselves to recording all of history. They had records of one area that were extremely vague, so he went back to see what happened and set the record straight as it were.

Not that it stopped him from getting into a few temporal shenanigans himself. We managed to avoid a long wait in the ropes of bureaucracy because I apparently made an appointment to see the NPC about 50 years ago(average wait time for that place).
Defeated Baal, lord of the First Layer of Hell and booted him out of the timestream. This came back to bite us when he came back as the cyborg devil Meta-Baal, armed with futuristic weapons like shoulder-mounted rocket launchers(we were a fairly average, if high-fantasy, medieval setting, so none of the other PCs knew what the fuck was going on) and a bit of his own time magic.
And a bit of helping out one of the founders of my history time group thing.

Luckily, since the exact events were vague, nothing I did really affected the timestream much, to my knowledge...besides the Meta-Baal thing I guess.

>>49267039
Steins;Gate is an overrated piece of shit.

I like the idea that everything that happened when traveling to the past has already happened, so nothing can be changed (infinitely closed time loops?). Hard to pull off, but makes for amazing stories.

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Am I the only person on 4chan who unironically thinks that The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiyah (books, not anime) is actually a fantastic example of the use of time travel shenanigans in storytelling?

Don't do it.

The more you time travel the more stupid you realize time travel is as a concept and the more bullshit you have to come up with to make it work.

>>49274264
Nah, it's pretty good.

>>49267039
By playing TIME WIZARDS!