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Ya Ta Hey!
2008-01-27, 05:46 PM
Here's some flava-fluff to set the mood (I forgot my incense candles).


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So, I like games where exploration and sense of discovery are a large part of the reward. An important part of creating that effect is to have a wide diversity of possible environments, and make sure that they're well justified within the canon of that homebrew world. You can't just have forest abruptly give way to desert and then a glacier thrown in for kicks.

The problem is (and this may just be a reflection on me), I can't think of a way to implement that in a single setting that hasn't been done better elsewhere. To make a confession, I once wrote a story where my big Perspective Shattering Historical Revelation™ was that a giant robotic mouth cataclysmically chews the globe every ten-thousand years for various reasons. (Yes, various; it had multiple justifications for this.)

Instead of trying to dream up ways to make a well-concieved but completely unfamiliar world, I've decided to just make the mode of travel different: time travel.

I write a lot, but I'm fairly new to tabletop gaming and wouldn't be GM-ing this without a lot of practice. Obviously, most of the game would center around travelling to different eras in history and completing a chosen assignment under a specific set of criteria. Mistakes would have to be corrected in a sort of Back to the Future or Bill and Ted manner.

For now, what I need advice on is...


How to synthesize D&D 3.5, d20 modern, and d20 future since all three settings will apply. For now, I'll be sticking with open source material so that I don't have to bankrupt myself considering Complete-this and Unearthed-that.

How exactly the rules of causality should work. I'd like the consequences of player actions to be far-reaching but not too easy to take advantage of (I don't want someone planting messianic legends about themselves, and then jetting forward a millenium to have an entire civlization at their command unless they can really play their cards)

Most importantly...how to make it fun to play. While I don't want the time machines to be the answer to every problem, I do want them to provide ways for the player to get creative and think outside the box. I mean, The easiest way to reign in the potential for munchkinny abuse is to put strict limits on how the time machinery operates, but if they can only change scenery when I say so, then it's basically a raildroad adventure with a very capricious GM.

I'm thinking of treating the various eras like "towns" and the overall world timeline as the "world", so that travelling between them wouldn't be done lightly.


Here would be an example of what I think is ideal game structure:


"Pierre?! Now would be really a good time!" Jonas' voice echoes from inside the rumbling blast furnace. A hideous alien snarl interrupts him, followed by a frenzied round of gunshots.

"Yes, I'm sure it is! Keep your stance on, and all that!" Pierre, outside, snaps, fumbling around with the energy cell.

"Its, uh 'pants'." Archie politely adds.

Pierre sneers over his shoulder at the little kobold. "'Keep your pants on?' Why would anyone--?"

There's another, much angrier snarl, followed by the click of an empty pistol. ("Pieeeeeeeerre!!!")

Finally, the uranium battery clicks into place. The temporal engine immediately blinks to life and boots up, the screen Apple logo reflecting in Pierre's black eyelenses as he smiles.

"Aaaand, s'pose I'll go with nanoseconds." He mutters after a flurry of typing, hitting 'enter'. With a brilliant red flash, all activity slows to a halt around him; the flames from an earlier phase of their elaborate trap become stationary columns of superheated air, Archie stands uselessly frozen in place (not that that's abnormal), and the geiger counter is frozen mid click.

The only sound is his watch, which beeps as it measure the heat buildup in the temporal engine's core. With a sigh, Pierre slings the satchel of TNT over his shoulder and heads for the furnace door...

And no, that wasn't supposed to make specific sense. The point is, it would be human ingenuity and using the time machines other funtions that would accomplish stuff. I hope.

So, am I on to something?

puppyavenger
2008-01-27, 05:55 PM
Use D20 modern, it has a suppliment called D20 past, that probably has the stuff you need for medivel.

Istari
2008-01-27, 07:05 PM
I think this would be a good idea and if youre players wouldnt abuse this too much you could have it be set on earth with the actual historical events.

Ya Ta Hey!
2008-01-28, 05:47 PM
I was considering that, except that I wouldn't want to bring up too many historical arguments about woulda-coulda-shoulda. Besides, a lot of our history was kinda inevitable given the context it happened in and there's very little that outside intervention could achieve that wasn't tried at the time.

Besides, I'm trying to go for a 'Men in Black' flavor and keep things from getting too heavy. There will be plenty of dramatic points and human interest type stories if that's what people like, but I don't want it to turn into Tom Clancy.

TheLogman
2008-01-28, 05:56 PM
If you Absolutely must use d20, I would go with Modern/Past, but if you can use another system, Rifts has the right kinda style, multiple things, all under one system, from Modern to Past to the Supernatural.

Jalor
2008-01-28, 06:16 PM
Awesome. I've always wanted to play something like this.

I definitely recommend using D20 modern. It has supplements for everything you could think of.

Ya Ta Hey!
2008-01-31, 10:32 PM
Okay, looks like I've figured out the time travel mechanic:

Jumping through time will involve a skill check that's a syngergy of "Knowledge: History" and "Computers", with the Knowledge: History providing a +1 bonus for every 3 ranks. You can't take 10 or 20 on this check unless you get the Time Travel and Greater Time Travel feats, respectively.

The DC is determined by the level of accuracy required by your time jump, with down to the year being a DC 15. If you only specify what year, you get a circumstance bonus of +2 for simplicity. Otherwise, the DC goes up in increments of five for each level of accuracy you want, with up-to-the-second being DC 45.

Specifying a location adds 5 to the DC for each level of resolution you want finer than 20 km, with hitting the target by meters being 20.

Failing the DC by more than 5 gives a 1 year inaccuracy for each integer you missed, up to 10. Missing it by 10 to 20 is 3x that number. Missing the roll by 16 or higher does 1d2 nonlethal damage for every five that the roll is off Rolling a natural 1 means a serious foul up that drains the energy cells, and get each player stuck in a loop that instantly adds 1d4 years to their age. They go nowhere.

The basic time machine has 20 units of energy, 5 of which can only be used for time jumps. Every time jump uses 18 units of energy. The time machine is very adaptable and can derive energy from almost any power source of sufficient voltage. Portable uranium batteries are the chief source of energy, and restore 10 energy units per use. The uranium batteries are a one-use only deal and can't be recharged unless you know how to undecay fissile matter. Which you don't.

The other 15 energy units can be used for the more useful day-to-day functions:

Pausing; you relativistically accelerate your own passage of time so that every second you experience is roughly one nano-second of realtime, allowing you to accomplish quite a bit in the blink of an eye. However, every movement you make is delivering a pretty significant amount of kinectic energy to your surroundings in an extremely short time period (which translates to a very high force), so this function can do a lot of harm if misused. Plus, its not very stealthy to have the combined energy of your breathing create a ninety-decible bang when you come out of it. Even interacting with the air molecules causes some heating, so fire damage could apply if you spend too long.

20 energy units per second of effect.

Accelerating; The opposite of pausing puts user or target in a stasis, of extended time. Useful for finding a solution to time related problems affecting the target. 10 units per realtime hour. Don't touch the target.

Others to be determined.

Realms of Chaos
2008-02-02, 05:34 PM
A couple of rules that I'd implement to stop abuse.

1. If you want to travel into a location's past, you must be in that location. You are travelling through time, not through space. You do, however, emerge in the exact same space (although if something was occupying your square back then, you may be painfully shunted out of the way).
2. You arrive within 1d4+1 minutes either in the future or past of the desired time (50% chance of each). This allows travel into a general period but not into a specific round (to hand your friend your shield on the round before they are attacked, for example).
3. You may not travel to any point in time during which you have been in existance. Therefore, you couldn't travel back in time to hand yourself a letter but you could travel back before you were born, write graffiti on a billboard, and hope that you read it. As another example, if you travelled back in time and got into a battle, you can't travel into that same time period again later to help with that battle. However, you can travel back before you arrived in the past and strategically place a needed weapon that you will be sure to see next time.
4. If one existance in time overlaps another (for instance, travelling back before your birth and staying until you are born), you are immediately transported back to your present (no saving throw), although you do see what happens within the next couple of seconds (so you may see a younger you travel back through time or see your own birth).
5. If you travel from the past towards your present, all who witness your disappearance must make a DC 25 will save in order to comprehend what they have just seen, suppressing the memory on a failure.
6. Once you have travelled through time, you may not do so for 1d4-1 minutes (minimum 1 minute). This prevents you from travelling back in time, switching a real statue with a fake, and travelling back on the next rounds.
7. Performing time travel while in combat requires a DC 25 concentration check. performing time travel while threatened by a foe provokes an attack of opportunity and requires a DC 30 concentration check. If the concentration check succeeds, however, the attack of opportunity has a 50% miss chance.
8. Whenever you travel through time, you must make a Fortitude Save (DC 10 + 1 per successful save) or become sickened for 1 hour. Whenever you fail such a saving throw, the save DC resets.

Just a few things to go with.
(huh, maybe I'll make a time-travelling class)

BarroomBard
2008-02-02, 07:55 PM
I think you should add more energy to the machine, or at least lower the costs. As it is, you only have 15 units with which to pause time, which consumes 20 units every second. Which is completely useless. In addition, the time machine is the focus of the campaign, so it shouldn't completely deplete after each jump.

The penalties for failure of a time travel check seem rather... harsh. Its kinda like the rules for hyperspace in the Revised edition of the Star Wars RPG- one bad roll could ruin any mission that requires timeliness.

My friends and I have discussed a similar concept for a campaign. We decided to deal with the problems of causality by structuring the universe as a series of slightly delayed timelines. A time machine doesn't move you back and forth through time in our reality, but moves you to other realities, where they are on a different point in history. This way, you could go back to WWII and nuke Germany, but when you returned the world wouldn't be run by Italians or anything weird like that. And the conceit of the campaign would be that none of the time travelers realize this is the fact at first.

Ya Ta Hey!
2008-02-02, 11:29 PM
Realms, I like some of those ideas. Thanks.

(Thanks for posting, you two. I though this thread was dead)

Bard, I hate to say it, but I don't understand that take on alternate universes :(. If it allows changes made to the timeline for the greater good cold hard cash, then I'd love to hear more.

And the penalties are pretty stiff, but that's only for untrained or hasty usage of the time machine. Once you get the first feat and ranks in computers, you'll have no trouble making down to the year jumps with take 10, which is the baseline level of accuracy for missions. Truth is, while time travel is a feature of the game and it is under the players control, its an asset that needs to be carefully controlled or else it'll make the entire game about finding loopholes in the wording of the mission, jetting back to an opportune time, and winning with the minimum effort possible. While I'm all about letting the time machinery allow you to get creative, I don't want it to be that powerful.


Oh! I forgot to mention that the hardware description only applies to the training-wheels model of time machinery. You eventurally get more energy storage space, but Pausing has to have ornerous power requirements; I don't want 1st level characters kicking down walls left and right :smalleek:

Demented
2008-02-04, 05:58 AM
I think 20 units/second is a perfectly acceptable drain for the time pausing.

After all, if time passes at the rate of 1 nanosecond per second for you, then you've 0.75 seconds real time to play with, which amounts to 750 MILLION seconds in relative "your" time, or about 1.6 years per unit of energy. :smalltongue:

Then again, maybe you didn't mean it that way...

Ya Ta Hey!
2008-02-04, 10:45 PM
Silly goose. Its stuff like that that makes cobbling these rules such a nightmare.

:smallsigh: (that emote really does not convey sighing to me, but...okay.)

Arbitrarity
2008-02-05, 10:07 AM
Bard's conception is of the alternate timeline "trap". It's wholy thematic, having little actual game effect, but it has some interesting fluff.

Ok. You exist in one universe. You travel back in time. At this point, your universe splits in two: One continues unchanged, as if you hadn't gone back in time, and the other is modified by whatever changes you make, as if those changes had always been there. When you travel forward in time, you arrive in the second universe, where things are different.

This prevents "origin" paradoxes, such as killing your grandfather. You originated in a universe where your grandfather existed.

It also can provide non-paradoxial reasons for travelling back in time. Normally, if you have a reason, you go back and do whatever. But now your reason is invalid, so the next "iteration" of yourself won't go back in time, and whatever it is will become a reason again, etc, like the grandfather.

How much does extra power cost? Exponential scaling, like magic items, or linear?

The time "stop" function has issues. Primarily, you can't even get a single round of actions off during the frozen time, even with a great deal of power. This is dependant on how much extra power costs, of course.

jagadaishio
2008-02-05, 11:24 AM
Just curious, but would this campaign setting use the D&D class system or the d20 class system? Also, based on the excerpt that you showed, the setting would have the full gamut of D&D races. If that's the case, I have to ask whether the time travel device is a magical device or a technological one.

Arbitrarity also raises a good point. How do you take into account the grandfather clause and the idea of pre-corrected causality if not using a timeline-splitting method of time travel?

Human Paragon 3
2008-02-05, 11:52 AM
One easy way to get around causality is just to say you were "out of the loop." Let's say you go back in time and kill your own grandfather, preventing your birth. In the present, things would reform as such, and "you" up to the second before you left, would cease to exist. However, the real you wasn't there to go through the reforming, the real you was in the past, so the real you continues to exist as sort of a hanging chad, if you will. A free radical in the time stream. Also, the documented evidence that you completed your job would be logged into your time machine's computer, so when the free radical you gets back to the present, you can still get paid for your work!

To simplify things, the time travel company may even require that all of its employees be such "free radicals" with no stake in the time line. You'd have no mother, not father, and no past. According to all records, you were never born. You'd simply exist, and your only function is to serve the company.

Ya Ta Hey!
2008-02-05, 09:41 PM
How much does extra power cost? Exponential scaling, like magic items, or linear?

The time "stop" function has issues. Primarily, you can't even get a single round of actions off during the frozen time, even with a great deal of power. This is dependant on how much extra power costs, of course.

Damn, that's a good point. Maybe instead of a straight up 'time' for how long you can be in pausing, I'll just have it be move and free actions. What I don't want is someone duct taping C-4 to faces with impunity.

I'm figuring the energy expansions (15 to 25 units of usable energy, say) will be kinda like spells per day and come from levelling up.


Just curious, but would this campaign setting use the D&D class system or the d20 class system? Also, based on the excerpt that you showed, the setting would have the full gamut of D&D races. If that's the case, I have to ask whether the time travel device is a magical device or a technological one.


Could be either, I guess. I'm mainly interested in building the game system for now and ironing out the canon later, but...

What I was thinking was that the era you originated from would determine your character creation rules. Most of them would roughly parallel our own history up to 5000 BC, and then have the early Paleolithic be a lost D&D civilization that got erased under the last ice age. That would be the time where you could be a non human, but the trade off is limited magic and class access.

Ancient times would have the more extensive magic and any non-caster class. The d20 modern/past/future system threshhold would be around 1650's.

But that completely depends on how you as a GM would want to run a game, if you thought it was cool enough.



One easy way to get around causality is just to say you were "out of the loop." Let's say you go back in time and kill your own grandfather, preventing your birth. In the present, things would reform as such, and "you" up to the second before you left, would cease to exist. However, the real you wasn't there to go through the reforming, the real you was in the past, so the real you continues to exist as sort of a hanging chad, if you will. A free radical in the time stream. Also, the documented evidence that you completed your job would be logged into your time machine's computer, so when the free radical you gets back to the present, you can still get paid for your work!

To simplify things, the time travel company may even require that all of its employees be such "free radicals" with no stake in the time line. You'd have no mother, not father, and no past. According to all records, you were never born. You'd simply exist, and your only function is to serve the company.


I am two_many_tamale and I approve of this message. I love it.

Its simple, and while it lets you do thigns as an outsider, it still makes the consequences of mistakes very real, not something you can shunt off on someone elses reality.

Human Paragon 3
2008-02-06, 01:09 PM
Rock on.

Are you planning on making a PbP game with these rules, or is it just an IRL thing?

Ya Ta Hey!
2008-02-08, 11:28 AM
(Well, nobody I know in real life plays D&D, so I'm restricted to play by post. Which takes out the most fun element of the game, to me.)

Anyway, I'm pretty new to d20 gaming and am restricted to open source material, so I'm not the guy to be running games at all because it seems like everybody wants to play expansion stuff. What I was going to do was hammer out the ruleset, notes, artwork and banners, and maybe a very generalized story, and then toss that sucker up under the title Gauging Interest and wash my hands of it.

So if you like this game enough that you'd want to run it, be my guest.