(Pathfinder) Time Travel Flashback Campaign. (Work in Progress.)

[Reksew Trebla]

I'm not certain if I want to do the campaign this way, but the basics are that I was wanting to do a campaign with Dragon Ball Z style time travel, using those rules for how time travel will work.

But then I started thinking about it, and instead of having the time travel happen later, after the initial failure of the future timeline being roleplayed, I thought to myself "What if I had them roleplay the future timeline through flashbacks, that will eventually lead to showing how everything went to hell?"

And so I got this as an idea.

Okay, so the campaign would start out with everyone making their level 1 characters like normal. Once that's done, depending on the characters' personalities and what not, I'll think up of a reason for why they are all together or meet up, but in one way or another, they come across a "madman" claiming to be from the future.

I'm going to base him off of Future Trunks, without the super over-the-top power level, and not being half Saiyan of course.

Regardless of whether or not the heroes pay attention to him, I'll pull a few strings and make something bad happen to them, just as he predicted, with the "madman" saving their lives.

Now from there, it depends on what we come up with for the story as to what specifically happens, but whenever the first real key event occurs, and everyone afterwards, I'm going to have the campaign switch to a different setting and/or time period, to show off a flashback for the future timeline. I'll have different characters made for the players to use (since these flashbacks won't last too long, and ultimately lead to them failing to save the world, it doesn't make sense for them to make the characters themselves, plus the are going to die a lot, so we may go through a lot of them) and then they'll roleplay the flashback out, which will develop more of the story.

I'm thinking the reason why the future guy doesn't reveal everything right off the bat is going to be because he suffered a lot of trauma and it's hard for him to remember everything, so that is why these flashback scenes are going to be important to the story.

So far, this is all I have for the campaign.

I originally had decided for it to be rogue robots, but allowing the players to attempt at somewhat deciding what happened through roleplaying the flashbacks, plus being able to "create" the key events that activate the flashbacks, seemed like a better idea.

What do you think? Any suggestions? Sound stupid? Let me know, and please be nice. I'll take criticism, but don't just be mean for the sake of it.

[jqavins]

I didn't follow what is happening when. Who's flashing back to when and from where?

Would you try mapping it, please? Use something like different colors and fonts to identify in-game time and character sets. For example:

Red text is the in-game past, i.e. what has already happened in the world.
Blue text is the in-game future, i.e. what will happen in the world.
Green text is the in-game present.

Comic is the characters the players made for themselves.
Times is the characters you will provide.

Reading sequence is the same as as-played sequence.

As near as I can figure, what you described looks like this:

Characters meet old, crazy future dude.
Future dude saves characters' butts.
Other characters observe butt saving as a flashback.
Characters do more stuff.
Other characters flash back to more stuff.
Characters are helpless to keep bad things from happening.
Other characters flash back on bad things happening.
World goes to crap as time moves on and present becomes future.

Or, since past and future are relative, it could look like this:

Characters meet old, crazy future dude. (Their future, not ours.)
Future dude saves characters' butts.
Other characters observe butt saving as a flashback.
Characters do more stuff.
Other characters flash back to more stuff.
Characters are helpless to keep bad things from happening.
Other characters flash back on bad things happening.
World goes to crap as time moves on and past becomes present.

I think I must not have really got what you were going for, since the above seems pretty pointless. What purpose is served by the flashbacks? Is there any way the characters can win? I doubt you've conceived something as pointless as what I mapped out, which is why I'm pretty sure I must have it wrong.

[Jendekit]

I personally don't care for DBZ (except the Team 4 Star abridged version), but the flashback thing sounds similar to a key aspect of the RPG Fireborn. Short version: the players play 2 characters thousands of years apart but sharing the same soul. The one in modern times (default setting is London) is the main character that is played, while the other one is the character in the flashbacks in what the game calls the Mythic Era. Key difference between the two characters: the one in the Mythic Era is a dragon.

I haven't actually played Fireborn so I can't really say much more, but if you can take a look at that game for advice/ideas.

[Reksew Trebla]

I didn't follow what is happening when. Who's flashing back to when and from where?

Would you try mapping it, please? Use something like different colors and fonts to identify in-game time and character sets. For example:

Red text is the in-game past, i.e. what has already happened in the world.
Blue text is the in-game future, i.e. what will happen in the world.
Green text is the in-game present.

Comic is the characters the players made for themselves.
Times is the characters you will provide.

Reading sequence is the same as as-played sequence.

As near as I can figure, what you described looks like this:

Characters meet old, crazy future dude.
Future dude saves characters' butts.
Other characters observe butt saving as a flashback.
Characters do more stuff.
Other characters flash back to more stuff.
Characters are helpless to keep bad things from happening.
Other characters flash back on bad things happening.
World goes to crap as time moves on and present becomes future.

Or, since past and future are relative, it could look like this:

Characters meet old, crazy future dude. (Their future, not ours.)
Future dude saves characters' butts.
Other characters observe butt saving as a flashback.
Characters do more stuff.
Other characters flash back to more stuff.
Characters are helpless to keep bad things from happening.
Other characters flash back on bad things happening.
World goes to crap as time moves on and past becomes present.

I think I must not have really got what you were going for, since the above seems pretty pointless. What purpose is served by the flashbacks? Is there any way the characters can win? I doubt you've conceived something as pointless as what I mapped out, which is why I'm pretty sure I must have it wrong.

Okay, it's more like this:
Red is the Future Timeline's Past. Crazy Future Dude lived through Red Events, but doesn't quite recall everything that happened, due to some sort of trauma.

Blue is the In-Game Present.

Green is Key Events that occur in Blue.

Comic is the characters the players made for themselves.

Times is the characters I will provide.

Future Dude time travels in a similar manner to Terminator, or Dragon Ball Z, in which it cannot change your past, but instead creates a new timeline.

Group encounters Future Dude, who warns them of something bad that's about to happen. Group ignores and heads on anyways.

Group get's attacked, nearly dies, and is then saved by Future Dude. He remembers how this event occured in his timeline.

Flashback occurs in Future Dude's mind/memories. He was with a group of people on that day, that the players will take control of. Once the event is settled, Flashback stops, Players take control of their own characters again, and the story continues until next Key Event occurs, which will cause a new Flashback to occur, showing more of the Future Dude's past.

The point of the Flashbacks is to show how Future Dude's Timeline went to crap, by giving the players some control over the story of it, and to show what they need to stop in the present, with their own characters, to prevent it from happening again.

I think you just got the placement of which timeline everyone belongs to mixed up.

[jqavins]

I think you just got the placement of which timeline everyone belongs to mixed up.

Trust me, I was more mixed up than that.

So, the players' main characters and the provided characters, who are seen in Future Dude's flashbacks but played by the players, are playing through two versions of the same events. The provided characters will lose and watch their version of the world go to crap; all they get to choose is some little details of just how it gets there. And the main characters get the chance to win and keep their timeline from going to crap. Have I got it?

(Before I go on, since what's coming is rather negative, let me say it's your game and whatever I think doesn't really matter. It's all just my two cents.)

If that's it, I'm afraid I see several problems.

• In my experience, players tend to have one of three reactions to characters provided to them. Either they refuse to play, they go through the motions but have no investment in the outcome, or they grow attached and think of the characters as their own.
  
  • The first leaves you without a game.
  • The second gives you players who are annoyed by the boring flashback sequences.
  • The third gives you players who are upset by the high mortality rate.
  
  
• The characters in the flashbacks are supposed to lose. Well, players are like goblins: clever, cunning, devious, and always doing things you don't expect. If they have any meaningful control of the characters, they will find a way to win, sometimes at least, unless you are ridiculously heavy handed. So either they'll destroy your concept (by beating it) or they'll have all the more reason to find the flashback sequences annoying.
• Since Future Dude's past, the "original" timeline, is fixed, as the main characters score wins and create a new, divergent timeline, flashbacks will become less and less relevant. Just a simple example, if the original timeline included blowing up a truck full of plague virus in a city, and the main characters prevent this, then the next flashback, which is all about life in the plague-ridden city, is irrelevant. The more the timelines diverge, the more this will happen.
  
  • You could fix this by making the original timeline fixed in-game, but not written yet by you. That is, you can keep making up the original timeline one step ahead of the main characters so that it looks mostly the same but continues its downward slide. That'll be really, really hard to do. It means the main timeline has to look a lot like the one that's going to crap, even though it isn't going to crap itself.

I wish you luck, but I wouldn't run something like that, and I wouldn't want to play it either.

[CarpeGuitarrem]

Just say "no" to time travel.

I mean, sure, I might run a time travel campaign, but only if I was really ready for the headache of dealing with constantly exploding causality that goes off the rails with frequency.

[jqavins]

OK, so I've been thinking more about how to make a time travel themed campaign that would not have these problems, and the answer I've come up with is to not have multiple versions of events at the same moment. That is, no flashbacks. How about this?

The party meets Future Dude, who seems normal until he tries to warn them of something that is about to happen. They don't take him seriously until the thing (an ambush or some such) happens, and Future Dude saves their bacon.

So, they buy his story of coming from the future, a future that has gone to hell, in hopes of changing it. They begin to take him seriously, to take his advice, and even to rely on it.

The first few things they change are pretty minor in the big scheme of things. As they change things, Future Dude ends up with overlapping and conflicting memories. For instance, in a fight in F.D.'s original history Character A got his arm broken. The pary won the fight, and the evening was spent in an ER waiting room. In the events as played, F.D. warned the party and they won with no serious injury; the evening was spent over wings and beer at their favorite bar. F.D. remembers both versions. He knows when Character B is about to get a drink spilled down his back when the waitress trips, but also remembers the ER, which is a bit confusing.

But, because the broken arm and beer spill are both minor things, this does not really effect the action. As time goes on, though, little things pile up and the party changes some not-so-little things, and F.D. becomes increasingly confused, his memories of tomorrow less reliable. Since the party changes things in stages, he developes three, four, more different memories for the same day or event, and has more and more trouble keeping them straight.

The party continues working to avert the key event that sent the world to hell. They learn to detect signs of when F.D. is clear-headed and when not in order to make the most of what he tells them. F.D. is aware of the problem, but can do little to deal with it.

As the climax of the campaign approaches, F.D. is suffering major dimentia and is mostly incoherent. A few clues may be gleaned from his babble, but the party for all intents and purposes is on their own.

After the climax, assuming the party wins and hell is averted, I don't know what should become of F.D. I have three ideas:

• He dies.
• He disappears.
• He is all better, remembering his role in events, but having lost all the conflicting memories of other versions.

[the_david]

Honestly, I'd like the idea more if the players jump back and forth from their past selves to their future selves. I also know that that's really hard to plot, and even then your players are gonna do something stupid like letting their characters die in the past.

Or maybe like Ocarina of Time were Link can travel 7 years into the future and back. That would work a lot better.

In the Dragonlance adventure Key of Destiny the players would find themselves in a dungeon where they'd get visions about the past. An alternative was offered on the Dragonlance forums where they'd actually visit the past instead.


Great, now I have to figure out how to use time travel in my campaign.