Time Loop Fortress?

[druid91]

Ok, tell me if this makes any sense at all.

The plan is to make a fortress within a stable time loop.

To do this they came up with this order of events.

1: Craft a time portal that goes back to the day before, to minimize the temporal drift and chance of failure.

2: wait a month.

3: Step through the portal that now leads to a time 1-month back permanently.

4: Cast genesis Be sure that time matters on the demiplane

5: Craft a portal in front of the time portal.

6: Step back through the portal into the present. Destroy the portal to the demiplane.

Now you have a portal to the past, where a portal to the demiplane exists!

Now for your second trick, go through the demi-plane portal, and set up a reset button VIA psionic reset trick.

Set things up so that the demi-plane resets once a month.

Thus the demi-plane only exists during that one month period, so one can't planeshift into it, but one can planeshift out just fine. As the time effect wouldn't cross planar boundries you'd be in the present.

Thus you have a fortress within a stable time-loop.

[Zale]

That hurt my brain.

I see how it works, but ouch. Time travel hurts my head.

[Jack_Simth]

Well, I'm not familiar with where you're getting the specific mechanics, but...

A few potential problems:
1) The transitions in step 1-3 assume that the time portal goes back to a fixed instant once it is created. That is, that the time portal goes to, say, January 4th, 2012, at 08:31:26 GMT (or some such), rather than "one day into the past". Otherwise, waiting 30 days does not produce a portal that goes back 31 days. It only works at all if this assumption is true... and if this assumption is true, every time you go through your time portal, you go back to the exact same instant... and the second time you try, there is a warm body (your past self) in the spot you're trying to occupy.

2) A Psionic Reset is not generally infinitely repeatable; Forced Dream costs XP, and when it's set off, the resources involved are still consumed, and the spell is discharged at the point in the past to which you return, which means it doesn't still apply. It a save game trick, it is not a stable loop trick.

3) In order for this to do you much good, you have to be able to spend time within your demiplane. What happens to people who were not inside the demiplane originally, who are inside it when a reset happens?

4) Anyone who can find your time portal can get in the same way you do... which basically just means you've got a very expensive area that is difficult, but not impossible, to breach.

5) Just because the portal to the demiplane is destroyed, and just because time inside the demiplane keeps resetting, doesn't mean the demiplane doesn't exist in other times! Time in the demiplane resumes once something disrupts the stable time loop... which, as you have to have to keep the open time portal back to a time during the loop in order to make any use of the place, will eventually happen. So someone can, indeed, plane shift into it (although you probably won't be there).

6) Someone can render your fortress completely unusable by disrupting or destroying your time portal, just like you did on the one for the demiplane access.

[druid91]

Well, I'm not familiar with where you're getting the specific mechanics, but...

A few potential problems:
1) The transitions in step 1-3 assume that the time portal goes back to a fixed instant once it is created. That is, that the time portal goes to, say, January 4th, 2012, at 08:31:26 GMT (or some such), rather than "one day into the past". Otherwise, waiting 30 days does not produce a portal that goes back 31 days. It only works at all if this assumption is true... and if this assumption is true, every time you go through your time portal, you go back to the exact same instant... and the second time you try, there is a warm body (your past self) in the spot you're trying to occupy.

2) A Psionic Reset is not generally infinitely repeatable; Forced Dream costs XP, and when it's set off, the resources involved are still consumed, and the spell is discharged at the point in the past to which you return, which means it doesn't still apply. It a save game trick, it is not a stable loop trick.

3) In order for this to do you much good, you have to be able to spend time within your demiplane. What happens to people who were not inside the demiplane originally, who are inside it when a reset happens?

4) Anyone who can find your time portal can get in the same way you do... which basically just means you've got a very expensive area that is difficult, but not impossible, to breach.

5) Just because the portal to the demiplane is destroyed, and just because time inside the demiplane keeps resetting, doesn't mean the demiplane doesn't exist in other times! Time in the demiplane resumes once something disrupts the stable time loop... which, as you have to have to keep the open time portal back to a time during the loop in order to make any use of the place, will eventually happen. So someone can, indeed, plane shift into it (although you probably won't be there).

6) Someone can render your fortress completely unusable by disrupting or destroying your time portal, just like you did on the one for the demiplane access.
WotC Time Portal (http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/pg/20030416b)


1: Interesting idea, I didn't think of that... Perhaps that could be countered by building the fortress around the time portal. Then limiting you to entering the fortress once a month. Thus the reset takes care of your past self getting in the way.

As for if that is a question of how it works, then yes it is. Constructing a portal has the same rules as casting the spell, thus it has a target "location" in time, along with a certain amount of drift and a failure chance. Thus the reason for making a portal set to go one day back is to minimize the drift, because the drift and failure chance is set during creation.

2: Have someone ready to reset it each time. It's really a simple matter of keeping it going. Sure it'll cost to maintain. That's why you make a system of back-ups. So long as the place resets once a month the trick works.

3: Poof. Gone. That's why you'd put a portable hole on the wall. As an extradimensional space it shouldn't be affected, as long as the hole was there at the start of the reset cycle. And for long-term staff you can work them into the time-stream at each reset cycle. Just keep a thought bottle in an extradimensional cupboard with all your recent memories in it.

4: Kinda the idea really. It wasn't going for completely impregnable. It's intended first and foremost as "Something really cool" And secondly to prevent plane-shift in.

5: Congratulations you've plane-shifted into an empty plane. :P Alternatively find a god and ask them to destroy the plane in the present. By the time you reach epic levels at least one god should owe you a favor anyway.

6: The portal can be reconstructed. It would be difficult and probably a lot easier to just build a second time-loop.

[Jack_Simth]

WotC Time Portal (http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/pg/20030416b)


1: Interesting idea, I didn't think of that... Perhaps that could be countered by building the fortress around the time portal. Then limiting you to entering the fortress once a month. Thus the reset takes care of your past self getting in the way.

Doesn't work.

The time portal cannot go into the future as of when it was created, so it must take you to a point in the past from when it was created.

In order for the reset to wipe out your prior self so you don't run into yourself, the reset has to return to a point before when the time portal's destination.

Time portals only traverse time, not space.

Your time portal is thus destroyed in the reset, and must be built from scratch every time... which means that there must be a version of you there always to build it, and there's a pesky clause in your time-travel method about what happens when you're in the same place and time twice. You WILL kill yourself trying this.


As for if that is a question of how it works, then yes it is. Constructing a portal has the same rules as casting the spell, thus it has a target "location" in time, along with a certain amount of drift and a failure chance. Thus the reason for making a portal set to go one day back is to minimize the drift, because the drift and failure chance is set during creation.

The rules you're invoking are poorly-defined. Is the drift and mishap rolled every time, or just during portal creation? If you read the other Perilous Portals articles in that series, you'll note that this type of thing requires a rather lot of DM adjudication.


2: Have someone ready to reset it each time. It's really a simple matter of keeping it going. Sure it'll cost to maintain. That's why you make a system of back-ups. So long as the place resets once a month the trick works.

...

OK, so you have the guy doing the reset trick (round number-loop number)
1-0) He burns XP and PP to set up the recall point, and jumps into the pool of Quintessance (or gets Time Hopped, whatever).
2-0) When he can act again, he resets
1-1) He is at the recall point, but his Forced Dream has expired, and he has already used the action type needed to make the Forced Dream this round, so he delays a moment....
2-1) He burns XP and PP to set up the recall point, and jumps into the pool of Quintessance (or gets Time Hopped, whatever).
3-1) When he can act again, he resets.
2-2) He is at the recall point, but his Forced Dream has expired, and he has already used the action type needed to make the Forced Dream this round, so he delays a moment....
3-2) He burns XP and PP to set up the recall point, and jumps into the pool of Quintessance (or gets Time Hopped, whatever).
4-2) When he can act again, he resets.

You've got a problems here that makes this method very strictly finite: The reset guy can only carry so much resource for this at once (be that XP, PP, power stones, or whatever). You also can't feed him resources, as he has to have them before the time loop. Your limit of time is based on the reset guy's carrying capacity for the resource used... and the entire set of resources must be paid up front.



3: Poof. Gone. That's why you'd put a portable hole on the wall. As an extradimensional space it shouldn't be affected, as long as the hole was there at the start of the reset cycle. And for long-term staff you can work them into the time-stream at each reset cycle. Just keep a thought bottle in an extradimensional cupboard with all your recent memories in it.
Follow-up: What happens to something removed from the area after a reset? Might be an interesting mass-production method, if nothing else.


4: Kinda the idea really. It wasn't going for completely impregnable. It's intended first and foremost as "Something really cool" And secondly to prevent plane-shift in.
Oh. There's much simpler ways to prevent plane shift. Really.



5: Congratulations you've plane-shifted into an empty plane. :P Alternatively find a god and ask them to destroy the plane in the present. By the time you reach epic levels at least one god should owe you a favor anyway.
There's a question, here, of what exactly a reset means if it doesn't affect things not on that plane at the time. Your impregnability assumes that capital-E Everything goes back to the instant on reset... rather than the particular plane just being reset so that everything on that plane is exactly as it was at that point in time... which would have 0 effect on someone trying to Plane Shift onto it (as everything's still there, it just doesn't know that a month has passed, as it was reverted) - a save-state, rather than true time travel on the reset... and true time travel on the reset is what you need for this to work.


6: The portal can be reconstructed. It would be difficult and probably a lot easier to just build a second time-loop.
Yeah. This will get very, very expensive quickly.