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zabbarot
2013-09-18, 01:07 PM
I'm looking for a game that can handle time travel, and that handles some of the weirder aspects of time travel, like players mucking with their own time line. I'd really like something that can handle dead end or damaged timelines and alternate realities spawned though poor decisions. Maybe with some kind of 'paradox' tracker that keeps track of just how confusing you've made things.

So is there a game that's designed for that sort of play or should I start homebrewing?

Edit: I actually meant to post this to Roleplaying Games but this is okay too I guess.

Rover
2013-09-18, 05:43 PM
Doctor Who: Adventures in Time and Space?

Amechra
2013-09-18, 08:55 PM
Continuum is what you are looking for.

CombatOwl
2013-09-19, 04:44 PM
I'm looking for a game that can handle time travel, and that handles some of the weirder aspects of time travel, like players mucking with their own time line.

Pick a generic system. GURPS or Fate would work well, depending on your play style.


I'd really like something that can handle dead end or damaged timelines and alternate realities spawned though poor decisions. Maybe with some kind of 'paradox' tracker that keeps track of just how confusing you've made things.

Uhh, shouldn't that just be reflected in the story? I'm not sure why you'd need game mechanics for that. TBH, if I was going to run a game like that and insist on mechanical support for timeline paradoxes, I would absolutely run it in Fate--and add an "Integrity" stress track. Damage to a character's own timeline inflicts Integrity damage that can be resolved like normal by taking a consequence relating to incongruities in their timeline ("Phasing Equipment," for example, where a character's ultra-tech gadgets keep phasing in and out of existence as their personal timeline is in flux).

Actually that would work pretty well because of Fate's consequence resolution mechanics. If it's a minor incongruity, their own "temporal inertia" could carry them through (reflected mechanically by marks on their Integrity stress track). Somewhat more important incongruities show up as consequences that may take a session or two to resolve, but can still be dealt with easily enough. Major disruptions of a person's own timeline would inflict severe consequences that force the character to rewrite a basic aspect of the character by the rules anyway.


So is there a game that's designed for that sort of play or should I start homebrewing?

I'd take a look at Fate Core (since it's free) before jumping immediately to homebrewing. http://www.evilhat.com/home/fate-core-downloads/ is the link to the free core book in electronic form.

zabbarot
2013-09-19, 07:21 PM
Pick a generic system. GURPS or Fate would work well, depending on your play style.



Uhh, shouldn't that just be reflected in the story? I'm not sure why you'd need game mechanics for that. TBH, if I was going to run a game like that and insist on mechanical support for timeline paradoxes, I would absolutely run it in Fate--and add an "Integrity" stress track. Damage to a character's own timeline inflicts Integrity damage that can be resolved like normal by taking a consequence relating to incongruities in their timeline ("Phasing Equipment," for example, where a character's ultra-tech gadgets keep phasing in and out of existence as their personal timeline is in flux).

Actually that would work pretty well because of Fate's consequence resolution mechanics. If it's a minor incongruity, their own "temporal inertia" could carry them through (reflected mechanically by marks on their Integrity stress track). Somewhat more important incongruities show up as consequences that may take a session or two to resolve, but can still be dealt with easily enough. Major disruptions of a person's own timeline would inflict severe consequences that force the character to rewrite a basic aspect of the character by the rules anyway.



I'd take a look at Fate Core (since it's free) before jumping immediately to homebrewing. http://www.evilhat.com/home/fate-core-downloads/ is the link to the free core book in electronic form.

Most the time I run of of GURPS if I'm to the point that I'm homebrewing something for a single campaign, it just saves time. I haven't messed with Fate much other than opening the book once. Eventually I'll read it.

The reason for wanting a mechanic for it, is just for the sake of consistency. Even though there's a chance that I, as the GM, am the only one who'll ever actually need to see the rule I like to have something to go off so I don't forget something and start getting wishy-washy on how it works. A time travel game is probably complicated enough without me getting inconsistent on how things work.

And the bit you have there about Integrity of Personal timelines is pretty much exactly the sort of thing I was thinking about. Going from a GURPS point of view I was considering also giving players options like a Stable Loop advantage, saying something to the effect of "your jumps are particularly reliable" with a decreased chance to stress their timeline. Or advantages for things like aiding themselves in combat.

Have you used both Fate and GURPS? If so is Fate definitely a better system for this?

Amechra
2013-09-19, 08:50 PM
Let me try this again...

Continuum is a system that is literally designed specifically for time-traveling shenanigans. Temporal combat is a thing that is entirely separate from normal combat, and has a bunch of fun maneuvers (including looping back to fight next to yourself, retroactively killing your opponent before the fight even began (which is not actually lethal to other time travelers; it just smacks 'em with paradox.))

One of the example time travel things is a guy wanting a drink, so he spends "potential" to have a drink in the fridge. He then has to, at some point in the future, go back and stick a drink in the fridge.

zabbarot
2013-09-19, 09:02 PM
Sorry Amechra, I forgot to mention it here because I did post this in Roleplaying games as well, Continuum is prohibitively expensive. $74 dollars used is more than a bit outside how much I can justify spending. It's about $200 for a new copy. They're pretty much literally charging a dollar a page for this book and it isn't even hard cover.

Edit: a link to the Amazon page the official site sends to you to for purchasing: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1929312008/104-8897009-9327134

Amechra
2013-09-19, 09:09 PM
Oh, right, sorry.

I have an older copy. Can't be blamed for not keeping up with the cost.

zabbarot
2013-09-19, 09:10 PM
That's fine, it genuinely sounds like a good resource. I just don't have that much money to throw at it.

Amechra
2013-09-19, 09:52 PM
If you have a Something Awful account, I can link you to a fairly in-depth review of it.

CombatOwl
2013-09-20, 01:01 PM
And the bit you have there about Integrity of Personal timelines is pretty much exactly the sort of thing I was thinking about.

I thought as much, which is why I mentioned it. The Fate stress/consequence system is literally how "health" is handled, so it lends itself well to odd sorts of games where "damage" isn't necessarily primarily physical.


Going from a GURPS point of view I was considering also giving players options like a Stable Loop advantage, saying something to the effect of "your jumps are particularly reliable" with a decreased chance to stress their timeline. Or advantages for things like aiding themselves in combat.

I think this would be moderately hard to model in GURPS--you'd have to give and take away advantages which can get pretty weird character-wise. I do think GURPS makes a better choice for time travelling games than a lot of other choices simply because it describes so many different time periods reasonably well. It does, however, lack the detailed mechanics for handling paradox and such. My recommendation for GURPS being a suitable choice is based entirely on it being very flexible and having TL and mechanics for how to handle skills at TLs different than the current setting. All useful things for time travel games.

I have no experience with continuum which is being recommended by the other person, but it sounds as if that's dealing more with "trivial" time-travel (I.E. using it in a fight to solve an immediate problem, as opposed to using it as a vehicle to adventure in the past or future linearly).

If you intend to use time-travel as a part of solving problems in a fight, GURPS really has nothing there and you're going to have to homebrew something in that system. Fate could deal with it, but that's because Fate is sufficiently abstract that it doesn't need to deal with fiddly bits like that. It could also provide obvious mechanical solutions to, say, doing something like time-jumping as a means of teleporting in combat--since Fate deals only with zones (rather than feet or meters), you could just roll your temporal mechanics skill to change your zone.

Oddly enough, Fate would also provide the means to run a combat spanning multiple concurrent timelines. For example, it gives you the means to run a fight that occurs simultaneously in, say, 1862, 1942, and 2010... simply by having zones for each of them. Incidentally, it could also provide appropriate difficulty modifiers for doing crazy time-related stuff like shooting a bullet from a balcony in 1942 in order to hit someone walking by the street below in 2010... as a part of the regular course of a fight!

Now that I think about it, Fate would do this pretty well.


Have you used both Fate and GURPS?

Yes.


If so is Fate definitely a better system for this?

Hard to say. Fate is a heavily narrative-focused game. It doesn't deal in concrete details so much as providing you a framework for managing narratively meaningful details. Personally, if I were running this, I would prefer to do so in Fate, simply because it seems to me that its abstract approach is probably better suited for such a game.