PDA

View Full Version : Chronomancy in games



AnBe
2017-08-05, 09:50 PM
I only have one question: Is Chronomancy a good type of magic skill to be included in your game?
I'm not being system-specific here. I really need the insight, wisdom, and experience of the playground on this one.
I'm in the process of designing a system and need to know if Chronomancy should be a thing in the game.
Thank you all.

The Glyphstone
2017-08-05, 10:17 PM
That depends on what your Chronomancy can do. By itself, the term just means 'time magic' (or if you to be literal, time divination). But that can itself cover everything from simply making something speed up/slow down (Haste or Slow) to Time-Stop effects to outright time travel. It could be an attack via destructive aging, or a restorative via undoing change. There's simply too many possible sub-abilities that could be lumped under the descriptor to give a firm opinion either way.

Vitruviansquid
2017-08-05, 10:19 PM
You should make Chronomancy a thing in your game if you can picture it adding fun and interesting mechanics. If you can't, then don't.

Slay33
2017-08-05, 10:44 PM
Time magic can be extremely powerful, that goes without saying. Making time speed up or slow down, time travel (This can be very game breaking and confusing), and other abilities that Chronomancy offers will definitely affect the world it is present in. My opinion is that it comes down to the level of power in the end.

I personally wouldn't let any players have access to ridiculously powerful time magic, though it can be used as an interesting plot device for a big bad. Depends on the style of play that you and your players want to go for, and Chronomancy will become however you describe it in your own campaign and world.

Geddy2112
2017-08-05, 11:44 PM
Chronomancy is generally okay, so long as there is no major time travel ability. Slowing/speeding up time for a short period is fine, and even stopping it for a little bit wont hurt. If characters can go back in time or change timelines, things get really wonky. If you have time travel, make it prince of persia where you can only go back a few seconds(a round or two of combat at most) and even that should be a pretty powerful ability.

XmonkTad
2017-08-06, 06:20 AM
One of the best uses of time magic I've seen was a guy running a Tomb of Horrors game where instead of making his players roll extra chars or making them waste time on leaving the dungeon to get resurrected he gave them a clock that could "rewind" time to give them an extra chance that way.

But I am going to echo what other players have said. The most drastic theoretical uses of chronomancy are the ones that require the most planning to pull off. Also, it means setting some ground rules. For example, of you go back in time, can you change things? See yourself/ Meet yourself/ Touch your(past)self without consequences? On a practical note: who controls the past version of the character, DM or player?

Personally, if there is chronomancy in a game, I would prefer that there is no way to go back in time directly. If you want to introduce a time-traveling plot, consider making it so players can only send very literal-minded inevitables back in time. Other "lesser" forms of chronomancy sound great, they add a lot to the game. Just don't let wizards heal people/bring them back from the dead.

Millstone85
2017-08-06, 07:40 AM
If chronomancy includes time travel, then you are going to run into this:

http://i.imgur.com/gkr8N1B.png

Something jumps back in time and sends the course of history in a different direction. What becomes of the original course? Does it go on beyond the point of the jump? Maybe these divergent timelines are equally real, coexisting in a multiverse kind of way. Or maybe the original exists in a ghostly state, including faint memories everyone seem to have. If it just never existed, you have got yourself a full-on grandfather paradox.

Or something jumps back in time and sends history on the very course leading to the jump. Where did that start? It didn't, it is circular, a snake eating its own tail.

It is difficult enough to write or read such a story, but playing it? :smallconfused:

Bohandas
2017-08-06, 09:19 AM
Check out Netbook of Time (http://dcrouzet.chez-alice.fr/gaming/d20downloads.htm), a free 3rd party supplement.

Quertus
2017-08-06, 09:21 AM
Well, to start, let me echo the sentiment that time magic is awesome. Accelerating your actions is awesome in most every system. Heck, creating a custom setting where time mages are the only ones who can heal would be awesome.

That having been said, awesome and balanced are not synonyms. Trying to balance accelerated actions, time stop, divinations, healing, etc is something most systems fail at hard. So, when creating a new system, ask yourself: how important is game balance?

But time travel? That one's truly tricky. Beneath the surface, many big settings with time travel actually follow the mechanics that the timeline you left continues without you - you've simply traveled to or created a parallel reality. Just no-one (usually) bothers to pay any attention to the world you left behind. One of these days, I'd love to write a story about a BBEG who is clever enough to plant (subtle) rumors that the only way to defeat him is through time travel, thus ensuring his victory, as all sufficiently powerful heroes simply disappear of their own volition!

A few follow more difficult mechanics, where you actually change a given timeline, potentially causing problems where you return to your starting point, only to discover that no-one knows you, because you were never born. Others include a kind of "historical inertia" to prevent this paradox - but limit your agency / effectiveness at the same time.

Many allow you to interact with your past self; some do not. Some systems even allow you to coexist at the same time as a past version of yourself. Given that we are constantly shedding elections, skin cells, hair, etc, it is make inevitable that past and future matter will collide at some point. Thus, I generally dislike systems that made coming into contact with past versions of yourself arbitrarily bad.

Necroticplague
2017-08-06, 09:55 AM
Depends on what you want it to do, and what other kinds of magics you have in the system. If need be, you can always rip a page from ToME's book for inspiration.

Anonymouswizard
2017-08-06, 10:27 AM
Chronomancy is fine, as long as time goes one way. It's powerful and would likely be expensive and difficult, but it wouldn't break a game.

But as soon as you can hop backwards in time you open yourself to a bunch of problems. This doesn't matter if it's present to pay or future to present, going forward is fine but backward produces headaches (and potentially free energy).

goto124
2017-08-06, 10:58 AM
Many allow you to interact with your past self; some do not.

If you go back to meet your past self, why didn't you meet your future self in that point in the past, when you were your past self?

Stories with time travel get to carefully control many things. For example, Harry Potter has a stable time loop, where the past experiences things that occur due to people from the future. Or this image (https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/originals/1f/ff/b6/1fffb63d9f7b30e26252d80347149c9a.jpg).

Stories can do Stable Time Loops because everything is pre-written, so the author can take the actions from the future self and apply them ahead of time. But not in tabletop games, where the DM isn't going to know what the players will do ahead of time, before their PCs actually travel back in time and perform actions that would've changed the past.

A way around this would be a 'parallel universe' thing. Time travelling brings the PCs to an alternate timeline where their past selves experience the changes made by their future selves. One wonders if the players get to play the past selves after the time travel.

Another issue with meeting with past selves, is that it's essentially an even more powerful form of divination. The future selves has plenty of reason to help their past selves. They can literally gives themselves powerful weapons, armor, magic items, and valuable information ahead of time. Mechanics against this would be... their past selves not believing them, I suppose?

jindra34
2017-08-06, 11:18 AM
Most things that are UNIQUELY chronomancy get banned in my games. Moving super fast or slowing things down? That can be justified through other means. Time travel (and all the problems it can cause like PCs going back to the point where you screwed up...), time stop (both freezing yourself out, and freezing others), and generally accurate future knowledge get smashed down HARD.

NichG
2017-08-06, 11:46 AM
One way to do self-consistency loops a bit more easily is to make it so that the action which initiates time-travel backwards must take place at the arrival point, not the departure point. So e.g. a character might have an ability that lets them say 'at some future point, I will send myself a message that arrives now', rather than 'oh now that I think of it, what if I send my past self a message?'. Of course they can later decide 'I'm not going to send the message' or 'I'm going to send a different message', but now it requires willful disruption of self-consistency rather than being almost guaranteed to happen by accident. Add a small random chance for the spell to distort or alter the message, and then all universes in which the caster decides to change the contents turn out to be ones in which that small chance of a false message is rolled. This still lets you do more fine-grained and clever divinations, and there are some interesting twists of logic without going full-on paradox.

For example, the caster may act in such a way as to make it impossible for them to actually have found out the information that they received from their future self, but that information still exists. So there's some fun to be had there.

For full-on bodily time travel, it gets trickier obviously since someone has to play the future (or past) version of the character, and its harder for that to be 'oh, just a false message' (of course, it could be a 'paradox ghost' or whatever).

Necroticplague
2017-08-06, 03:34 PM
For simplicity, all time-effects should be done based on their affect on the present. The assumption that you aren't beholden to either your past or your future makes things a lot easier. So if you bring your future self to help you, your aren't necessarily going to go 'poof' in the future to go back and help yourself. Anything involving the past is a retcon to change the present, anything involving the future is taking out a temporal loan for an advantage right now. One's ability to magically patch space-time from the problems this causes can be part of what determines one's power as a chronomancer.

goto124
2017-08-06, 07:37 PM
I'm starting to get a chronoache.

Psyren
2017-08-07, 11:19 AM
3.5 psionics has some great ways to make a "time mage" without automatically ripping the campaign apart at the seams, thanks to powers like Synchronicity, Time Hop, Temporal Acceleration, Hustle, and Time Regression. Both 3.5 and Pathfinder also have spells that could be borrowed for a time mage, like Blessing of Fervor and Contingent Action.

Rather than just brewing one up on the spot, here are some guidelines I would follow:

1) I would probably have the time mage be a limited focus spontaneous caster, like a Beguiler.

2) You should focus on action manipulation rather than action accumulation. Keeping these spells from being broken means no getting something for nothing. Convert action types, or steal them from yourself in future rounds, but don't let players simply double up on their actions, at least not cheaply. (Looking at you, Linked Synchronicity.)

3) Long scale time travel in either direction should be relegated to rituals. No Teleport Through Time, no weeks-long Forced Dream etc.

4) You can refluff a lot of non-time spells as being time-based. For example, Ray of Exhaustion does not have to come from sapping a target's life force, it could instead come from briefly aging them or shunting them out of sync with their rested state, thus making it a time spell. Similarly, a spell that gives you evasion and boosts your reflex saves can come from getting glimpses of future events, rather than from boosting your agility directly.

5) Time magic is especially powerful when combined with things like direct damage and physical attack prowess (because more actions means more capacity for... that stuff), so any time mage should be weak at doing those kinds of things. You can make a "gish time mage" too if you want, but their magic needs to be weaker - 6th or 4th at most.

Anonymouswizard
2017-08-07, 11:45 AM
Short range time travel can be annoying too.

Like that one D&D psion power that required you to play out 1d4+1 rounds while the psion cast it, then hop back to the beginning of the casting time and play the 3.5 rounds again.

Honestly, the only truly easy to use time travel is one way travel into the future. No paradoxes, no changing time, no 'we must fix this', a plain and simple 'it is now 100 years later or whatever'. It can also be useful, imagine there's a war on and you can't deal with all your refugees. Just shunt them a year or two into the future when you'll hopefully be prepared for them.

JellyPooga
2017-08-07, 12:30 PM
The general topic of chronomancy aside, if you want time travel to be a thing in your game, there's one film you need to watch first, because it's the only media I've seen or read that actually got time travel right. That film is FAQ About Time Travel.

Back to the general topic; chronomancy can easily implemented with "time manipulation" effects, as has already been discussed. The problem, if it is one, is distinguishing chronomancy from other forms of magic. Is a "haste" effect the result of manipulating time, or is it one of manipulating physiology? Is rapid decay a time effect or a "death magic" one? So on and so forth. If ypu're going to have chronomancy be a thing, give it a niche and don't let other forms of magic encroach too much upon it.

Kaptin Keen
2017-08-07, 12:54 PM
A friend of mine once said the following:

If something is so good that you'd be a fool not to take it - it's OP and shouldn't exist
If something is to bad that you'd be a fool to take it - it's UP and shouldn't exist

Only things that gives you meaningful choices are really relevant in games. Irrelevant choices aren't choices unless at all. So time magic is cool but hard to balance. Every RPG I've played has some sort of action economy, and once you start breaking that, you start breaking the game. A school of magic that seems designed for breaking the game might be a poor investment.

I like stuff like the psion powers Time Hop (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/psionic/powers/timeHop.htm) and Fiery Discorporation (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/psionic/powers/fieryDiscorporation.htm) because they do tricky stuff that doesn't leave you with weird holes that are hard to explain.

But stuff like Haste is - frankly - harder to justify in terms of game balance.

Vogie
2017-08-08, 08:38 AM
I think it'd be something that is only touched on in your system, and but keep it around for McGuffin Purposes. It was originally more diverse, but someone went back and removed it all.

A good limiter of chronomancy is that line in time stop: "You cannot move or harm items held, carried, or worn by a creature stuck in normal time, but you can affect any item that is not in another creature's possession." Using this as a base rule probably allows chronomancy to not be incredibly broken, but as a neat uber-utility.

Many divination spells could be fluffed as Time magic. You could also use time magic to explain things like dimension door - You aren't teleporting, you're freezing time and moving there really fast (relatively) - and the previously mentioned Ray of Exaustion.

Of course, if the story needs it, there should still be ways for the party to be frozen in time, or transported hundreds of years into the past or future... but these things shouldn't be available to the PCs at will.

Millstone85
2017-08-08, 11:23 AM
If time travel and paradoxes are the focus of the campaign, then it might be worth playing with such abilities.

I like some of what I read about C°ntinuum: roleplaying in The Yet, such as a higher-level version of your character being a typical NPC and quest giver. In fact, a beyond-playable-levels version of your character might be one of the gods of this setting, known as the Inheritors, who reside in the forbidden far future. Alas, your future self is likely to treat you like a child or, worse, like an embryonic stage of their posthuman existence.

Something I like less about C°ntinuum is how there is a period in prehistory that is just one massive paradox, and everything after that is pretty much a repatched timeline. It does make for an interesting take on Law versus Chaos, though.

Quertus
2017-08-08, 11:52 AM
Chronomancy can be used for multiple SoD / SoS effects, from slowing or aging the target, to placing the target in stasis, to even rewriting the target's personality based on an entirely different timeline of events.


One's ability to magically patch space-time from the problems this causes can be part of what determines one's power as a chronomancer.

My signature character, Quertus, for whom this account is named, invented a whole series of such spells. He must be the most powerful chronomancer of all! :smallcool:


The problem, if it is one, is distinguishing chronomancy from other forms of magic. Is a "haste" effect the result of manipulating time, or is it one of manipulating physiology? Is rapid decay a time effect or a "death magic" one? So on and so forth. If ypu're going to have chronomancy be a thing, give it a niche and don't let other forms of magic encroach too much upon it.

Some versions of WoD handled this in the opposite way, claiming that there was more than one way to skin a cat. Want to wither flesh with Necromancy? Cool. Want to have the same effect by aging then with chronomancy? Cool.

So there's more than one valid approach to this problem - niche protection is just one valid solution.


You could also use time magic to explain things like dimension door - You aren't teleporting, you're freezing time and moving there really fast (relatively) -

Quertus also invented that spell - primarily for use in areas where dimensional magic was dangerous, or being prevented by counter-techniques, or even impossible because the requisite planes did not exist! Downside was, it can't be used to bypass walls and such.

Psyren
2017-08-09, 10:08 AM
Back to the general topic; chronomancy can easily implemented with "time manipulation" effects, as has already been discussed. The problem, if it is one, is distinguishing chronomancy from other forms of magic. Is a "haste" effect the result of manipulating time, or is it one of manipulating physiology? Is rapid decay a time effect or a "death magic" one? So on and so forth. If ypu're going to have chronomancy be a thing, give it a niche and don't let other forms of magic encroach too much upon it.

Nah, I'd rather there be multiple ways to skin cats. In addition to improving game balance (you don't have to worry about one specific flavor of mage completely overshadowing the others), thinking about the ways different types of magic could approach the same problem is simply fun.

Dragonexx
2017-08-09, 01:58 PM
There's this from a homebrew sourcebook that explains the risks of adding time travel to your games.

Breaking the Narrative

Under no circumstances should magic, or phlebtonium of any kind, ever be allowed to break the narrative. That's not to say that magic shouldn't be allowed to derail the plot; that's the whole point of having it. If it can't, there's no reason to play a magic PC. However, around the table, causality generally runs in one direction. Events occurring around the table are reflected in the game world, and events occuring in the game world have to be talked about around the table. So causality in the game world has to have a definite flow to it; you can't affect the past since it's already been played through. The game quickly becomes impossible to play if the ability to travel back in time is thrown in casually; if you have to consider the possibility of a time traveller to show up and try to change things whenver you do anything, you have an adjucation nightmare. A few forms of time travel are acceptable; into the future (with no return) is fine, as is actually rewinding (like the Wish spell does); there's no risk of a time traveller showing up, and narrative time still flows in one direction, it just skips over things.

Everything that has to do with time in the game world should take into account the narrative time; causality only flows in one direction at the table, and the game world should reflect the way the table works. Trying to mess with the direction of causality in-world is fine in a single-author novel where you know how the (from an outside perspective) future is going to go, but doing so breaks down a cooperative game, not only through breaking your ability to understand how your actions will be reflected, but also through breaking people's understanding of how the world works and taking them out of the story.

Likewise, the fourth wall should remain intact. Magic should not "only target characters played by people wearing blue shirts", for instance. That just turns your game nonsensical.

JellyPooga
2017-08-09, 02:19 PM
Nah, I'd rather there be multiple ways to skin cats. In addition to improving game balance (you don't have to worry about one specific flavor of mage completely overshadowing the others), thinking about the ways different types of magic could approach the same problem is simply fun.

There still needs to be something that chronomamcy does that others don't, though. Otherwise, why bother with it? It can be as simple as being a particular combination of spells that you'd otherwise have to poach from multiple other sources, but that's...weak. Evocation and Conjuration in d&d can both do blasting, but each has spells that are uniquebto their field.

JeenLeen
2017-08-09, 02:27 PM
In general, I'd recommend leaving time magic out and just having other magic exist. It's challenging to be metaphysically consistent and not break the game (either in the OP sense or in the sense of how annoying it is go back and redo things because someone changed the past. Moreso if your enemies are also using chronomancy to counter your chronomancy, and so on).

IF you want it, I'd recommend make actual time travel (beyond a few seconds) impossible, either by magical law (literally impossible) or in effect (due to consequences).
One big plus of how oWoD Mage handled time magic is that, if you change the past, you likely get Paradox. If you change it significantly enough to alter the present (which almost all changes were), you probably die. If you change it really significantly, you probably die and the changes you made get unmade. Time magic mainly existed for haste/slow effects, scrying into the past to get info (though it was dangerous, as I note later), or... well, it could do other stuff, but I don't think any of us considered getting Time magic higher, so I forget the details.

It also had something built in to make scrying the past difficult. For one thing, you could make a temporal shield so that it is hard to scry your vicinity. If you scry the past, and someone in the past had a magical sense on to see scrys into the past, that person could kill someone because you scried them, which would almost certainly kill you. I think by 'RAW' (insofar as that has meaning in oWoD), you could scry the future... which got wonky... but my DM just ruled that scrying the future gave you a vague prophetic sense, not actually let you see the future, since otherwise someone there looking for scrys could change their actions based on you scrying, and you get a feedback loop that makes it impossible to plan missions against other mages uses Time.

It was also implied that the Vampire Discipline that did time magic, Temporis, couldn't change the far past.

Knaight
2017-08-09, 03:39 PM
Any level of chronomancy can work for some games, up to and including straight up time travel. However, there are a few things that have the capacity to warp a campaign until they're about it, and time travel is really high on that list.

Psyren
2017-08-09, 04:50 PM
There still needs to be something that chronomamcy does that others don't, though. Otherwise, why bother with it? It can be as simple as being a particular combination of spells that you'd otherwise have to poach from multiple other sources, but that's...weak. Evocation and Conjuration in d&d can both do blasting, but each has spells that are uniquebto their field.

I completely agree with that, and there are. Time Regression for instance is a power I don't really see fitting anywhere else, outside of Wish/Miracle (which are explicitly designed to be able to mimic everything anyway.)

And keep in mind that a power doesn't have to be totally unique to still be niche protection. Some abilities can be available to multiple schools/techniques, but at higher levels or limited in some way. For example, Shadow Conjuration allows illusionists to horn in on the conjurer's summoning territory, but their summons are lower level for when you get them and have flaws that true conjured creatures don't, so you'd still be much more likely to run a conjurer if you wanted a dedicated summoner. Or at the very least, if you wanted an illusionist summoner, you would have to go for a very specific build (Shadowcraft Mage) and even then you'd be faced with downsides, like not being able to go into Malconvoker.

GungHo
2017-08-10, 08:39 AM
Time travel (against the arrow of time) is one of those things you allow in when you have decided to Flashpoint your campaign world and start over. It can be fun to try, but there is no going back.

Vogie
2017-08-10, 09:52 AM
I think that the connection to straight up Time Travel, specifically Regression/going back in time is what is hampering the discussion. Chronomancy can certainly be used to mimic certain things, but I would add a reason why it isn't widely practiced - Such as:

An unknown chronomancer going back to remove the writings from ever existing, before he or she even learned it, causing a paradox and blinking themselves from existence.
A Technological or training-based limiter of some variety (similar to the one used in the Ant Man movie) - if one uses chronomancy without a limiter, often they age themselves to death, hitting the Benjamin Button and eventually becoming a fetus, becoming unstuck from time, or worse, becoming frozen in time mid-spell due to a loop or an aggressive expansion of time.
A mechanical lock on only being able to travel forward, or having a set period of time (like 2 minutes) to manipulate, or require an equal amount of foresight (such as in Primer) to use the time power. Perhaps that means they have to compress time before they expand it.
All of the above


Chronomancy could include things that aren't normally covered in typical abilities, such as:

Round manipulation


making opponents lose rounds & giving allies additional rounds
adjusting initiative order
showing up multiple times in initiative
saving actions for later, or preemptively using actions

"healing" using save scumming/gray health/Temp HP
moving experience points (or levels) around and giving temp experience (or levels)
increasing and decreasing the duration of effects


In addition to being able to do things like increase/decrease dexterity & reflex saving throws, Blur/Displacement/True Strike effects, haste/slow, Hold/free person, Daze/fatigue/exhaustion/blink effects, and doing things like rituals faster than normal. The pinnacle of chronomancy is probably still a limited wish (based on time), Foresight and Stopping time completely

NichG
2017-08-10, 12:23 PM
The stuff about redundant spell effects or 'many ways to skin a cat' makes me think that perhaps the idea of building character ability sets around 'ability to manipulate X' where X is a specific aspect of nature like time, space, fire, etc, is kind of backwards.

You could instead make something based on the idea that you're going to describe how time itself reacts to things that various characters might already be able to do. So 'the splatbook of time' would describe how very powerful blows or very high level spells, historically important moments, etc could just by their very nature create specific temporal side-effects, and then present various ways that characters can intentionally take advantage of those side-effects. That better avoids the 'well, suddenly we have to worry about the fact that actually non-chronomancers can get their hands on a few time-related spells, so what makes a chronomancer special?' problem.

Psyren
2017-08-10, 01:08 PM
For the record, I'm fine with Chronomancer-specific abilities, like Time Regression as I mentioned. I just think that some abilities, particularly the workaday lower-level ones, should have redundancy. This is especially true for abilities nearly every party will want access to, like healing or Haste.

Imagine if only a Chronomancer could Haste - When people sat down to play the game, they would say "someone needs to play Chrono" - similar to what happened in the early days of D&D with "somebody needs to be the cleric." You should never have people mandating classes and builds, only roles, and sometimes not even then.

It would be like if only Transmuters had access to flight, and only via the Fly spell - no summoned or reanimated monsters could do it, no force disks could lift people up, no shapeshifters would have it, and so on. It would be terrible.

Vogie
2017-08-10, 01:21 PM
For the record, I'm fine with Chronomancer-specific abilities, like Time Regression as I mentioned. I just think that some abilities, particularly the workaday lower-level ones, should have redundancy. This is especially true for abilities nearly every party will want access to, like healing or Haste.

Imagine if only a Chronomancer could Haste - When people sat down to play the game, they would say "someone needs to play Chrono" - similar to what happened in the early days of D&D with "somebody needs to be the cleric." You should never have people mandating classes and builds, only roles, and sometimes not even then.

It would be like if only Transmuters had access to flight, and only via the Fly spell - no summoned or reanimated monsters could do it, no force disks could lift people up, no shapeshifters would have it, and so on. It would be terrible.

No, I completely agree. I'm down with replicating certain things between classes. No one should be required to bring along a rogue for traps and theft, a cleric for heals and buffs, a Shaman for Heroism/Bloodlust, et cetera.

Obviously we're not saying that a things like Slow or Haste should be set up for chronomancers only. In fact, the OP was looking on whether it would be "a magic skill" in their (presumably) Homebrew. That could mean that it could be a class, it could be styles of elementalism, or a wizard/sorcerer/shaman school. For example, they could break all spells into Earth, Wind, Fire, Water, Lifeforce, Time, Spirit, Good, & Evil, instead of Abjuration, conjuration, divination, enchantment, evocation, illusion, necromancy, transmutation, & Universal. If that's the case, a "time school" called Chronomancy would be fine.

NichG
2017-08-10, 01:39 PM
Perhaps it's mostly me just going off on a system design tangent then. I've been reading a lot of xianxia lately, and one pattern in that genre is that distinctions that in D&D would be considered to be modeled by different classes, end up being more like different stats. So different kinds of cultivator have better or worse body, consciousness, spiritual energy, what-have-you, but they all basically have all of whichever of those things the author included in their particular cosmology. So then you have things like, when a body-cultivator uses a lightning power versus when a consciousness-cultivator uses a lightning power, its not that they're achieving the same effect in different ways but its rather than their mastery of the effect benefits differently from different specializations or capacities. The guy with a lot of energy throws a big lightning bolt, whereas the guy with a developed consciousness can throw 100 individually-targeted homing tendrils of lightning, whereas the body guy ends up storing the charge in his own body until he almost explodes in order to make up for poorer reserves of power.

So my thought with these highly specific disciplines of magic is that its kind of a problem that comes about because the class system of D&D started with very broad strokes (e.g. 'wizard'), so making additional specializations tends to be a bit underwhelming. Whereas if you came at the design from the idea that e.g. Haste is Haste is Haste, but rather than the spell just being a static effect, there are different masteries one can achieve in using Haste, and a specialized chronomancer would generally be further along on those masteries than a generalist, rather than having the question be one of access in the first place.

So, concretely, one could say something like:

Changing the rate at which a person can act is a facet of the manipulation of time. When doing so, one must consider certain limitations:

- Maintaining speed of thought in proportion to speed of action. At low competency, a character can only move faster in 'blind' ways, such as running in a straight line. At moderate competency, a character can basically keep up and is able to act as normal in the accelerated frame. At high competency, a character's thoughts can be accelerated even beyond action, gaining benefits to passive defenses and initiative. This competency is determined by ...
- Dealing with the interface between fast time and slow time. At low competency, acting across the interface is impossible without the character taking damage/suffering bad debuffs from the time shear. At medium competency, the interface is permeable and the character can attack/act across it, bring things in and out of their time bubble, etc. At high competency, the permeability can be controlled and used as a shield against effects. This competency is determined by ...

and so on...

In that sense, a 'chronomancer' would be more like someone who gains benefits when using time-related spells rather than the guy who has the time related spells. Of course what I'm suggesting requires significant rewrites to fit it into an existing thing like D&D, which is why its maybe a bit of a side-track...

TeChameleon
2017-08-11, 03:02 AM
Another potential limiter for time-travel would be a (Lawful Neutral?) Time Police or Clockroaches- time travel isn't actually all that hard, but the more 'noise' or mess you make (i.e. the bigger/more far-reaching the effects), the more chance you'll have that Clockroaches will show up and eat you, or that the Time Police will pop up, undo what you did, and kick you solidly inna fork before popping out again. So undoing the action that you took that same round would probably be safe enough, but if you shove the BBEG out of phase with reality so that you can loot his castle in peace, you're gonna be roach chow.

One thing I'd be very careful with, though, is making the action economy very easy to track, if chronomancers can mess with it.

Other Chronomancer 'toys'- perfect stealth, by sliding slightly out of phase and using a parallel timestream to move through an area (of course, it should include a percentile die roll with a low chance that the parallel timeline is somehow dramatically different than the 'real' timeline, resulting in, for example, them climbing a tower that's not there in the 'real' world :smallamused:)
- a Mordenkainen's Magnificent Mansion-alike, again achieved by going slightly out of phase with regular time
- short-term mind-wiping- just rewind the target a bit, and whatever you did never actually happened to them
- truly horrific traps- forget Groundhog Day, how about Groundhog Nanosecond? Whoever got stuffed in there wouldn't even be able to realize that they were trapped.

JeenLeen
2017-08-11, 08:49 AM
Another potential limiter for time-travel would be a (Lawful Neutral?) Time Police or Clockroaches- time travel isn't actually all that hard, but the more 'noise' or mess you make (i.e. the bigger/more far-reaching the effects), the more chance you'll have that Clockroaches will show up and eat you, or that the Time Police will pop up, undo what you did, and kick you solidly inna fork before popping out again. So undoing the action that you took that same round would probably be safe enough, but if you shove the BBEG out of phase with reality so that you can loot his castle in peace, you're gonna be roach chow.

Check out the homebrew (but very well-received) Genius: the Transgression, for nWoD. It has something akin to this for large uses of time travel. I don't have a link, but I think you can find it easily via Google. (In it, the time police are actually somewhat short-staffed and/or corrupt, but you can take the concept and make it efficient as a safeguard.)

It also has a neat thing that some things that seem like they'd be big deals, aren't. This allows the DM to let the PCs do some cool time stuff. For example, maybe a village gets wiped out by a volcano. They use time magic to relocate the villagers before the volcano hits. You'd think that's a big deal, saving all those lives?
Well, it turns out the end result was about nil, since you wisely choose a somewhat isolated location. For whatever reasons, their long-term impact on the space-time continuum is minor, so it gets a pass. Maybe you get a warning to be more careful in the future, but the villagers are left alive since it's more trouble than it's worth to undo it (and the time police aren't heartless jerks.)

The Glyphstone
2017-08-11, 09:38 AM
Or if you really want some in-depth thought, try and track down a copy of Continuum, a somewhat obscure and extremely niche RPG specifically all about time travel and time travellers.

Millstone85
2017-08-13, 03:02 PM
Or if you really want some in-depth thought, try and track down a copy of Continuum, a somewhat obscure and extremely niche RPG specifically all about time travel and time travellers.Yeah, I mentioned that. And this thread made me look it up some more.

http://projects.inklesspen.com/fatal-and-friends/images/885c2bcfaf816648f794818a543519689a3376c0e939fc6e28 37eb9c72b08564.jpeg
And I take back what I said about not liking the Interregnum much.

The idea, it seems, is that the natural universe doesn't know how to handle time paradoxes, at least not in a way that supports life. So the people of the Antedesertium are trying to engineer a multiverse, experimenting with many grandfather paradoxes and even establishing their empire right into prehistory. Their enemies, the Inheritors, are instead enforcing a singular timeline where predestination paradoxes are a relatively safe bet, a timeline that notably leads to humanity becoming the Inheritors.

The Interregnum is a period of chaos between the fall of the Antedesertium and the rise of Inheritor-approved history... or is it a temporal no man's land in a war that can have no more end than beginning... or is it where another timeline splits from this one?

The first book is written from the point of view that the whole multiverse deal is pure folly. Player characters are essentially time cops from a period not long before the advent of the Inheritors, and whatever their feelings on the matter this is the history they must enforce.

It was to be followed by a book offering you to play sympathizers of the Antedesertium. Somewhat appropriately, troubled publishing means the book both exists and does not.

AnBe
2017-08-15, 03:41 PM
Thank you all for your input. After reading these posts, I am sure now that I will not include Chronomancy in my new game. Chronomancy is cool, but it can be confusing at times and I see players abusing it left and right. Such power should not be in the hands of the PCs, unless it was after they had retired from adventuring and become quasi-gods or something like that. Very hard to balance time magic, and I am actually trying to keep this game simple, like more simple than D&D is.

shadowkat678
2017-08-15, 05:25 PM
Time magic can be extremely powerful, that goes without saying. Making time speed up or slow down, time travel (This can be very game breaking and confusing), and other abilities that Chronomancy offers will definitely affect the world it is present in. My opinion is that it comes down to the level of power in the end.

I personally wouldn't let any players have access to ridiculously powerful time magic, though it can be used as an interesting plot device for a big bad. Depends on the style of play that you and your players want to go for, and Chronomancy will become however you describe it in your own campaign and world.

I'd make a ruling that the powerful magic can be a thing, but it would have very deadly consequences. It could also be very unpredictable. For example, fortune telling could be a form of this, since it's looking at destiny through time. However, the messages are often vague, because the magic is very hard to control and only gives a "sense" of what's coming.

ATHATH
2017-08-16, 12:34 AM
Whatever you do, do NOT add (backwards) time travel of any sort to your system. It just creates headaches. Slowing down and speeding up stuff is okay, as long as you anticipate your players slowing an enemy's heart or brain to a near-stop or hyper-analyzing your time slow down/speed up mechanics.

Psyren
2017-08-17, 11:53 AM
Whatever you do, do NOT add (backwards) time travel of any sort to your system. It just creates headaches. Slowing down and speeding up stuff is okay, as long as you anticipate your players slowing an enemy's heart or brain to a near-stop or hyper-analyzing your time slow down/speed up mechanics.

I think small-scope backwards travel should be allowed at higher levels - no more than a round or two, but enough to undo a disaster and reroll or even try something new entirely. Another rewind ability I think would be fun and minimally disruptive would be an effect that lets you force a foe to repeat actions they took in a previous round.

ATHATH
2017-08-17, 11:54 PM
I think small-scope backwards travel should be allowed at higher levelsNo, it should not. Backwards time travel will give you nothing but headaches and philosophical dilemmas.

For example: What happens to the people who were in the previous timeline? Do they cease to exist, to be replaced by the people from the new timeline? By going back in time, did you just kill everybody (except for you) in the universe?

Blacky the Blackball
2017-08-18, 04:43 AM
I don't normally blow my own trumpet on here (toot! toot!), but I've written some quite comprehensive time travel rules that you can get for free here (http://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/194619/Immortals-Companion).

They're written for D&D 5e, but to be honest they're pretty system-neutral.

I use the alternate and branching timelines approach to time travel, because it's the most flexible, and combine it with a concept of "San Dimas Time" and "True History" in order to allow for changing of history (otherwise alternate-time-line time travel is boring and might as well just be plane-shifting to parallel worlds). It's all been carefully worked out to be playable and to avoid paradoxes. While I'm not saying that it's impossible to form a paradox using my time travel mechanics, I don't currently know of a way in which it can be done.

In my experience, the big issue with time travel isn't that it breaks campaigns - it's that once the PCs have access to time travel it rapidly takes over the campaign and the game rapidly becomes about time travel. That's not necessary a problem, if that's the sort of campaign you want to play; but it can be hard to put the genie back in the bottle if you were hoping for a different type of campaign.

Psyren
2017-08-18, 09:10 AM
No, it should not. Backwards time travel will give you nothing but headaches and philosophical dilemmas.

For example: What happens to the people who were in the previous timeline? Do they cease to exist, to be replaced by the people from the new timeline? By going back in time, did you just kill everybody (except for you) in the universe?

Relax, it's magic, you can handwave paradoxes like that easily. I'm not proposing anything radical here - just a magic version of what psionics already lets you do right now by RAW (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/psionic/powers/timeRegression.htm). I don't see you complaining about that.

Knaight
2017-08-18, 12:07 PM
No, it should not. Backwards time travel will give you nothing but headaches and philosophical dilemmas.

For example: What happens to the people who were in the previous timeline? Do they cease to exist, to be replaced by the people from the new timeline? By going back in time, did you just kill everybody (except for you) in the universe?

That's not necessarily a problem, but it does do a good job demonstrating how backwards time travel can basically take over a campaign. If it's about it anyways, cool. Otherwise you're playing with fire.

Lord Torath
2017-08-18, 03:37 PM
I think small-scope backwards travel should be allowed at higher levels - no more than a round or two, but enough to undo a disaster and reroll or even try something new entirely. Another rewind ability I think would be fun and minimally disruptive would be an effect that lets you force a foe to repeat actions they took in a previous round.2E AD&D's Tome of Magic's gotcha covered!

6th level clerical spell Reverse Time undoes the targets actions for the previous round. The dragon did not, in fact, breathe on you last round. All your actions last round still take effect, though, so it still retains any damage you inflicted on it, while any damage it inflicted on you, any spells it cast, are undone.

3rd level clerical spell Rigid Thinking keeps the target repeating his previous action until the spell expires. Where "repeating action" really means "taking actions to achieve the same end your previous actions were trying to achieve." If your target was shooting arrows at your warrior, he will keep shooting arrows at the warrior (or charge into melee combat with the warrior when his arrows run out), even after he sees your wizard cast Protection from Normal Missiles on him. Of course, this is more of a Sphere of Thought spell rather than a Time spell.

5th level cleric spell Repeat Action keeps the target repeating the same action for the same result. The archer from before would keep firing arrows at your fighter, even if he moved out of range or behind hard cover.

There's also the Sands of Time spell from Dragon Kings (2E Dark Sun hardcover) that reduces the effects of several centuries of erosion from the object you cast it on.

I really like the Time Duplicate psionic power (2E The Will and the Way softcover): You from three rounds ahead jumps back in time one round to help you out.

Round 1. Initiate this power.
Round 2. Future You appears from Round 3, and helps Present You fight. Or sing a duet, or whatever. At the end of this round, Future You disappears, returning to the beginning of Round 4.
Round 3. Present You travels back in time to the beginning of Round 2, becoming Future You. No version of you is present for this round.
Round 4. Future/Present You arrives from the end of Round 2, and becomes the only you.

martixy
2017-08-19, 08:56 PM
Pitching in with my own 2 cents:

I vehemently dislike any significant fluckery with time.

- By now I find all of the twists you can do trite and boring.
- It's too easy to spot holes in the plot.
- It never goes well.
- It tends to be abused as a deus ex machina or plot device to fix the GMs campaign.
- Poorly. It is internally inconsistent and only worsens the situation. It can never be made consistent.
- It WILL break your world. It WILL double-henderson your campaign so fast, it'll make your head spin.

The short term payoff is nowhere NEAR worth it for the long-term damage such shenanigans will do to your universe(see: Star Trek).

This does not include short term mucking. That one is available, since it's significantly harder to get it wrong, and most abilities that allow it have clearly defined limits.

Illustrating my strong convictions - my world has two overgods, one of which is the goddess of time. She can't travel through time. Let alone some poor 20th level schmuck.

EccentricCircle
2017-08-22, 10:29 AM
As many have said Time Travel is the difficult thing to get right. When it works well, it can be amazing, but getting it to work well can be hard to pull off.

My general rule of thumb is that if you add time travel to your game, then the game becomes about time travel. There isn't really a middle ground there, which means that you either have to be very prepared, or very ready to change things as the plot demands, and basically make things up as you go to fit the changes your players make.

If you keep time travel out of the hands of the players it can be possible to set up some awesome time loops and predestination stuff. When they control it you kind of have to work together as a group to allow that stuff to happen.

Anecdote of my favorite time travel game:
I run several groups, all set in the same world. One new year we were meeting up for gaming, and I said that everyone should pick their favourite past character, and we'd have them all team up for a crisis crossover.

One player wanted to play a character who had last been seen going to become the apprentice of a powerful wizard dedicated to protecting the world from mystical threats. He'd not played that character for a while.

A couple of other players wanted to play their steampunk airship crew, from a game set a few hundred years later. Once I knew there would be characters from both eras it was clear that some time travel would be needed to set up the plot.

The steampunk game was ongoing, but didn't have the player of the wizard's apprentice in it. So I realised that I could set up something cool, and wrote an adventure where the airship crew encountered an old wizard, who defended the world from mystical threats. They helped him to close a portal to the beyond and then went on their way.

Then for the team up game, I introduced those characters by having them receive a letter from the old wizard, telling them to meet him at a certain time and place. Upon arrival they were sucked through a time portal, and encountered not their friend, but his younger self. He was now a PC once more, who had no idea that his character had been an NPC in another game.

Later in the game the characters from the future ended up showing the letter (an actual handout) to the apprentice, at which point he realised that the P.S. (which they had been unable to make sense of), was a message to him from his future self, and helped them solve the final puzzle and save the world.

So much could have gone wrong, but it all played out perfectly, and the players were very impressed that i'd managed to write a time loop into the game, despite not knowing precisely what they would do.