Time Travel: how to plan a game with it

[Quixotic1]

I've had this game in the works for quite a while now, and it feels like it just might be too much story for me to handle.

The jist is as follows: each character receives an item/message/clue from a mysterious stranger that leads them to a location where they will be able to travel back in time to a specific date.

Around that time, terrible thing X happens.

If they stop X from occurring, Y happens instead.

The meat of the game will be discovering/dealing with various butterfly effect-type stuff, going back to the same point in time, etc.
There will hopefully be a significant moral quandary where they realize that terrible thing X really prevents more terrible thing Z.
And I will try and throw in a powerful organization that's aware of X, Y, Z and so on--is probably responsible for a lot of the stuff in motion--and the PC's ability to travel through time.

So...how would you begin to plan out this sort of thing? I want to make a flow chart, but I'm struggling to even know where to begin.
I think I need to start with various events and alternate timeline versions of those events and connect them with the different avenues the players will most likely take.

What do you think?

[Batcathat]

Have you checked out this (https://forums.giantitp.com/showthread.php?636964-Time-Travel) thread? Seems to touch on some of what you're thinking about, at least.

[Slipjig]

IMHO, the only way to have backwards time travel work in a game with any player agency is to have the players generate a new alternate timeline every time anyone travels backwards. Otherwise you have to explain why characters don't run into their earlier selves, or throw in some arbitrary rules where the universe will blow up if they interact with their prior selves or something. It also allows for chaos gremlin PCs who will take actions that would otherwise completely blow up the plot (e.g. killing their own parents).

[Quixotic1]

Have you checked out this (https://forums.giantitp.com/showthread.php?636964-Time-Travel) thread?Awesome thank you. Definitely gonna go through that.


IMHO, the only way to have backwards time travel work in a game with any player agency is to have the players generate a new alternate timeline every time anyone travels backwards. Otherwise you have to explain why characters don't run into their earlier selves, or throw in some arbitrary rules where the universe will blow up if they interact with their prior selves or something. It also allows for chaos gremlin PCs who will take actions that would otherwise completely blow up the plot (e.g. killing their own parents). Yeah, I was thinking each attempt/jump/whatever is a separate instance from the others, so no past selves or whatever.
I also don't have "chaos gremlin PCs" (great term) and refuse to play with such. So that helps.
I was thinking that the organization might run into them when they go back in time and might somehow know how many attempts they've made or which temporal thread they're currently on and sort of hint at that ("stand down. Subject is only in the second layer of entanglement. No imminent threat") to suggest a headache-inducing level of complexity and a really big scope.

[Jay R]

Here is the most straightforward way to plan a game with time travel.

A. Start running a game with time travel.
B. Make it possible for PCs and NPCs to go back in time to undo what other characters have done.
C. Re-run the scenario over and over, as different people go back to that point.
D. Save or sink the Titanic fifty or more times.
E. Realize that the game cannot ever end, and that you are sliding into chaos.
F. Give up.
G. Go back in time to the point where you decided to run a time travel game, and talk yourself out of it.
H. Based on this information from your future self, plan a different, more successful game.

Voila -- you have planned a game with time travel.

Yes, this is a joke - but the point is real. With that level of time travel, any success just means somebody who wants a different result will go back and try again. It might be somebody from a million years later, but that doesn't prevent it.

[Thrudd]

I think you need to start with the rules of time travel for your world. You can't plan out a scenario without knowing what is and isn't possible, what strategies the players will have at their disposal, what the motives of the different time travelers might be.

Are the time travelers "anchored" to their original starting point in the timeline? so if they spend four days in the past, they will return at a point four days from when they left? Or can they leave, spend any amount of time in the past or future, and return to the immediate point they left, so an observer would only see them blink away and blink back, seemingly having aged instantaneously.

How are people's memories affected? Clearly, the time travelers can't have their memories overwritten every time the past is changed. Are they immediately also aware of their new history, so they can have two or more sets of memories? What stops someone from going back in time before time travel was invented and changing enough that the tech is not discovered or so different people control it?

What stops people from erasing other people from existence by killing one or more parents, pre-birth? Is time travel actually travel to parallel universes that may be nearly identical to one another, but you can't change the past in your original universe, to which your personal flow of time is anchored? What happens to your life and memories if someone from another universe changes the past in your original universe? Can you ask someone from another universe to change your past so you get a better life or gain something?

To keep the game playable and sane, you'll need some pretty severe restrictions, I think.

[Quixotic1]

As far as the specifics, I was hoping to keep it as simple and limited as possible:

- the characters can only travel back in time to one specific point for a specific amount of time.

- traveling through time requires the use of a very specific substance found only in a singular place, so it's something only the PC's will/can do.

- they can change the past, resulting in immediate consequences upon their return. Sort of a divergent timeline idea. So no past selves or anything like that. The traveling method causes them to become unstuck from the stream or whatever.

Does that help?

[Thrudd]

Start with the motives. Whoever is manipulating the players into time traveling to these specific points, they want something. Are there two or more factions trying to change the timeline? Why will the PCs want do what the mysterious figure wants?

Along with this, you need to design an actual history for this world so you can track what will change. There must be a sequence of events, and for each possible outcome of the PCs' interventions, a different sequence of events with possibly a different end point. This is tied into the motives because you need to know what it is the mysterious figure wants to change/accomplish. Stop bad guys of the past from hurting people, not thinking about the butterfly effect?
Eliminate present and future enemies before they get too powerful and/or to get more powerful yourself?

So you should probably have a finite number of "nexus" points in each time period that will create a different timeline. The players shouldn't necessarily know what all of them are- some will be obvious, like killing or saving an important figure. Some will seem incidental, like saving a seemingly random person in the vicinity who should have died.

Finally, decide how to give the players some agency in this process- like they need to have clues dropped to them about what effect their actions will have, and eventually a choice between points/events to travel to. A moral quandary is not very interesting if the only choice is "do a thing or don't do a thing". Not doing something isn't what you want to happen in a game.
Better to have a choice between doing X or doing Y ( or Z). And it's only a meaningful choice if the players have an idea what the effect of each choice will likely be (though they probably shouldn't know 100%).

[farothel]

In the old Alternity game there was a book on alternate realities: Tangents. I've used that to send players to alternate realities that were back in time. That also solved the issues of meeting themselves.

[TheStranger]

Here is the most straightforward way to plan a game with time travel.

A. Start running a game with time travel.
B. Make it possible for PCs and NPCs to go back in time to undo what other characters have done.
C. Re-run the scenario over and over, as different people go back to that point.
D. Save or sink the Titanic fifty or more times.
E. Realize that the game cannot ever end, and that you are sliding into chaos.
F. Give up.
G. Go back in time to the point where you decided to run a time travel game, and talk yourself out of it.
H. Based on this information from your future self, plan a different, more successful game.

Voila -- you have planned a game with time travel.

Yes, this is a joke - but the point is real. With that level of time travel, any success just means somebody who wants a different result will go back and try again. It might be somebody from a million years later, but that doesn't prevent it.

Heh. This is pretty much my take on it. Time travel plots are cool in theory but boy is it hard to come up with something narratively satisfying that holds up to any kind of scrutiny. IMO the branching timelines approach fails on the first point because the timeline with the bad outcome isn’t undone (or worse, players may conclude that a timeline exists for each possible outcome, making their input irrelevant). And anything with a single timeline is vulnerable to repeated alterations.

You *might* be able to make a time travel plot work by having time travel be a thing that happens to the PCs rather than something that they or anybody else can do on command. You probably still create all sorts of paradoxes, but a firm rule of not being able to try again helps a lot.

I think time travel works in fiction because you can suspend your disbelief long enough to get through the story. But over several weeks or months of gaming sessions with 4-6 people actively engaging with a time travel mechanic and trying to think of ways to use it to solve problems, something is going to break.

[Quixotic1]

Maybe if I offered up some more specific information:

- each character will have a mysterious something or other from a mysterious somebody. This will bring them all to an abandoned underground complex in the woods.

- one of the features of this complex are several large psychotropic mushroom gardens. It is the consumption of these fungi that allow someone to travel in time, but only to a specific date in the recent past, and at a cumulative cost to the traveler.

- something bad happened on that day in the past, which has something to do with preventing something even worse in the future.

- the meat of the game will be attempting to prevent the bad thing, understand the worse thing and avoid the vague and ominous forces at work.

I hope that helps provide a little more direction.

[Batcathat]

Maybe if I offered up some more specific information:

- each character will have a mysterious something or other from a mysterious somebody. This will bring them all to an abandoned underground complex in the woods.

- one of the features of this complex are several large psychotropic mushroom gardens. It is the consumption of these fungi that allow someone to travel in time, but only to a specific date in the recent past, and at a cumulative cost to the traveler.

- something bad happened on that day in the past, which has something to do with preventing something even worse in the future.

- the meat of the game will be attempting to prevent the bad thing, understand the worse thing and avoid the vague and ominous forces at work.

I hope that helps provide a little more direction.

So will the PCs be able to travel back and forth between the present and the past or will they just go there once and then not go back to the present until they have (hopefully) succeeded?

[Quixotic1]

The time-jump will last a certain amount of time, at which point they'll wake up on the floor of the complex. I'm assuming anywhere from a few hours to a couple days have gone by in the present, where as the time spent in the past will be far more elastic, but equally variable.

[jayem]

So will the PCs be able to travel back and forth between the present and the past or will they just go there once and then not go back to the present until they have (hopefully) succeeded?

'Obviously'* the players timeline has to be linear, which cuts out anything involving their timelines doing anything too interesting.
The easiest thing is if their timeline corrosponds to one that is somehow privileged. In which case...
Minimise effects from past to present
Minimise journeys that cross-over
Encourage them to 'fit in' to the past time line as much as possible.
Keeping the party together.

You could have time travel working in a splitting fashion (as observed this has messy philosophical questions, if they actually stop and think about it), in which case each time travellers experience is 'in order for them'.
Having the style of time travel where future-time and past-time are vaguely in sync, would also work (the mystical mushroom time travel would probably allow this). At that point you avoid the knottier timelines, any pre-interference would have to involve the long route for a step (and that gives plenty of chance to undo it).
The fewer trips made, the less knots are possible.

*Alternatively
You could try having some 'I will have prepared this' points. Which they get back if they close the timeline and don't if you have to coincidence it out.
Alternatively you'd need to try some 'dubious' gameplay methods (e.g. railroad). It's one of the cases where I could believe the payoff is worth it. But that is a heck of a gamble.

__
ETA, I'm of the opinion any complex time travel story lasts 3 episodes before destroying itself. (Dr Who, Quantum Leap, Sliders are of course not stories about time-travel, and so are exempt)

[Pauly]

Some thoughts

1) Is time resilient? i.e. does it resist change? e.g. if Nelson isn’t shot at Trafalgar is he killed by a disease 2 weeks later? If [bad person] is killed before they become famous will [different bad person with the same ideas] arise instead?
How much do you have to change in the past for the present to change?
2) if the past is changed will anyone but the PCs know? Has the 10th symphony always been Beethoven’s masterpiece? Will the quest giver be aware of the change or will they congratulate the PCs on a job done well regardless of outcome?
3) If the PCs can interact with the timeline who else can? Their motive will be to make the present a better place, but what constitutes “better”m their eyes?
4) can the PCs bring future tech to the past? Will the PCs be using ray guns and the like becoming the basis for gods, UFOs and myths, or are will they have to scrounge for equipment as in the terminator franchise?

[Quixotic1]

1) Is time resilient?...2) if the past is changed will anyone but the PCs know?...3) If the PCs can interact with the timeline who else can?...4) can the PCs bring future tech to the past?Hm...1, no. Change away.
2. Mmmaybe, sort of. The organization will be aware of changes, but not what they are, exactly.
3. Potentially whoever can find the underground base/grow project. Which will probably be...no one.
4. Sure, but I was thinking the jump would be less than 50 year's difference. So there probably wouldn't be much of a technology gap.

Some more details:

- each character received a padded manilla envelope containing an ominously letter and a key. The key has a paper tag with 1-9-8-2 written on it. The

- the letter helps the characters find an old radio station in the woods. There's a tunnel/secret underground complex (elements of a bomb shelter and a green house sort of mashed together) nearby. Each key opens one of the doors inside.
Some of the rooms look like abandoned fungi grow projects. Others look like old barracks, but they've been abandoned in the damp dark for long enough they're resembling mushroom gardens as well.

- the numbers station is the U.S.'s attempt to replicate a code that was used during WWII, but not for communication with Army Intelligence. There are a few bare snippets of information that suggest someone had broadcasted a signal (off-planet? Through time? Into another reality?), and that *something* had replied.

- investigating into the radio station will quickly reveal that it's still under surveillance by at least one branch of the government. At least, they seem like a branch of the government.

- there is *something* in the woods. The result of a government project gone wrong. Some kind of carnivorous, parasitic fungus?
Or maybe that radio broadcast was received by something from another world. And it answered.
Or maybe the tunnel was too deep and unearthed something that was sleeping in the dark earth.

- the mushrooms look like they could maybe be part of some MKULtra spinoff. Unlock the true potential of the human mind, Stoned Ape theory, connecting to the collective consciousness of the natural world, etc.
Or something from another world? Something drawn by the signals or through the tunnel, or something that manipulated humanity into sending/digging said things to allow it to come here?

- consuming a certain type of mushroom within the tunnel results in an intense psychotropic experience. Lucid dreams and hallucinations and something that certainly feels like time travel.
The characters travel to different dates in 1982. Different rooms lead to different dates.

- using the mushrooms to travel through time allows the fungus to release spores into the character's brain. The effects are almost unnoticeable at first, but eventually lead to severe mental and physical health issues. And possibly becoming unstuck in time.

- on March 13, the station sent out a reply to a complex coded message from an unknown source.
On March 15, a child went missing during a bad storm. The search party racked up hundreds of man hours over the next two weeks, but no one ever found anything. Not a body, not a scrap of clothing, not a single hair.

- if the players prevent the child from being stolen, the present is worse. More children go missing at a later date, or a huge storm destroyed most of the area, the whole town is made up of fungi-infected zombie-people?
The response sent out on the short waves somehow set all of this in motion. If they can just figure out what it is or what it means...

- there are more effigy mounds in Wisconsin than anywhere else in the U.S. Uncovered from one were a few shards of pottery, possibly containing the missing pieces of the code.

- one of the places where I'm struggling is that I don't want to give them too many definitive answers. I want to keep that "incomprehensible, unknown horror" sort of thing intact as much as possible. But the more I lean that way, the harder it is for me to form any kind of meaningful cause/effect relationships for the players to interact with.
I really want this one to be something that might give you a migraine if you think about it for too long. But I also want to to be clear what the goal is and what the options are in terms of achieving it.