[3.5] How to mess with time in 6 easy steps.

[Emperor Tippy]

How to tell the future in 6 easy steps

Step 1: Be a Psion with the powers Force Dream, Schism and Time Hop, Mass
Step 2: Manifest the power Forced Dream on yourself
Step 3: Manifest Schism
Step 4: Have your Schismed mind manifest the power Time Hop, Mass on yourself to send yourself 15 hours into the future.
Step 5: Use a full round action to gain the days worth of memories from the Thought Bottle
Step 6: Use your swift action to activate Forced Dream, placing you back at before Step 4.

The set up for this is a room with a table and a though bottle in it. You also need an Orange Ioun Stone (or some other way to boost your ML to 21 so that your Schism can use mass time hop). At the end of the day, you place the days worth of memories into the thought bottle and leave it on the table. When you jump forward in time you gain those memories of living the time in between the jump and now, you then go back to before the jump but you take the memories with you.

Repeat as needed.

--
This is like super divination because you know what is coming, at least in general terms. It is also super spying.

I mean you don't have to be stealthy at all, or worry about being found out. Once you learn what you want (no matter how bloody you were or how many people found out), you send the knowledge back and reset.

---
The only real problem with this trick is if you die, it ends the loop.
The only real way to get around this is to effectively stutter the loop by combining it with Tleilaxu Ghola's save game mechanic.

Just activate the save game trick every time once you complete your hop and if you die on the iteration you are still outside the loop but you do retain all memories except for that last loop and you do know that you did something that resulted in your death that go through.

EDIT: Actually I found a better way to prevent deaths in the loop and retain your memories. Before you enter the loop you need to have used the spell Clone to growth yourself a Clone. Then, you leave your clone next to your thought bottle and upon your death it immediately awakens. You have it place it's memories inside the thought bottle so that they are now entered in the loop and you now remember everything up too and including your death.

[Deth Muncher]

Not only am I glad to see you back in action, Tippy, but it's good to know you haven't died. Haven't seen you around breaking the game lately.

But wait...you're using Psionics. Isn't magic your forte? What is this ludicrousness? Did you learn to bend Psionics to your will in your vacation?

[Elfin]

Wow...crazy.
Nice to see you back, Tippy.

[Emperor Tippy]

Not only am I glad to see you back in action, Tippy, but it's good to know you haven't died. Haven't seen you around breaking the game lately.

But wait...you're using Psionics. Isn't magic your forte? What is this ludicrousness? Did you learn to bend Psionics to your will in your vacation?

I've always liked Psionics and I just recently found out about the Save Game trick and that got me interested in messing around with time. This is the result. It's amazing what one can do with 20 minutes worth of boredom.

----
Oh, if you want extra security on your time hopping you should buy a Craft Contingent Spell Time Stop set to activate upon you being hit with a Mass Time Hop after you say uga buga. Thanks to forced dreaming you don't expend it and this gives you guaranteed security on the other end of the trip, to make sure that no one has readied actions to kill you when you appear (if they found out about your fun).

[Seffbasilisk]

Still saying, all the memories that never were, will clutter up the mind. You would likely be dealing with incredible Int, but even so.

[Myrmex]

Reminds me of that movie, Primer.

[Doc Roc]

:: shrug :: As you said, it basically is a variation on T_G's old save game trick, but not as cool. 3/5.

Good to see you back though!

[Myrmex]

:: shrug :: As you said, it basically is a variation on T_G's old save game trick, but not as cool. 3/5.

Good to see you back though!

Yo Tippy, I'm really happy for you, an imma let you finish, but T_G had one of the best time exploits of all time.

[Emperor Tippy]

:: shrug :: As you said, it basically is a variation on T_G's old save game trick, but not as cool. 3/5.

Good to see you back though!

Yep, mines cooler.

His doesn't let you remember everything that happened after you save. Mine does.

[Doc Roc]

It's actually not clear that you can target anything other than a whole creature with time hop. In general, powers and spells that affect you while schismed hit both minds or more accurately, the body you share. Unlike temporal acceleration, time hop lacks an exception clause for Schism.

Also, due to the wording of schism, you may need to have it up before you manifest forced dream.


Answer me a koan....

How fast is no action?

[Cicciograna]

Pardon my ignorance, but what is the "save game trick"?

[Emperor Tippy]

http://web.archive.org/web/200804161...d.php?t=737126

[Seffbasilisk]

...the Flash?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=odU1bHaYNDQ

[Fishy]

I love it, but if I were a hypothetical evil DM:

The subject reappears in exactly the same orientation and condition as before.

If you are not standing in the same place you were when your Schism manifested Time Hop, it arrives outside of your body.

If the space from which the subject departed is occupied upon his return to the time stream, he appears in the closest unoccupied space, still in his original orientation. Determine the closest space randomly if necessary.

If you are standing in the same place, the space is 'occupied', and a literal reading of the text pushes the Schism somewhere else.

Either way, a part of your mind ends up on the floor. Could get messy.

[Emperor Tippy]

Just to clear this up, you aren't sending the Schism into the future. The Schism is manifesting Time Hop, Mass to send the real mind into the future. Whether or not the Schism comes along really doesn't matter. I would say it does but I suppose that is up to the DM.

[Fishy]

Ah, so Schism is just for the extra action you need to do everything you have to do in the one round Forced Dream gives you. You could get the same result with Action Surge or Delay Power, right?

Wow, the causality of all this is weird.

[Indon]

I daresay that any mechanics use that involves the DM needing to fabricate rules for time travel is a fascinating one.

Just make sure to have your schism run away or something, because if he makes contact with your future self (which, after you return, was formerly your other past self), you could conceivably cause a chain reaction that would unravel the very fabric of the space-time continuum and destroy the entire universe. (If you're lucky, the destruction will be localized to the campaign)

Also, there's a book out there somewhere that lets you travel forward through time without any complicated magic or psionics, though at a fixed rate of an hour for every 3600 seconds of actual time that passes.

Wait, wait. Is this a joke, or is there really a D&D ability somewhere that lets your character move forward in time an hour for every hour that passes _outside_ the game?

The use of 'actual time' is confusing in this context.

[ericgrau]

I smell the plot to Final Fantasy 1.

[Oslecamo]

However, since the future hasn't hapened yet, there's nothing guaranteeing that what you've seen will actualy happen.

The principle of chaos will make that even if you have seen the future, this will result in small changes that will change the future, meaning you may only be fooling yourself thinking that the BBEG will rolll a 1 on his third save.

[Flickerdart]

But that isn't the point. Things like distribution of troops and traps will still be the same. The BBEG will still, likely, be in that very room, and have the same contingencies prepared to fire when the PCs enter. He'll still try to get off his seemingly innocent but devastating combo involving 3 rounds of casting Quickened Prestidigitation, but now you'll know that he's a threat.

[Emperor Tippy]

However, since the future hasn't hapened yet, there's nothing guaranteeing that what you've seen will actualy happen.

The principle of chaos will make that even if you have seen the future, this will result in small changes that will change the future, meaning you may only be fooling yourself thinking that the BBEG will rolll a 1 on his third save.

Ah, but the only variable is your actions. Nothing else changes. With enough iterations and an intelligent enough character, especially if combined with the hypercognition power, one should be able to get pretty much whatever result one desires if it is something that isn't physically impossible, no matter what actions you take.

And sure, while you loose out on the random dice rolls, you gain something much better. Total knowledge of your enemies abilities and standard attack routines. Basically, if I manifest X then 99/100 iterations the baddy does Y.

[PlzBreakMyCmpAn]

I smell the plot to Final Fantasy 1.

So true.

For those of us who are too lazy too look this up could you explain the powers and why they allow you to do what you say. I believe you and all but Im sleepy

[Emperor Tippy]

So true.

For those of us who are too lazy too look this up could you explain the powers and why they allow you to do what you say. I believe you and all but Im sleepy

Forced Dream is a rounds/level power. Once it is manifested, at any time during it's duration you can activate it as a swift action to reset your current turn. That wipes out everything that has happened since the beginning of your turn and you are the only one who remembers what occurred.

Time Hop, Mass sends you hours/level into the future.

So, since your turn starts in the past (before you are affected by Mass Time Hop), you can use Forced Dreaming to go to the future and then back to the past.

A thought bottle let's you store or retrieve up too a full days memories as a full round action. This means that you still have your swift action. So you get sent to the future, use the thought bottle to gain the next days worth of memories, and then activate Forced Dreaming.

Now, all you retain is your memory. So you remember everything that was placed in the thought bottle.

[The Rose Dragon]

This feels like the plot of Butterfly Effect, but in reverse.

[Doc Roc]

I do not see that you can target either the schismed mind or the real mind separately.
Nothing else lets you do so that doesn't have some very specific language, I see no reason why this would be an exception with no exception.

[Fishy]

The real problem is that the contents of the thought bottle are in the causal past of you reading the thought bottle. Until what you put in the bottle matches exactly what you read, you have a timeline that doesn't work.

The other problem with this plan is- what if some jerk with a hammer smashes your bottle between when you fill it and when you read it again?

[Emperor Tippy]

I do not see that you can target either the schismed mind or the real mind separately.
Nothing else lets you do so that doesn't have some very specific language, I see no reason why this would be an exception with no exception.

What are you talking about? Nothing of mine cares about the Schism at all. The only thing Schism does is manifest Mass Time Hop. Whether or not said schismed mind comes along (I believe it does as it is part of your mind) is utterly irrelevant.

[Doc Roc]

What are you talking about? Nothing of mine cares about the Schism at all. The only thing Schism does is manifest Mass Time Hop. Whether or not said schismed mind comes along (I believe it does as it is part of your mind) is utterly irrelevant.

Then I must be missing the part where some of you stays behind to actually experience the day. Because thought bottle memories can only be retrieved by the person who stored them, and time hop means you spent your day wallowing outside the timestream.

[Nohwl]

i thought you left, good to know you're back.

[Kyeudo]

I don't see how this works. The Thought Bottle never gets filled, because you spend the day outside of time and then warp back to the begining of the day, so you never get any memories out of the Thought Bottle.