TTRPG Timetravel

[C-Moon]

Hi, in Suzerain (meta-setting of SWADE) there are different Realms, some are just different areas of Earth, some pocket dimensions made by Gods and some are in completely different centuries!

Question: How do you deal with time-travel or any time-bending mechanics/adventures in your TTRPG?

[DataNinja]

The one time that I've involved Time Travel has been basically more as a transport to another location. One NPC was able to take them to The Future after getting come McGuffinite that let them jump really far in time, taking people with them. But there were rules and restrictions in place to stop any willy-nilly timestream stuff. It was mostly just a drastic locale change.

[C-Moon]

The one time that I've involved Time Travel has been basically more as a transport to another location. One NPC was able to take them to The Future after getting come McGuffinite that let them jump really far in time, taking people with them. But there were rules and restrictions in place to stop any willy-nilly timestream stuff. It was mostly just a drastic locale change.

Oh I dig it, like sort of 'time officer' type character? Keeps them in-line without breaking lore/character? Nice nice.

[Mutazoia]

Man...we just had this whole conversation a month or three back. We covered the alternate timeline theory, all the possible ways to handle a time paradox...

[DataNinja]

Oh I dig it, like sort of 'time officer' type character? Keeps them in-line without breaking lore/character? Nice nice.

Not so much time officer (though, as a time traveller, did have an innate sense of the rules of time travel), as the fact that they very much didn't want to cause anyone (especially not themself) to die by being in close temporal-proximity to their temporally-correct self. And could mostly only do fairly short time jumps without the McGuffinium. So it was really only useful for going to whens that you'd not existed in yet, and wouldn't ever expect to exist in (in this case, going to the far future to try and let the PCs PC up the place and fix things then).

Practically speaking, it meant that they didn't have the ability to do more than the one jump to any time period that was practical. Thus stopping the "hey, let's go places to see about messing stuff up." Because it would be fairly quickly pretty lethal if the worst happened.
(I know my players. I wanted my game to have a reasonable time to conclude. )

So, yeah, not so much artificial laws to try and keep things pure, as the timestream 'pushing back' against potential paradoxes, and working to fix itself if major breaches occur. Which time travellers tend to want to avoid, because they tend to value continuing to live. (Which also, in this cosmology, means time travellers can only truly change results that they don't know about. What has happened will happen, but you can change the specifics that aren't known. So future travelling can be very hard on the psyche, and isn't done often. Because if something horrible's happened... you know you can't stop it. If you do, something similar will just happen shortly, to protect timestream continuity.)

[JustIgnoreMe]

Your regular reminder that Continuum is, hands down, the best time travel rpg in existence.

[DataNinja]

Your regular reminder that Continuum is, hands down, the best time travel rpg in existence.

I did borrow the "Spanning" terminology for my own game, but hahahaha, no thanks, not getting into time combat. I could barely follow it reading the example.

[C-Moon]

Your regular reminder that Continuum is, hands down, the best time travel rpg in existence.

Not seen it before, I'll have to check it out!

[The Glyphstone]

Not seen it before, I'll have to check it out!

Sadly, further information is not available here.

[Saintheart]

Sadly, further information is not available here.

Surely you can tell me what time is it?

[Lord Shark]

Your regular reminder that Continuum is, hands down, the best time travel rpg in existence.

I prefer Timewatch, although Continuum is interesting in its own right. Continuum is a more serious and, if the word is applicable, realistic look at time travel, and requires careful bookkeeping to make sure you don't introduce paradoxes into your own time line. Timewatch is for when you want to hop around in the time stream battling psychic dinosaurs and sentient languages.