[GroupDesign] - Mix Your Own Metaplot

[Andrew Morris]

Doug, two timestreams is a fine way to go, because it's probably easier for most folks to wrap their brains around than a non-temporal, non-dimensional un-space. The only thing I have to add is that if we go this way, we are accepting that the human timestream can be rewritten. I think there was some initial resistance to this idea.

Here's my suggestion around the more blatant problems that go with this. Instead of Archivists being able to jump in to the host-time tunnel (heh, Time Tunnel) at any point, we can say that there are "cracks" into the tunnel through which an Archivist must enter. That way, the GM can define the available time periods at any moment in Archivist-time. No, you can't get to the Kennedy assassination right now, but you can get in six years before it happens. Want to try changing things from then, or will you wait until an opening into the right time period opens up?

[Sydney Freedberg]

I think I understand what Doug and Andrew are saying (and I thought GNS Theory made my head hurt!), and I agree. This is what I was trying to get at with the idea of moving "windows" of access into different eras -- a concept that I now realize only makes sense if there's a parallel "tunnel" of Archivist-time in whose frame of reference the windows/nexi/openings/cracks can be seen to move.

EDIT: Now everybody stop being so bloody creative so I can finish my 3,000-word article due next week, dammit....

[Doug Ruff]

Actually, I'm tempted to approach this one backwards:

Events such as the Kennedy Assassination are relatively "fixed" in Host-Time (actually, it's more like Host-Spacetime, but let's not go there right now...)

It's still possible to go there, but the events surrounding the assassination are so well documented, that it's virtually impossible to do anything useful there.

But by going six years down the "tunnel", the Archivists have more latitude to make changes - and these changes can undermine the events of the assassination, which introduces "cracks" in the solidity of the documented information, which make it possible later (that is, later in Archivist-Time) to go to the assassination and do something.

Have you ever played the Chrononauts card game? I see the whol Archivist Nemesis conflict as a massive game for control of the major events of history ("nodes", if you will) by the manipulation of the surrounding events, followed by a dramatic "capture" of the node itself.

This also means that, in Archivist-Time, the Kennedy Event has changed hands several times - sometimes he is in the "assassinated" state, sometimes he is in the "survives the assassination attempt" state - which brings us neatly back to Schrodinger's War

[Andrew Morris]

Doug, I like it. Print it, wrap it, ship it. Seriously, this is my vote for the "official way things are" for our game, and I think we should take the concept, flesh it out a bit more, without any "but we could do it this way" conversations. Changing history is possible, but it's hard, requires a lot of creativity and grunt work, and is a real reward to the play group -- or a real punishment, if they let the enemy get away with it.

With this as the model, though, I'm thinking a triad of opposed factions would be cooler. Instead of the Archivists/Nemesis, you have Archivists, the Nemesis, and...something else. Dark Archivists, maybe? Each group could have its own agenda and cool stuff, which could be detailed in our much-talked-about-but-unworked-on expansion modules. Anyone here ever play PlanetSide? It's my secret, guilty pleasure ("Kinnison" and "Damon" on Emerald server; say hi if you play). Anyway, that's the setup of the game -- three opposing empires, each with a mutually exclusive ideology, engaged in perpetual war. We don't have to limit ourselves to three, of course, but it's a nice prime number, low, but allowing for much more complex interactions than two.

Oh, and duh! Uhm, how come none of us throught of "Schrodinger's War" as the name of the game? Personally, I love it.

[Sydney Freedberg]

Doug, I like it. Print it, wrap it, ship it. Seriously, this is my vote for the "official way things are" for our game, and I think we should take the concept, flesh it out a bit more, without any "but we could do it this way" conversations.... [and]how come none of us throught of "Schrodinger's War" as the name of the game? Personally, I love it.

Agreed. Here's my vote for the "Doug Ruff Time Tunnel Theory" as the "reality" we're trying to model.

EDIT: So do we take votes and then proceed to a new thread to work out mechanics? Or do we still need to figure out other metaplot issues first, e.g. how to depict social change and what the "macro issue" is?

And Schrodinger's War does make a great title -- although it (a) requires a little physics knowledge to appreciate and (b) relegates non-Time Travel setting options to distinctly second-class status. That said, we're doing so much conceptual work on the Time Travel aspects of the game, it's so damn sexy (hell, I was resistant for a long time -- another "Sydney was wrong, you're all right" moment), and the rules for it are going to have to be so good in order to work that it's going to dominate the game no matter what we do.

[Andrew Morris]

According to the method we set up at the start of this, I believe we should request that Tobias either call for a vote or arbitrate. Hey, maybe we can even set it up as a poll. That way, even folks who aren't actively contributing, but are following the discussion can chime in.

And as to Schrodinger's War being the title, I just checked Google, and only came up with one site where that appears, and it was talking about a "Schrodinger's war criminal."

I think we should determine if others agree that we should lock this idea down as canon, then move on to other areas, but using this concept as a basis.

[Sydney Freedberg]

Good idea. Maybe we should also vote on Tony's candidate for Contracycle's position of the "macro dilemma" (all rephrased here by me): some variant of Freedom vs. Happiness -- i.e. at one extreme letting mortal humanity self-destruct if it chooses to do so out of its own free will vs. at the other extreme making mortal humanity a puppet in order to ensure it survives and prospers.

My argument for tackling this issue at the same time:

(1) Substantive:
Besides being the only candidate for a Macro Dilemma at this point, Tony's idea beautifully scales up the individual-level dilemma facing an Archivist possessing a Host, but then turns the problem at right angles to address an issue that the concept of "Fade vs. Burn" really doesn't adequately encompass, namely free will. (And while I can see how to scale up "burn-out" to human civilization as a whole, it makes less sense, or at least is less gripping, to scale up the danger of "fade-out" to all Archivists collectively). Maybe we need more discussion, but the more I think about this as the (rather than just a Macro Dilemma, the more I like it.

(2) Procedural:
If we wrap up the Macro Dilemma and the nature of Time Travel, the work of Mix Your Own Metaplot is arguably done, and instead of pages and pages more on this thread, we can move on to the mechanics of implementing these two inter-related concepts.

Well, to be honest, we can move on to mechanics after we've nailed down a few more things in Advanced Archivism -- where the issue of the Host's potential for free will is actually becoming one of the more interesting ones we're exploring, which fits nicely with Freedom vs. Happiness as the proposed Macro Dilemma).

[Sydney Freedberg]

Okay, let me elaborate on something I didn't make clear enough -- in part because it's only become really clear to me now:

Freedom vs. Happiness [as] the Macro Dilemma and the nature of Time Travel ....[are] two inter-related concepts.

Why are these so inter-related? Because at both the macro level of Archivists manipulating all of history, and at the micro level of an Archivist possessing an individual host, there are two ways to go:

1) The "puppeteer" approach -- narrowing people's options: "These poor fools can't save themselves, so we must override their personalities/alter their history so they can only make the right choice."

2) The "guide" approach -- opening up people's options: "These poor people are trapped by circumstances/history, so we must show them the truth/alter their history so they have more choices open to them."

In fact, you probably could come up with a mechanic to measure whether any given Archivist "mission" ended up changing the past to constrain the flow of history in a particular direction or to open up new possible streams. Constraint/puppeteering offers more control over the outcome, but probably is much harder to do; Opening/guiding is probably easier, but runs a real risk that the actual outcome might be nothing like what you expected. (Of course, as Tony pointed out over in Advanced Archivism, humans "sometimes make stupid decisions that turn out to be right.")

(And while I can see how to scale up "burn-out" to human civilization as a whole, it makes less sense, or at least is less gripping, to scale up the danger of "fade-out" to all Archivists collectively). Maybe we need more discussion, but the more I think about this as the (rather than just a Macro Dilemma, the more I like it.

Okay, now I'm going to outright contradict myself. (Is Sydney possessed? Has someone changed history to alter his opinions?) I think it's possible that both "Fade vs. Burn" and "Freedom vs. Happiness" can apply at both the individual scale and the macro scale. (One problem is that Fade vs. Burn is expressed in negative terms and Freedom vs. Happiness in positive terms, but that's fixable). In fact, you can construct a four-way dilemma as a Cartesian plane and see the entire game as about avoiding the extremes and making Hard Choices to achieve Balance somewhere in the middle.

Lacking graphics capability, I'll do this textually:

Axis 1: Fade vs. Burn

Fade > Burn - Individual: Archivist fades out and drowns in mortal nature.
Fade > Burn - Macro: The Great Library itself fades out of existence, taking all the accumulated wisdom of the Archivists with it.

Burn > Fade - Individual: The Host burns out, dying or losing all humanity.
Burn > Fade - Macro: Civilization burns out, becoming extinct or soullessly materialistic (the Minority Report consumerist dystopia, or perhaps a negative form of Clarke's Childhood's End, where a psychic massmind ascends and leaves mortal humanity an empty husk).

Fade & Burn Balanced - Individual: The Host and Archivist both retain their humanity yet possess Transcendent knowledge and power.
Fade & Burn Balanced - Macro: Civilization evolves to a transhuman state without losing that which makes us human.

Axis 2: Freedom vs. Happiness

Freedom > Happiness - Individual: The Host chooses to screw up his/her life.
Freedom > Happiness - Macro: The Wild Wild West -- or runamuck capitalism destroying the environment.

Happiness > Freedom - Individual: The Host is a happy, passive puppet.
Happiness > Freedom - Macro: Huxley's Brave New World.

Freedom & Happiness balanced - Individual: The Host chooses to do the right thing.

Freedom & Happiness balanced - Macro: Civilization achieves both democracy and equality, both freedom and peace.

N.B. When I say "happiness" here, I'm really talking about what philosophers would call "utility" -- as in "utilitarianism," the greatest good of the greatest number -- I think -- but since I don't quite grasp the term, and most people wouldn't either, I'm gonna steer clear of it.


EDIT: And now I'm going to crosspost the relevant bits of this in Advanced Archivism....

[TonyLB]

Heck, this could mean the players are ALL the currently existing archivists - no society of NPC archivists out there.

If folks still like this idea, it makes the link between individual and macro levels very clear.  The Archivists are the Library.  As their collective Burn/Fade and Free/Happy trend, so trends their underlying reality.

The other question, of course, is what Freedom and Happiness mean to the Archivists themselves.  Quite possibly not something to address in the rules, though... it might be fun to see it pop up like a jack in the box from addressing the Theme through the lives of Hosts.

[daMoose_Neo]

Re: Triad

Why not steal a page from Lucas?

Archivists = Jedi, Order Keepers, Arbitrators, collectors, observers. Archivists are reactive, responding to changes in the temporal current. Mostly/Roughly organized.

'Anti/Dark Archivists' = Dark Jedi: Not Sith, but not Archisits either. They retain much of what makes Archivists what they are, keeps roughly the same ideals, but uses methods Archists won't, almost to the point of being counter productive. AA/DA are proactive, changing things themselves time to advance the 'cause' of the Archivists. Reletive Loners.

'Nemesis' = Sith, reletively unknown, shadowy force attempting to alter what is, was, and is to be. Organized as well as the Archivists.

Now, with this (take it or leave it), by leaving the Nemesis reletivly unknown, we open up a question: How all knowing would the Archivists be? Is the status quo what needs to be maintained? Is this "Nemesis" a threat or simply the next step? Could it be both, depending on what is changed, balanced or outright attacked?

Say in game terms a Nemesis agent assainated Austrian Archduke Ferdiand (I believe that was him), sparking 'The Great War', with the intent of producing some kind of effect almost 100 years into the future (Which it could). Should the players stop that assination, WW1 might not have occured, meaning WW2 probably wouldn't (The aftermath of WW1 is what lead the German people to so readily accept Hitler and make the concessions that lead to WW2).
Now, on the one hand we have a few things:
1) The sheer loss of life averted by the avoidance of not one but two wars would be a plus (I couldn't even tell you what that amount would be between military and civillian deaths and BOTH wars)
2) The loss or severe postponement of many of the advancements made during both wars (if I remember correctly, Einstien and much of the scientific community considered much of his work that was the basis of the Manhatten project to be theory...until push came to shove and US Scientists used those "theories" to create a concrete reality in atomic power and weapons) would be a detriment
3) Who is to say, however, we couldn't be more advanced, after all we don't know what the children or grandchildren of those who died in the wars could have been capable of, which could be a plus

Other brain burner- could the "Nemesis" be the Archivists, existing in relation to them as the Archivists exist in realtion to Humanity?

[Sydney Freedberg]

Re: Triad .... Anti/Dark Archivists.... They retain much of what makes Archivists what they are, keeps roughly the same ideals, but uses methods Archists won't, almost to the point of being counter productive

That's definitely the most appealing version of evil Archivists -- that they are what the PCs could become if they went too far. In fact, if we make "Maintaining a Balance" the goal of the game in a Cartesian plane of tradeoffs along the lines I outlined above (Fade vs. Burn at right angles to Freedom vs. Happiness), then any and all of the extreme results is a possible Nemesis* -- which in turn means that if the PCs react too strongly against one extreme, they could make the other extreme more likely, and (without realizing it, at least at first) become a cause of the Nemesis themselves!

* Remember Nemesis doesn't have to be a faction, or even have sentience -- it can be an event or the end-state of negative trends.

[Michael Brazier]

If I may offer a suggestion on handling time travel, changing history, etc.?

Make the Archivists' past experiences in history be their anchor to humanity.  And, if history changes in such a way that an Archivist's past is erased -- either their mortal past, or their Archivist past -- their tie to humanity is weakened; they become less human and passionate.  Symmetrically, if an Archivist influences some part of history where they've never been, their tie to humanity might grow stronger.

Firstly, this gives a reason why Archivists don't just head into the same point of time over and over until they "get it right".  Each time the Archivist tries to change an event and fails, the cost to them of the final success goes up; there's more of their past being cancelled.

Secondly, it gives a way that Archivists can hurt each other; by discovering where in history an Archivist first came from, then altering that part of history, an Archivist enemy can reduce his victim to the dispassionate indifference of the purely transcendent.

And you could even tie this in with the Nemesis, by saying that sometimes when Archivists have had all their history annulled, and therefore cease to care for history as it is, they are attracted to the Nemesis and become its agents ...

[Tobias]

How could you guys type so much while I slept?

Also: warning: this started as a coherent post, but has become rambling because I'm trying to pull a lot in.

:)

There's a lot of wonderful stuff here. The main points seem to be the 'double time stream' issue, the '2nd axis' issue, and now, in the end, some thought on Archivist factions (splats? *ducks*).

Suggestions have gone up for voting, but I'd like to do so with a twist: I'd only like those who DISAGREE to vote against (and say why). The reason being that I see little disagreement now, and I think we can proceed under the assumption that everyone's good to go with this. If not, then those opposed can make the strength of their feelings known by this vote, as well as argue the exact point why they're voting No.

BTW, don't feel bad about voting no, if that's you wish - it will only make the game better in the long run. If people want a poll, let me know. Lurkers may also just PM me or chime in, as always.

I'm happy with both the time-stream and the 2nd axis suggestions. The double timestream gives the players pressure (they will have a 'Nemesis deadline' on 'Archivist time', which is also a good reason of why Archivists are needed in the first place - normal humanity can't deal with the issue because they aren't on Archivist time). The 2nd axis wraps up a series of concerns about good and bad (side)effects of archivist actions (host burnout, host freedom and wonderment at his posession can very well be an aspect of 'freedom vs. happiness'), and deals with one of the great philosophical questions as well at the same time to boot!

I like the 'cracking open' description of the Host Time Tunnel (HTT) as well. I see the HTT (human history) as caused primarily by global effects, statistics (see psychohistory from Asimov's Foundation), i.e. 95/99 % of the time, things develop according to the law of the masses, and occasionally a 'freak' occurence will shift things. An example: given the state of the world at 1935, assasinating Hitler probably wouldn't have prevented WWII - someone else would've risen to that position (the nature of the WW might've been different, sure, but it's just an example).

So changing history might be a lot of drudge-work, little nudges to change the 'measurements' of the 'sample population' thus 'shifting the distribution', with the side-effect of laying open a shift in history at point X ('opened crack'). GM's could then decide on the pacing/level of tension they're happy with for their group by mixing drudge work with critical missions. There's another reason I want this statistical approach - while it might be a bit less appealing to the players, they're also less capable of 'wrecking' reality, AND it will make the life of the GM much easier. Sure, things will change with the Archivists actions, but 17th century Europe will still basically look like 17th century Europe, tech-wise, clothing wise, thought-wise. Otherwise, the GM will have to re-create whole society and timestream fabrics with EVERY change the archivists make.

Could be part of Archivist skill - the best archivists know which events to pick to change, that won't be drowned out by statistics (inertia). Heck, there are all kinds of spinoffs here into Paradox (changing the HTT too fast) or subtlety (don't let the other faction see where you're making changes), etc.

On the factions: I'm not opposed to having more than 2 factions. In fact, given that there are 2 axis proposed now, with 2 scales of application (global vs. individual), there are 16 (2^4) possible combinations of 'philosophical ends' an individual or group might go for (although some may be self-contradicting, and some will be similar enough that cooperation is possible).

An example: your mark1mod0 Archivist will probably be more negative about Burn than your Dark Archivist/Sith/Nemesis would be (although I would argue that Nemesis isn't necessarily a race or sentient), but might have a broader range on what 'setting' of Freedom vs. Happiness they prefer. Like Sydney also mentioned, there's appeal to PC's slipping into other factions and extremes (with a tantalising slip to Nemesis yawning at the extreme end of each scale).

I do think the Freedom vs. Happiness thing needs some work (Sydney's right about 'Happines' being an awkward and poorly defined term), as well as balanced axis - I don't think transcendence is automatic when balance is achieved, I think balance is a prerequisite for that transcendence.

Oh, and I like "Schrodinger's War" as a title a lot myself.

I also like Tony's comment: "The Archivists are the Library. As their collective Burn/Fade and Free/Happy trend, so trends their underlying reality." This is also what I was going for when I mentioned that the Great Library is the sum of all memories (senses, thoughts, feelings) of an Archivist, both in the life before the Transition, and while they were Hosts (with editorial comments). So Burn/Fade and Free/Happy would impact the library, as well as the 'life' they leave for their Hosts - abusing hosts would maybe get them time-moulding goals more directly, but load the library with a lot of bad memories (perhaps a difference in agenda between factions as well?)

I ALSO like Michael's suggestion on cross-archivists hostilities - make the archivist (and his memories and associated part of the Great Library) less relevant by performing history shifts in the places he's been - with the time (s)he lived the most determining (initially). This also makes young Archivists (by archivist time) more vulnerable than old ones.

Shame for the archivists there are so little secrets to keep with all your memories out there for review.... >:)

Also, the Mage and Lucas references remind me that it may be just as fun to play Archivist or Dark Archivist (just like Tradition mage or Technocrat mage both think they're 'good' and 'right').

And I'm so glad I've read stuff like a brief history of time and flat(ter)land. :)

And now I know I should've picked up Chrononauts when I was at Essen a few years ago... is there a .pdf of the rules out there somewhere (since it'd be fairly harmless to distribute without the cards)?

Ok, enough rambling.

[contracycle]

Some other possible time-travel mechanisms, selecte to try to take advantage of the archive/library trope:

big fish in a tiny pond:
In fact, the Archivists are not moving through any objectively existing time atll, but through a very small local model of time.  The archivists are somewhat disembodied sentiences of the crew of a starship trapped right on the very edge of a black holes event horizon as it shivers back and forth due to mass fluctuation and quantum uncertainty.  Thus the archivists exist in a fixed external frame but all sorts of manipulations of local time can be justified; what the A.'s are seeking to do is figure out a way to extract their ship from the horizon by constructing, from the dissasociated psycological states of the crew, how they got here and how to get out, or perhaps they need to reintegrate their own identities by collecting memories, fioguring out to whom they should be assigned, and reconstructing that perosnality.  Thats a bit vague but anyway...

the big model:
the world that archivists experience is ain fact a hug simulation built by the intellects that used to be human many billions of years ago.  Now they hang as barely tangible nets of electrons in the deepest and darkest of interstellar crevasses, undisturbed but for their own slight shimmer as thoughts surge along the tenuous circuits, crossing light-seconds.  These archivists are a projection of these radically advanced huimans and performed as an exercise in self-comprehension.

the matrix model:
the rise of the machines has been and gone, it was  a one-sided struggle and now, matrix-like, the only human experience anywhere is inside a simulation.  Similar to the above concept, the sim has been constructed so that the machines can explore their own origins, much as we carry out anthropology.  Reality is malleable as it is only a sim, but the coherence of the sim is what underlies its value as a reserach tool and thence there are limits to how far it can be bent.

the telescope tunnel:
if you were very far away, and moving towards earth at very nearly the speed of light, you could point a (very powerful) telescope toward the earth and thereby observe earth's electromagnetic shell almost on fast forward.  That is, an immense amount of things will occur in the earths frame of reference by comparison to what occurs in the subjective time on the ship.  Hence, the incomming data is temporally compressed, and it may be quite hard to discern the important from the dross.  Once again the time continuum is rather more a model than an actuality but there is a critical need to extract certain data from the model.

the wormhole telescope:
similar to the above, except that you build a pair of wormhole gates per Michio Kaku's hyperspace theory.  You send one to a point 1000ly away at 99.99% of c., then switch the gates on.  The subjective time on board has been reduced, so even though in real time the ship takes more than a thousand years to arrive at destination, you'll be able to switch the gate on in 10 years time, say.  Now the other gate is 1000ly away both in space AND time... which means you can go there and build a very large telescope to look back at earth and see the signal shell of that whole thousand years.... even though 990 of those years are in your future.  Again, introduce some reason for wanting to know stuff from this data-stream.

--

Anyway... there are a lot of ways to have time travel or a sort of pseudo-time travel that do not necessarily assume an objective and fixed time-stream.  Nor is it impossible to locate the chunk of time that can be travelled in a box, cut off from the rest of the causal universe.  The universe does not even have to be "real".


Schrodingers War:
I couldn't find any instances of "schrodingers war" either, but did find: S's Cat, S's Cat-sitter, S's Kitten, S's Dog, S's Mouse, S's Lifeboat.

If CONSCIOUSNESS is going to be the necessary 'observer' in this model, some gibble-gabble will have to be provided as to why this is the case as it is not implied by the theory itself.

[Tobias]

Whoa, contracycle, I thought I knew my sci-fi and popular science astro, but you're definately using those mental muscles a lot more than I am.

I guess some of these explanations would work great as alternative options, so thanks much for providing them.

Would you agree that it's a good idea, conceptually, to have a 'host time' and an 'archivist time', though? (To give the players some pressure of deadline on archivist time).

Do you have a science background you'd like to share, btw? I'll share mine - I'm a chemical engineer-informatics specialist, with a little study into the quantum world as well as interest in space-time topics.