[TSoY] Changing the Past

[Moreno R.]

I searched for an answer to this question in the rules and in this forum, but I didn't find anything:

A Khale traveling in the Green World could go in the past and change it? What could happen if he kill his grandfather before his father is conceived? What happen if he kills HIMSELF ten years before?

[Twobirds]

Whatever's coolest at the time.  Maybe he wants to disappear due to causality rules, maybe he wants to destroy his ancestors but live on.  The Green World is definitely one of the least-detailed sections of the book, and therefore one of the areas that's defined most by player/GM choice.

George

[Andrew Cooper]

George is correct.  There's not rules that say "This shall happen if you kill your grandfather in the Green Wood."  It's whatever is more interesting to you and your players.

However, in an attempt to be more helpful, MJ Young has some pretty good stuff on his website about time travel that might give you some interesting options for your game.

[John Harper]

I guess his grandfather is a real jerk, huh? :-)

He kills his grandfather. When he leaves the Green World, everyone calls him by a different name. His family and life is similar to what he remembers, but different. He's the only one that remembers the "old" timeline.

He kills his grandfather. When he leaves the Green World, no one recognizes him. His family doesn't exist. Everything he or his family ever did is erased from time. The world has at least one significant difference as a result (people are alive who were dead, etc).

He kills his grandfather. He cannot leave the Green World. His life has been undone. To return to the normal world, he must make a sacrifice to the spirits there and earn a new life.

He kills his grandfather. The break in the life-cycle of existence causes everything to unravel. The universe outside the Green World is destroyed. To restore it, he must travel deep into the memories of the Green World, battle the guardians of The Root, and plant the Heart of the World to re-grow the universe.

He kills his grandfather. He immediately is transformed and takes his grandfather's place in the river of time.

He kills his grandfather. When he goes back to his own time, nothing has changed. He can kill his grandfather a thousand times, but history is already set.

[joshua neff]

He kills his grandfather. The break in the life-cycle of existence causes everything to unravel. The universe outside the Green World is destroyed. To restore it, he must travel deep into the memories of the Green World, battle the guardians of The Root, and plant the Heart of the World to re-grow the universe.

I think that one's my favorite.

[Eero Tuovinen]

He kills his grandfather. He cannot leave the Green World. His life has been undone. To return to the normal world, he must make a sacrifice to the spirits there and earn a new life.

This one is mine. I'm not a big fan of the whole superhero world-gets-destroyed-when-you-blow-at-it thing. Seriously deprotagonizing for the world.

Generally, the game system handles this stuff very easily, as long as a player actually has some goal in mind when he kills the grandfather (we can't discuss this in pure theory, right?). You simply declare your goal: "I want to erase myself from existence by killing my grandfather" and then you roll on it. If nobody is resisting (say, the grandfather permits you to kill him because he realizes it's for the greater good, or you kill him with magics he has no conseption of), you need to roll at least 1 success. If somebody is resisting, you need to roll against that person or persons.

As you can see, we don't need a general answer to the question, the GM only needs to accept that this particular result is possible. It's up to the narration, of course, to define any other possible results. And yes, this means that in TSOY you can achieve very, very large things as long as nobody is resisting you, or even if somebody is. Say you wanted to destroy the world, and the GM agreed that causality violation would suffice (I wouldn't for a number of reasons, but many geeks seem to get off on it). Then it's your granpa in his prime vs. you, stakes being the fate of the universe. The key concept here is leverage; to achieve large goals you have to be in the fictional position to cause them to happen. The mere mechanical act of winning the conflict is often relatively irrelevant as long as you're in position. If we we're playing TSOY in modern world, for example, and I played the guy who presses the red button... I wouldn't need a conflict at all to destroy the world. It's all about leverage.

(Of course the latter part of that isn't very pertinent to the discussion. I just included it because many people I've met consider TSOY and it's ilk broken because they allow stakes disparate with mechanical resources. The point is, so does the world.)

[John Harper]

Very well put, Eero. And your bit about leverage is spot on. It applies to a discussion I've been having over email about using something like TSOY for superhuman characters. I linked to you previous post on the subject, and I'll link to this one, too. Thanks.

[Clinton R. Nixon]

I swear to everything holy that Eero should have written TSOY to begin with. His insight is amazing when it comes to this game.