Messages through the time stream

[DWeird]

Hi! I've been working on a game concept of a sort for a very, very long while now, with nothing to show for it but a few hair-brained half-baked ideas. This thread is about one of them.

So. The "game concept" I've referred to is "world building" - basically, the game involves building the game-world from scratch. This started as a freeform forum thing - players wrote up long tracts on whatever their creation was, and posted 'em on the board. Collaborative setting-crafting, basically. Only that it wasn't that collaborative, 'cause we ended up with a myriad details that had no inherent connections... A pile of parts with little bits of a dozen blueprints sprinkled over it, instead of the awesome machine I always wanted.

From then on out, I tried to make those connections appear, one way or another. One way of doing this I'm still interested in is making a historical-political game, something akin to Greg Stolze's Reign (only where the group is the "character" and individuals are resources, which is sort the opposite of Reign's design).

Then there's this other way. It's weird, I have absolutelly no idea how it got into my head, and I have absolutelly no idea how to make it work as a game, though I think I have a solid grasp of what it'd look like when played.

Players would be otherwise regular people with a single extranormal ability - that of receiving messages from each other. The fun part? They exist at different times, ages even, of the game world... So, if a character lived in the early ages, he could hide an artifact for the guy "down the flow" to find. Or he could help a small survive, which'd eventually become the religion of a continent or two... Whereas the guys at the end of the stream would be rather more limited in their ability to accomplish something, but they would have a much better knowledge of events both current and past, meaning that they would be the one's who can accuratelly perceive what is at stake.

So these people create, explore, and influence the game world at the same time. Which is what I've always wanted.

So now, I need... things. Like mechanics. Mechanics that would: 1) ensure the persistance of the world somewhat (some things cannot be changed... like the existence of the characters) 2) allow a "snowballing," or a "twist" effect, where little changes (I hide an artifact sword) produce unforseen effects (Someone who is not the intended recipient finds the sword, and uses it to slay some sort of super-creature, and now there's a thriving village in that thing's slowly decaying carcass). 3) Something else I haven't thought about 'cause this idea is very very raw.

Also. Need ideas of reasons for why the characters would care to do the things that they can do. I mean... I, as a projected image of my ideal player, don't particularly care why they're doing it, because the game itself is about these actions and their consequences. But, regardless, it'd feel damned weird to play a character who chucks a sword in a well so that some other guy can find it after two centuries without the character having some reason to do so. Help?

I'm at the phase where I don't need specific design help as much as I need people to talk to to help me find out what the hell it is that I'm actually making here... So anything you say, no matter how "unsophisticated", may be useful to me.

[Vulpinoid]

I played with these concepts heavily in The 8th Sea (my game about time travelling pirates).

Give me a day or two an I'll unbury my plunder and reveal unto you a horde beyond yer imaginin'.

V

[Abkajud]

Hey, D!

That sounds immensely like my concept for a Highlander MMORPG that I had in mind - to better realize PC immortality, I was going to let "time travel" occur, in a way that involved some funky resource management, although the "travel" would be realized in the fluff as simply the PCs recalling or remembering what they did back then.

Since the Google Document I have with this stuff in it is a collaborative file, I can't make it fully public. If you would like to check it out, let me know here, or through a PM, or e-mail me (addy's on my profile) and we can talk about it!

I find this idea of yours highly intriguing, by the way, not the least of which because you mentioned Reign and the scale that game seems to possess. Your game could do that too, I think, and that's exciting!

- Abby

[DWeird]

[...]you mentioned Reign and the scale that game seems to possess. Your game could do that too, I think, and that's exciting!

Spot on! Only that "could" for me is a "must", because that's pretty much the main design goal I'm trying to reach. A character could, I dunno... Divert a small brook a little bit out of its way, and a few centuries later, one of the sides in a major struggle gets an awesome tactical advantage on the battle to end all battles. Or she could accidentally flood the whole city and make the people living there use little homes on stilts.

The way such scale is brought into play is very different, however. In a political game, you have the power to change the world. In my game, you have the knowledge necessary to do so. Which is cool because then the setting becomes an active concern for the players. "How did this happen? Why are things the way they are? What if I do this?" and so on. The most tiny, stupid detail of the world is alive with potential to shape the future.

But, as players do this, I also want unexpected stuff to happen. Unexpected not in the sense of "Aw, my plans are ruined." but rather "Oh snap! How did that happen?." The world must resist becoming known... Otherwise there's not much fun in trying to do so.

[Abkajud]

Maybe you could take such a Ripple Effect and reward players for doing just that - when they designate something as Rippling (i.e. your analogy with the stream), not only do you let them get the advantage of causing the Rippling in the immediate scene, but you, the GM, then jot down that act of Rippling and tie it back into the player's Future Self events.

What we could be looking at here is a very direct way for the players to feed you story seeds: I'm assuming each player has multiple characters throughout history to act on the player's interests throughout this whole chain of events. Well, when I, in pre-Roman Britain, make a river run backward to keep some tribal king's shield-bearer from arriving at the battle in time, my future selves all live in a world in which that whole ecosystem was inverted because I forgot to turn the river back again. To my F.S.'s it's the way things have always been, but I, the player, know the precise moment when things changed. If that's not a ton of player agency and an impact on the plot, well... ^_^

I'm assuming that the Original Self and Future Selves (as I've decided to call them) can communicate with one another. But however that works, the player! is the one who knows how it all connects. You wouldn't even need to have any kind of mystic comm-powers for this to work: leaving a letter or some other sign in the right place will enable your FS to figure things out. On the other hand, being able to send messages back through time, in some way or another (I'm thinking don't make it too complicated, lest a player have to pretend to hide information from himself!) would mean that your goal of

But, as players do this, I also want unexpected stuff to happen. Unexpected not in the sense of "Aw, my plans are ruined." but rather "Oh snap! How did that happen?." The world must resist becoming known... Otherwise there's not much fun in trying to do so.

...could occur - when a character sees something weird or troubling, he could ask the OS and FS's to go and investigate it, to see what the precursors to it might have been.

It'd be interesting to see when a cigar is just a cigar, and not the workings of someone's OS from three thousand years in the past, you know? Gives a whole new layer of conflict and struggle, which is awesome. Maybe the PCs have some power to hone in on Ripplings (sorry to be making up jargon on your behalf, but I gotta use some word or another! ^_^), but I worry that if they did, that could maybe take out some of the sleuthing involved in tracking down what caused things. Or not - maybe it takes some legwork to ascertain if a Rippling happened or not, and once you do, if there wasn't one involved in a particular situation, "what do you do now?" would take center stage.

Neat!

[Vulpinoid]

Here's the way I handled quantum instability and time travel...

I'll have to set up a few terms first.

Everyone has "Coherency", their ability to withstand changes in the timestream. Most inanimate objects have no coherency, and they are subject to any changes in time and space. Most people have only a single point of coherency, Player Characters start with six points of coherency and can go as high as 13 points. [Note the whole game works off cards, with Jack=11, Queen=12, King=13].

A current analogy of timespace in quantum physics is that time is like a river of water flowing down a slope (many other field effects are described in similar terms). This slope is not uniform and it has different degrees of gradient in different parts. According to the shape of the slope, the timestream will have a tendency to follow a specific pattern, it's not guaranteed to follow that pattern, but it definitely tends toward that pattern. Making a disruption to the timestream can have one of two effects.

In many cases, the deviation makes a slight detour from it's old path, but on the grander scale, the pre-existant gradients bring the timestream back to it's original path in due course. In some cases, a deviation might alter the path enough to move it to a new set of gradients and cause dramatic changes to the time and space. If the shifts in gradient within s local area are erratic then this is more likely to occur, if the shifts in gradient are little and have a high tendency to channel time in a specific path anyway then the odds are that even the most dramatic impacts of the characters won'y have a major effect.

I'll describe it in another way.

Rain falls in a rocky mountainous range (there is no absorption by the ground, the water just hits the surface then rolls down the slope). Each raindrop represents a fragment of temporal energy. The natural gradients of the mountain range channel rain downward into valleys where the rain becomes a stream. If a raindrop falls in the middle of a valley, then a movement of a few millimetres to the left or right will make no discernable difference, it will still land in the stream.If the raindrop moves a few metres to the left or right, it might not land in the stream, but it will hit the ground then roll downward into the same stream after a minor detour. Great moments of history with huge cultural backing and significance are like this; no matter what happens, this course of events is likely to occur.

But things get interesting if the raindrop is due to land right on the edge of a ridge. What happens if the raindrop falls a metre to the left or right, it could end up in a completely different stream. At the finest level, a few millimetres of difference could  make the raindrop follow a completely different course and reality could be drastically altered based on "the single flap of a butterfly wing". I actually know of an old sculpture near Coffs Harbour, in Australia which sits on the ridge of just such a mountain range. If rain falls on the east side, it is channelled down to a ditch which leads to a stream, an onward a kilometre or two toward the ocean; if rain walls on the west side of the sculpture, another ditch leads the water to a completely different stream, which then leads to the Darling River on a journey thousands of kilometres to the Murray River then a few hundred more kilometres to a completely different part of the ocean. Critical change points in the timestream could be described in this way.

Let's get away from high theory and pull the concepts back to roleplaying.

The grand sweeping events of history don't really change; these are considered "Safe" parts of the timestream. In numerous potential timestream paths, the modern Olympics always occur every four years, once or twice over the course of their duration a host city might have changed, but on the whole the Olympics continue to occur. In numerous potential timestream paths, the American Civil War occurred. Facts like these will probably have effective coherency scores among the face cards (Jack to King).

Certain more specific things have less cultural weight behind them. Does Bill get hit by a car? Does he die, or just get injured? Events like this will have much lower coherency scores because fewer people really care about them. The difference between getting hit or not might have a coherency of 3, the difference of death or injury might have a coherency level of 2.

The whole timestream/metaphysical system basically works off the notion that you draw a card to see what changes to the timestream have happened as a result of your actions. If you draw a card equal to or higher then the coherency level in question, then events change. If you draw a card less than the coherency level, events remain the same.

One card per things you're looking at.

Bill's crossing the road, he gets hit and killed. Two cards are drawn.

A pair of deuces: He's no longer hit by the car, but he's still killed by something else. The players and GM decide what has killed him based on the scene that has developed.

An eight and a queen: He hasn't been hit, and there's no injury.

The key to the system is that the more people know about something, the less it is in a state of quantum flux, and the more fixed it's reality is.

But there will always be juncture points where dramatic twists can occur. These juncture points would be the very locations drawn by temporal travelers, because these are the temporal locations where they can make the biggest impact to reality for the smallest effort.

The benefit of using a deck of cards for resolution is that I don't shuffle the deck between task resolutions, and I keep jokers in the pack. The actions of player characters eat their way through the deck, eventually reaching either of the jokers; this means the players have encountered a state of temporal flux where someone else has changed the timeline (red joker means the change is in their favour, black joker works against them). The deck is shuffled, and one or more cards are drawn (as long as the cards being drawn match the colour of the joker an additional card is drawn, once a crad of the other colour is drawn, it stops). These crads make automatic changes to the outside world, with low cards making subtle changes, while high value cards make dramatic effects. The cards are also compared to each character's coherency score, if the card is lower than a specific character's coherency the character is immune to the change; if it's higher than the character then something "odd" will occur.

We had a game once where a string of six black cards were drawn after a black joker; as a result, most of the characters changed their race, their gender, their eye colours and their native language...naturally leading to all sorts of chaos. It was obvious in this situation that someone had made a huge impact on the timestream and the crew had to journey back at once to remedy the situation.

In your game you wouldn't travel back to the past to make those changes, instead you'd communicate with your earlier selves and let them know that something had to be prevented, or maybe they have to make sure it occurs. I ran a game at a convention where the assassination of Lincoln had been prevented and this caused all sorts of changes to the timestream, so that characters had to set up a plan to ensure Lincoln was killed in the manner of one of the conspiracy theories (they couldn't be caught in the process).

I don't know if this has been helpful to you, but it's worked fairly well in my game.

Just some ideas...

V

[DWeird]

Both of you helped a lot, thanks.

I like the idea of assigning certain key people or events a coherence score that helps against temporal fidling, but doesn't guarantee immunity against it. Score!

A question, though - in 8th Sea, how are these changes treated? Does drawing a certain card mean specific changes take place, or is it more like... generic damage + some player-generated colour?

The question of how to deal with these sort of questions is really important to me, because I don't really want to have either the GM (assuming there is one) or the players do have to pull the meaning of changes out of nowhere...

Um. One more thing I've realized about this game - it's not about the characters, it's about the world.

So I guess this is a Sim thing. Thing is, I don't want to have to have the sort of experience where the characters walk around and look and listen to what the GM has prepared. I want them to be able to touch the world, to change it, to find out what makes it tick. The time-messages are just a trick to allow them to observe the changes they are inducing at different points. A cool trick, a necessary trick, but still just a trick.

Pretty sure the sort of play I want can't easily be had 'round the table - lacks flash or the emotional grip to make a group of people ooh-ahh, grin or wince, or whatever. I want this to be the sort of thing about which one things quietly for a week, then snaps his fingers and starts laughing like a maniac, and then goes to write his email-input for the game...

So yeah. I want the effects that can be induced be based on principles that can be known, unknown, partially known... But they have to be there, and be used. You get what you want not by getting what you want outright, but by manipulating the rules of the world to your advantage.

A procedure-generated world with multiple entry points for influencing said procedures. *nods*

[Abkajud]

Hm, reminds me a lot of Burning Wheel, interestingly enough, in the sense that it uses not-quite-Narrativist elements (Athar/their version of Hero Points, Beliefs, and Instincts)  to mechanically support Actor Stance and a sort of fleshing-out of the PCs. But the Point of It All is still to love all over the setting, and the Life Paths, and so on, NOT to explore a Premise.
It's like how Willow is supposed to be a fun fantasy romp; it's why Ron Edwards distinguishes pastiche from actual thematic content in his Story Now essay. Sim is about enjoying a particular Dream, not grappling with a moral or ethical dilemma as the primary focus of play. In Willow, for example, the characters are more or less on a track, when it comes to their decision-making: if Mad Martigan (ah, boyhood crushes) actually betrayed his friends in any permanent or meaningful way, it'd be like Han Solo turning his back on the Rebellion - it'd short-circuit the story.
Granted, I think Star Wars: A New Hope does a lot more in Nar territory than Willow, as much as non-RPGs can, anyway. Also, I think it would have been really interesting to see where Han's betrayal would have taken things, whereas in Willow the hero probably would've just ended up locked in the Black Fortress, thus getting that much closer to the inevitable showdown with Queen Bavmorda.
Anyway.
In your game, you just spelled it out right there, and that's awesome! The point is Exploration, as you said:

I want them to be able to touch the world, to change it, to find out what makes it tick. The time-messages are just a trick to allow them to observe the changes they are inducing at different points. A cool trick, a necessary trick, but still just a trick.

You don't have to have a game that discusses the ethics of time travel if you don't want to ^_^
There's enough of that, anyway, and one of my favorite film series ever, Back to the Future, only tangentially puts moral questions about time-travel up front and center. Mostly, it's about a guy getting to see his family (and a few other people close to his folks) from different perspectives. The main draw, however, is how the Delorean works and how the protagonist adapts to three different time periods, with hilarious and kinda dramatic results. The focus is on "wow, cool!" and not on moral crisis. Go for it, and godspeed!

[Vulpinoid]

A question, though - in 8th Sea, how are these changes treated? Does drawing a certain card mean specific changes take place, or is it more like... generic damage + some player-generated colour?

There are two ways that the 8th Sea can be played. One follows a more traditional path of Gm and players, but the game really comes into its own with a group that tries a more experimental approach of Captain and Crew.

The Captain declares where the crew will head (he gives a basic idea of the type of mission that needs to be undertaken), but we then works with the crew against a series of randomly fluctuating constraints to complete the mission.

All the players (including the Captain) take turns in the spotlight, and while one player takes a turn, other players may choose to either assist the action in character, or help with narration duties. The story grows organically based on the initial mission premise and the developing complications.

Everyone gets "Pieces of 8" which are a form of narrative currency, these may be spent by a player assisting with narration duties to introduce things into the scene, and a fixed amount is returned to all players at the end of each act. A small number of "Pieces of 8" introduce minor plot twists, or things that are feasible in the current environment, more pieces may be spent to induce major story twists. Players may also spend pieces of 8 to counter the expenditure of others.

The captain begins with twice as many Pieces of 8, reflecting their stronger ability to control the destiny of the crew (Yes, a crew can mutiny and in the next game there will be a new player who gains the bonus tokens).

The question of how to deal with these sort of questions is really important to me, because I don't really want to have either the GM (assuming there is one) or the players do have to pull the meaning of changes out of nowhere...

So in a way, the players do pull changes out of nowhere, but if they pull out changes that make sense in the context of the events unfolding it will be cheaper for them...and if they do something too stupid, then a couple of other players can band together with their narrative currency to veto stupid things from coming into play (unless the group wants the game to head that way).

Actual changes sweeping across the landscape due to temporal waves have random colour effects, as well as damage. Characters resist both of these through their Coherency score, but the players may alter the random colour effects into defined choices through the expenditure of a coin or two.

The only thing to remember is that a black joker should always induce changes that make things worse in the current situation (eg. turning all the characters from Caucasians to Negros if they happen to be in Alabama in the 1960's).

Um. One more thing I've realized about this game - it's not about the characters, it's about the world.

A strong part of this game is deliberately inducing changes in the world to cause certain events to happen, then manipulating things back to cover the character's tracks, or at least stopping other crews from manipulating times and space even more than they are.

Pretty sure the sort of play I want can't easily be had 'round the table - lacks flash or the emotional grip to make a group of people ooh-ahh, grin or wince, or whatever. I want this to be the sort of thing about which one things quietly for a week, then snaps his fingers and starts laughing like a maniac, and then goes to write his email-input for the game...

I've probably headed in a different direction to your intentions, but I think that your goals can achieved around the table. I know that the twist and turns of a temporal struggle can induce emotional responses and deep connection between players and the shifting world around them.

A procedure-generated world with multiple entry points for influencing said procedures. *nods*

Definitely feasible. I've actually designed 8th Sea to effectively run without a GM through a series of balancing scales. All the captain has to do is indicate a general mission he'd like to achieve, and a few enemies that could be potentially faced (chosen from a selection of 20 or so). Everything else self regulates based on the actions of the crew.

I'd tell you more, but as it is, book sales have really slowed down...

Why give away all the secrets?

V