Preface: This is the latest thread in the GroupDesign project, tentatively titled "Schrodinger's War," a collaboratively designed game about incorporeal "Archivists" who jump through time and space, possessing human hosts to alter history, constantly forced to balance the welfare of their individual host with their objectives for humanity as a whole. The most concise (if somewhat out of date) overview of concepts occurs in the thread Nailing mechanics; older threads are indexed here. But reading through all these past threads is by no means required -- all Forge-folk should feel free to participate.

A lot of our earlier discussion struggled with the idea of a "Nemesis" : a Really Bad Event that the time-travelling player-characters would seek to forestall as the long-term objective of a campaign. We've also poked at the edges of how in hell we're going to model the effects of changing human history without getting hopelessly tangled in chains of cause and effect. Now Doug Ruff, one of our frequent contributors, has come up with a new take on The End of the World as We Know It -- including a concept on how to change history that involves thinking backwards in time from effect to cause:

To let Doug speak (via PM) for himself:

Doug Ruff wrote:
Wiping Out Humanity

I've asked Sydney to kick off this thread open discussion over something I raised in Tobias' most recent thread - The Pillars of Tobias.

OK, here's the pitch: I want to wipe out the human race, and I need your help.

Why? There are a couple of reasons why I would like to see this as a core (or at least, favoured) option for the game:

1) The most dramatic way to present a Nemesis within the setting is to let it win. "At some point in the future, the human race is wiped out. Now it's up to you to do something about it." This provides an immediate issue for the players to address.

(I am presupposing a time-travel campaign for this to work, and I think that if you explore the more recent Groupdesign threads, you will notice that time travel is an implicit part of the concepts. So let's make it Core.)

2) I've been thinking a lot about how changing events in History has an impact on the whole of the Host Time Tunnel (if you are new to this project, please check out this thread, or substitute "timestream" whenever I say Host Time Tunnel or HTT.)

One of the real problems with dealing with the HTT in any "realistic" (for which, read "Simulationist" perhaps) way is that major changes to early history could completely invalidate changes made later on; if I prevent the fall of the Roman Empire, will there even be a Napoleonic army? Or a National Socialist Party?

We've discussed before the option to say that major events are "overdetermined" and therefore resistant to change. I'm going to suggest a refinement of this view, which was inspired by Tobias' Impact mechanic (which assessed a person's impact on the future - I appreciate that this is a fairly sweeping generalisation, but this is how it inspired me, dammit!)

I would like to suggest that events are "overdetermined" by their impact on the future of the Host Time Tunnel. This is a complete reverse from the original theory (which is that events are overdetermined by what came before) but I think it works (and works better) within a time travel campaign.

In other words: under the "old" theory, the rise of Nazi Germany was "overdetermined" by the economic and political circumstances that led up to the election that placed it into power. In the new theory, the rise of Nazi Germany is overdetermined by all the people who died after they came into power.

This has an automatic consequence: as a rule, the further back you go into History, the harder it is (generally) to change things.

But, given the exponential rate at which the human population grows, how is it possible to change anything at all within this model? If humanity reaches the stars and colonises the galaxy, there is hardly any difference between 3000 BC and 1945 - events within both eras are cemented into place by their mpact on the countless billions of humans who inhabit known space - and if this expansion continues indefinitely, then Archivists would be all but powerless to act on known history.

Therefore: my conclusion is that humanity doesn't make it that far. In order for the Archivists to have any significant power at all, something must happen to end the History that they work with. For example, a nuclear war or a cometary strike - whatever it is, something that humanity doesn't recover from, ever.

Unless the Archivists do something about it.

And this is where the real Difficult Choice comes in: if the Archivists do manage to save Humanity and allow it to flourish, they weaken in their power to change things (as there is more "future" to overdetermine and lock down events.)

So Archivists may not want to rescue humanity, or at least, not to do it until humanity is in a fit state to progress. Or Archivists may wish to concentrate on the spiritual development of those Hosts that do exist before the catastrophe, in order to develop as many of them into Archivists as possible. Or Archivists may just want to keep their powers, and let the catastrophe take place.

Please comment, on the overall idea, and also on whether it should be brought into the mechanics somehow (which is likely to make it "core.")

Ahhhh... yer all just sissies.

Human race. Feh. Destroy the universe. Then say that the human race would have been the key to preventing said destruction if they had not been wiped out by clever little Nemesis before undertaking the destruction.

Then the entire Great Library is a last-ditch effort run at inverse-time-dilation within the last two objective seconds before the collapse of everything. This equates to some subjective period of time in the HTT (like, oh, say, eight sessions of play) during which the players must rescue the human race and explain (in so rescuing) what value or power humanity has that makes them the unique threat to the Nemesis. Then your epilogue is describing how humanity saves the universe.

The reason you don't futz around with Nazi Germany is that you can't predict the consequences, and you don't have the time to do a massive historical survey of those changes. You've got a fixed period of time. If the players want to waste that precious time having the GM improvise alternative histories then screw 'em, and screw the universe too. Indeed, the mechanics can reinforce that by saying every time they change the time-stream they reduce their own knowledge skills about all future periods of time.

So, anyway, that's my hardball contribution.

Okay, so I'm going to be a super-sissy. Instead of wiping out the universe, or (merely!) the human race, I'm going to suggest a "soft" version of Doug's idea, that gets similar dilemmas less dramatically:

If events are "locked" (determined) in history by their significance on what happens afterwards (as opposed to by their causes), or even if we embrace traditional sci-fi time-travel paradoxes, then the key event for the Archivists is the event that brought Archivists into being in the first place. If the Archivists' own existence is the byproduct of, or entangled with, some awful negative event (Nemesis), then you get a dilemma: The more you mess with history, the better you make things for humanity, but the more you reduce your own power to affect history -- ultimately perhaps to the point of causing yourself not to exist.

But, heck, I'm all for eliminating the human race -- albeit extinction doesn't have to be purely physical (comet strike): I think self-inflicted extinction due to moral/social causes has far more bite.

I'm not a huge fan of time travel as a device...but I like Doug's take on overdetermination.

Essentially, the more future things would be screwed up by whatever changes you're making to Now...the harder it is to make meaningful changes to Now. Thus, the farther back you go in time, the greater the volume of stuff there is after that time that resists you.

That's a perfect built in Difficulty modifier for the game. Franz wants to jump over the moving train...how hard is it? Who cares what the actual physical difficulty is in jumping over a train...Franz can always zap out to the future and zap back to that exact moment with a pair of anti gravity boots ala Bill and Ted and "Remember the garbage can". Giving players a nearly unlimited ability to bounce around through the time stream essentially makes any action virtually 100% automatic success...Zap back to 1947 from 1999 and in order to foil some Nemisis plot you need to make an impossible shot? No problem. Fortuneately in your copious spare time you zap back to 1990 and became a super expert marksman so 9 years later when you zap back to 1947 you can make the shot no problem.

In other words...task difficulty no longer matter.

Alls that matters then are two factors. 1) how far back in the time stream are you (farther back is harder), and 2) how invasive of an event are you doing (i.e. something minor that might have ripples that aren't immediately obvious vs. killing Abraham Lincoln before he gets elected president). No matter what task the characters do, that's your source of difficulty. All other task related difficulty can be explained away by time-wavium.

The first source of difficulty should be counted back from "Extermination Day"...the "day" humanity gets wiped out (probably measured in eras or some other mushy unit of time for practical game purposes). Every time you successfully thwart a Nemisis Plot, you delay the inevitable by some amount (I'm picturing a very Gamist-esque victory conditions table for each scenario). As the E-Day gets pushed farther into the future by the players' success...difficulty becomes increasingly hard for their characters...since humanity now survives longer, there's more stuff ahead of them, no matter where they are in the time stream than there was before. If they fail, the reverse happens.

As an example of the interesting things players could do...when faced with a HUGE Nemisis plot that if defeated could push the human future another 100 years out, players might go back and screw things up for humanity on purpose (maybe going back and undoing some of their own earlier successes) moving humanity's demise 40 years closer. This would make the difficulty they confront for the big plot lower making that plot easier to foil and so net them 60 years.


If one wants something a little more crunchy than auto success at any task difficulty, you can set task difficulty on some numerical scale which would add to time stream difficulty. Players could turn any task into an auto success by spending X number of years training or developing some gizmo etc, where X equals the task difficulty to be overcome. The years would be spent on the character sheet as if they were some metagame mechanic and listed into the characters "history".

1664-1668 AD spent 4 years studying with the finest fencing master in paris.

2058-2064 Received doctorate in genetic medicine from John Hopkins University.

In order to be helpful the era the years are spent in must correspond to the "skill" being mastered. When the player has spent all available years (obviously years spent studying with the Priests of Horus in 3500 BC will be of limited value in 1970s Viet Nam), he can't do this any more...UNTIL...the player's successes push E-Day into the future...freeing up additional years to spend.

Or something like that.

Quoting Doug Ruff:

We've discussed before the option to say that major events are "overdetermined" and therefore resistant to change. I'm going to suggest a refinement of this view, which was inspired by Tobias' Impact mechanic (which assessed a person's impact on the future - I appreciate that this is a fairly sweeping generalisation, but this is how it inspired me, dammit!)

I would like to suggest that events are "overdetermined" by their impact on the future of the Host Time Tunnel. This is a complete reverse from the original theory (which is that events are overdetermined by what came before) but I think it works (and works better) within a time travel campaign.

In other words: under the "old" theory, the rise of Nazi Germany was "overdetermined" by the economic and political circumstances that led up to the election that placed it into power. In the new theory, the rise of Nazi Germany is overdetermined by all the people who died after they came into power.

This has an automatic consequence: as a rule, the further back you go into History, the harder it is (generally) to change things.

But, given the exponential rate at which the human population grows, how is it possible to change anything at all within this model? If humanity reaches the stars and colonises the galaxy, there is hardly any difference between 3000 BC and 1945 - events within both eras are cemented into place by their mpact on the countless billions of humans who inhabit known space - and if this expansion continues indefinitely, then Archivists would be all but powerless to act on known history.

TonyLB wrote: Ahhhh... yer all just sissies.

Human race. Feh. Destroy the universe. Then say that the human race would have been the key to preventing said destruction if they had not been wiped out by clever little Nemesis before undertaking the destruction.

Sydney Freedberg wrote: If events are "locked" (determined) in history by their significance on what happens afterwards (as opposed to by their causes), or even if we embrace traditional sci-fi time-travel paradoxes, then the key event for the Archivists is the event that brought Archivists into being in the first place.

Sydney Freedberg wrote: But, heck, I'm all for eliminating the human race -- albeit extinction doesn't have to be purely physical (comet strike): I think self-inflicted extinction due to moral/social causes has far more bite.

So... I know you guys are pretty far into this development, but let me pose one basic question:

Is the core of the game the ability to play in times that we know about? I.e., is the fun aspect of playing this game that you can play in Roman times, or during a world war, etc.?

If the answer is "not necessarily," one way of doing it, which would avoid a host of issues, is to set the alterable time in our future, but the past of the Archivists. I.e., Archivists are from 3000 AD, they jump back to 2100, 2200, etc. You can make it chronological, so that the characters actually write history as the players play. The GM would need to think about some consequences in the time between sessions, but making it up is a lot easier than figuring out which events did and did not occur.

Because if the goal is to change history which we are familiar with, that would be seriously hard to simulate, as was pointed out before.

Alternatively, I thought when this game was first discussed (and I was mostly lurking) that the Archivists were supposed to gather knowledge, not change history. That might keep the ability to go to known times intact, as the interference is going to be minimal.

Anyway... just some thoughts. This is one heck of an ambitious project, with everyone's standards being high and all.

Ralph, yes, this difficulty curve is exactly what I'm looking for - either as a sole determination of difficulty, or as a modifer.


Gains, welcome!

gains wrote:
So, what you're working with is the metaphysical concept that more witnesses to an event strengthen it as reality. The more human beings alive who know that an event is historical, the harder it is to change, so very early history is rock solid.

xenopulse wrote: So... I know you guys are pretty far into this development, but let me pose one basic question:

Is the core of the game the ability to play in times that we know about? I.e., is the fun aspect of playing this game that you can play in Roman times, or during a world war, etc.?

I see.

Well, the only other comment I can make is that it may be best to have the Nemesis plot be removed from great historical events. The plot could be subtle and hidden, and take place in the shadows of these events. But if the big events are overdetermined, Archivists will not be able to change those, so cannot achieve a victory there. Or if they did, every major change needs to be taken into account for future development. If the Nemesis actions happen in more secret ways, the big picture future could remain virtually the same, while the underground development of the Nemesis plot and the Archivist development has changed.

I.e., introduce a completely different, hidden strand of history that is interwoven with, but independently alterable from, the known major history.

gains wrote: So, what you're working with is the metaphysical concept that more witnesses to an event strengthen it as reality. The more human beings alive who know that an event is historical, the harder it is to change, so very early history is rock solid.

Wow- SWEET concepts between Ralph, Doug and Syd!
Doug - I really think you're inverse concept really captures an essence of history that few have really captured , really eliminates a lot of the temporal headaches.

I'm really liking the concept of the Dark Archivist from earlier, and the Nemesis could tie into this yet.
Something just snapped to mind (maybe just a possible way):

The 'Archivists' came to being though a kind of temporal mishap, a device that shouldn't exist sends the group (or two?) into the 'non-time' Archivist time. The one faction seeks to use their new power to alter event X, fictional or historical, but because of Doug's inverse effects the events are difficult to change as is (which could help scale the events to the sessions players want). The mucking of time, in the end, is what destroys humanity. The players have the options of stopping the other party or stopping the device from coming into existance (assuming Doug's idea the Archivists are removed from causality- if successful, they try to access the device and it fails).

Warning: LONG post coming up. :)

After re-reading my own post, I saw that I make a lot of references to my Pillars post. This is not an attempt to drag the very valuable thoughts in this thread over there and convert them to what I already have. I just want to show where I dig this post most, shed some light on the similarities, etc. :)

Doug wrote: 1) The most dramatic way to present a Nemesis within the setting is to let it win. "At some point in the future, the human race is wiped out. Now it's up to you to do something about it." This provides an immediate issue for the players to address.

Doug wrote: I would like to suggest that events are "overdetermined" by their impact on the future of the Host Time Tunnel. This is a complete reverse from the original theory (which is that events are overdetermined by what came before) but I think it works (and works better) within a time travel campaign.

I wrote: All of SpaceTime is connected by a great Field. Events that are well-known and had big impact have many far-reaching ripples in this field (like a big stone thrown in a pond) and are harder to change. There are, however, unobserved points with a disproportionate impact on history and Passions – these are the points at which an Archivist may most effectively make his mark.

Ralph wrote: In other words...task difficulty no longer matter.

Alls that matters then are two factors. 1) how far back in the time stream are you (farther back is harder), and 2) how invasive of an event are you doing (i.e. something minor that might have ripples that aren't immediately obvious vs. killing Abraham Lincoln before he gets elected president). No matter what task the characters do, that's your source of difficulty. All other task related difficulty can be explained away by time-wavium.

Tobias wrote: I wanted to leave the door open for... - group-competition play - where different players represent all the Archivists in existance, and they're pushing their own agenda (you could say they're all each other's nemesis).

George Orwell wrote: He who controls the present, controls the past; and he who controls the past, controls the future.

That's a terrific concept Sydney. And actually increases the importance of the term Archivist. Is it someone who investigates history to try to reinforce their present, or someone who looks to break it down.

I had a story idea years ago about a company developing time travel and then going back to discover that they didn't really exist. That the events that led up to their lead researcher's birth didn't happen, that the company was owned by different people and completely mundane in the years leading up to their great discovery.

So, they went to work ensuring their own existence.

Never finished it, but it seems significant now.

Very interesting, Sydney, and it does make the term 'Archivist' make more sense.

There are 2 things I'd try to take into account, as I (and you) work on this:

1. Even if you wipe out the history of how the Big Brother society came to be, it, and its overlords, still exist. Even if you tell the people living under BB something completely bogus, they're still feeling the effects every day. So not everything can be erased (still plenty of room for horror and history-wiping, though).

2. This also opens up some other interesting avenues - what if the Archivists completely 'remove' a Pillar through ret-conning (known) history? Say they remove the pillar of Agression - wouldn't the world be a much better place? Sure, maybe, for a while, and then, all of a sudden, overpopulation, apathy (any hostile virus/threat is not met agressively enough to counter it), etc.

I've been banging my head trying to get parts 2 and 3 to come out, but they're stuck. (The gap between time-travel and pillar and personal possession spotlight is too hard to close elegantly). Maybe this'll jolt them loose. :)

The dependance on HUMAN observation is still troublesome. a) its not in the science, b) its more and more like mage ("kill everyone and let prime sort it out" is a potentially valid solution to the ascension war), and c) are there any aliens in space, shaking tentacles with the Tibetans 'round Algol, and if so, what does their observation effect? What if we are being observed by an alien through a very (very) large telescope?

I'm not sure I referred people to timestream before, but let me do so again.

(heck, I'm not sure if I haven't been influenced a lot by it already, if it's parallel development, or whatever. I did dl it today).

edit: oh, and contracycle, I'm having difficulty parsing your post. Could you elaborate a bit?

ok. There is nothing in the Heisenberg principle that relies on human or living observation. Any electron is a valid observer. But this model, by proposing that "observation" constitutes human knowledge of history, implies that observation is a special quality of humans, or at least, living beings.

Which is rather like Mage. Under this model, if a bit of history is troubling you, a valid methodology would be to erase its memory or kill everyone who remembers it, thus rendering it indeterminant. In a similar way in mage, because reality is enforced by the conceptions of humans, killing everyone is a valid solution if you think this will cause the re-assembly of Prime as all the shards are re-united (the shards being the mystic soul that gives humans the power to impose reality).

If its not specific to humans, or of the game is intended to pass into the future, then the question is raised as to if there are aliens, and if they also have the same powers of "observation" as humans. If they do, then we must consider the prospect that someone far away might be observing what we do through a solar-system sized telescope.

Ok.

This is just my take, but 'the model', as of now, is of course in flux. I am well aware that to the Heisenberg principle even one electron may be a valid observer.

I am not saying that the 'Schrodinger Points' are quantum-mechanical points that any electron will decide the state for; I am saying the SP's - that a Archivist may seek out and try to affect - share (disturbingly many?) characteristics with such 'Cat' situations.

As I see it, in the hypothetical grand field that unites things in the SW universe, there are space-time 'points' or 'moments' that for some reason are low-threshold to enter (from a perpendical vector) and little known, but once a little push has been exerted there (this may be as little as the Archivist observing) will 'collapse' to favor one side of the possible conflict at that point. Basically, the Schrodinger Point is a metaphor. Archivists may very well call them 'teetering boulder' points. After the boulder crashes down, the whole timestream wobbles with its impact, both past and future.

I just noticed this also elegantly solves the ret-conning problems of another (Dark) Archivist going back and undoing your work - the point has already collapsed once, and had it's effect - undoing it won't work since the delicate balance is gone.

Anyone outside the timestream with the power to influence could potentially collapse these points - people (and aliens) within the time-stream (which is 'over and done with' and 'complete' from the point of view of the archivists, or in the process of the last dying seconds due to Nemesis) however, have already had their say/impact effect. In other words, it can't be 'observed' by an alien within the normal timestream because it already hasn't been 'observed'.

(side note: I'm currently thinking on the possibilities of Passions also being somewhat perpendicular to the timestream.).

Tobias wrote: (side note: I'm currently thinking on the possibilities of Passions also being somewhat perpendicular to the timestream.).

Wheew, back from my business trip, and we're still discussing this, which is great.

I'm also going to sit back and digest this thread for a bit, but I'd like to comment now on somethng contracycle said, as it's both a good point and a significant potential stumbling block for this thread:

contracycle wrote: ok. There is nothing in the Heisenberg principle that relies on human or living observation. Any electron is a valid observer. But this model, by proposing that "observation" constitutes human knowledge of history, implies that observation is a special quality of humans, or at least, living beings.

I agree so completely with Doug I don't have the words to properly express it. I strongly suggest that we not allow any real science to interfere with the coolness of the game we are creating.

This game should be whatever we want it to be, not something we have to shoehorn into the scientific understanding of the day. Throw some pseudoscientific jargon in there for color? Sure. Try to justify it that way? Heck no.

Thanks Andrew, much appreciated!

To avoid turning this into a purely mutual back-slapping exercise, there's something I'd like to develop out of this.

As designers of this game, we don't have to justify any decisons that we make about the setting, period. However, I think we should acknowledge that the intensive discussions we have had about the "true" nature of HTT, possession etc. means that this is turning into a game with a significant Simulationist element - in terms of wanting a game universe with consistent rules, which can be explored. The emphasis on causality and modularity are also, IMHO, strong Sim themes.

The other driving force behind this game has been very Narrativist - in the sense of setting up play to addressing Premises and making difficult (moral?) choices, and wanting this to be explicit within the mechanics.

I don't want to derail the existing thread with this (but I think that making our design goals explicit in this way may be a useful mini-thread of it's own... that's a broad hint to Sydney, by the way.) However, if we accept the Sim element of this game as being a desirable or necessary feature: we do not need to justify, but we do need to be able to explain why things work as they do. Hence the "pseudoscience".

Actually, like Ralph (in one post, at least, I won't say that's Ralph's whole opinion), I arrive at rather gamist elements myself. But there's no need for a pseudoscience setting to automatically be Sim.

The thread might be useful, though.

Doug Ruff wrote:
This is why Mage is a viable game concept, and I think that we can come up with a similar precedent for allowing the "observer effect" to be human-only.

OK, it's been a week since the last post, but I'd like to make a statement of intent re:setting.

Assuming that we are still working (or thinking about, at least) "contender" mechanics for the game, here is what I would like to take from this thread for future use.

(1) My own "reverse causality" suggestion, which leads into the assumption that (at the beginning of the game) there has been a catastrophe.

(2) Archivists can only travel within Host time which is occupied by humans. I'd go so far as to say that they can only experience the Host Time Tunnel when they are in a Host.

(Note: Hosts with sufficient technology may be able to time travel physically as an Option. This would be extremely dangerous to the continuity of the HTT.)

(3) (From Tobias) - group competition very much encouraged. The Archivists are deciding how to shape the whole of human history, I cannot imagine them agreeing. I think this is facilitated by taking less interest in individual moments in history, and more interest over how the whole thing pans out.

(4) Also from Tobias - how old an event is, is not the only thing that makes it difficult to change. It's also how long the impact lasts, and (ultimately) how many people it effects. But I don't need to know (for example) who learnt how to domesticate animals, in order for this event to affect me. It's enough that it happened.

(5) (From Sydney) - if the Archivists (or Nemesis) change events so that Humanity flourishes amongst the stars, this effectively "locks down" a large element the game, as the Archivists have much less power to change things.

This makes a permanent "big brother" society a potential outcome. This should be considered to be a major danger when trying to save humanity.

Although this isn't yet a set of mechanics, I want to ensure that there are no "dealbreakers" within this set of assumptions. One of the reasons for this, is that I would like to draw a line under this thread, and start posting an outline for possession mechanics.

So, please speak, and speak loud.

(Sydney: let me know when you want to see the first possession mechanics, and whether or not I should start the thread, or PM you first.)

Doug Ruff wrote: (1) My own "reverse causality" suggestion, which leads into the assumption that (at the beginning of the game) there has been a catastrophe.

Doug Ruff wrote: 2) Archivists can only travel within Host time which is occupied by humans. I'd go so far as to say that they can only experience the Host Time Tunnel when they are in a Host.

Doug Ruff wrote: (Note: Hosts with sufficient technology may be able to time travel physically as an Option. This would be extremely dangerous to the continuity of the HTT.)

Doug Ruff wrote: (5) (From Sydney) - if the Archivists (or Nemesis) change events so that Humanity flourishes amongst the stars, this effectively "locks down" a large element the game, as the Archivists have much less power to change things.

Andrew Morris wrote:

Doug Ruff wrote: (Note: Hosts with sufficient technology may be able to time travel physically as an Option. This would be extremely dangerous to the continuity of the HTT.)

I hate this, even as an option. Sorry Doug. My problem is twofold. The first issue is that this complicates things even more. My greater concern is that hosts being able to time travel has nothing to do with (at least in my opinion) what the core of this game is -- hard moral choices. Maybe I'm just being cranky and judgemental, but I think this would only serve to dilute the impact of the Archivists' own time-travel abilities.

Andrew Morris wrote: 3. What happens to the evolved humanity (i.e. Archivists)? They vanish, because they never were.

Just a little note - I'm following this (and the new thread) with interest, and did a brain-dump to Sydney last Friday to get myself unstuck. Still plugging at it, but I'm at that phase of creativity where everything I've done looks like garbage, there's too much unsorted unassociated stuff, etc.

Sydney, feel free to post my brain-dump somewhere, if you think it might help.

Tx.