This is another idea for a game I've had. I just recently came up with the idea, so there's much fleshing out necessary, but I figured I would explain my idea and hopefully everyones advice would help in the development.

The concept of Long Goodbye is time travelers trying to determine what destroys the Earth and, of course, try to prevent it from occuring.

Players begin at the last moment before the world is destroyed and, through cosmic rays, Divine Intervention, technology, etc... the players are going to relive the day until they either figure out what happened or they run out of time.

As soon as the game starts, the players witness the destruction of the Earth (it could be anything from nuclear war or giant locusts to alien invasion or an asteroid). After the world is destroyed, the roll 2d12.

Subtract one from the result and this is the hour they have been teleported to.

Roll of 2 = 1 am
Roll of 3 = 2 am
Roll of 4 = 3 am
...
Roll of 23 = 10 pm
Roll of 24 = 11 pm

At 12 am, the world is destroyed.

The players relive the entire day, but the hours are all out of order. They live a complete hour before the dice are rolled again and they are transported to the next hour.

They must collect clues, ask questions, kill major players or protect major players, trying to work their way to saving the planet.

For example, the players start out and they roll a 7. They are then living at 6am. They go from 6:00 to 6:59 at which point they roll again. Now they get a 23 and are living in 10 pm. They go from 10:00 to 10:59.

If an hour is rolled they already have lived through, the dice are rerolled. No hour can be lived twice.

This game is very intense for the GM, who will have to sit down and work out the details for every hour and use his notes so he knows what is occuring at specific points in time.

Everyone must also takes notes and keep track of everything they do, just for the sake of confusion.

For the hook is, once someone is confused to the point where an argument begins or discussions of how doing something in the past might ruin something in the future, the game ends and the players die. So the players must be very careful not to make any drastic changes to the time line.

They are there are observers, interrogators and information collectors.

After all the hours have been completed, they return to the last hour, the 23rd hour. They now have one hour to fix everything that needs fixing to save the world.

Ideally, this last hour should be filled with debate about who should die, what should blow up, what should be preserved and how to accomplish these tasks.

I pre-agree that this sounds complicated, but if organized properly, it could make for a very intense roleplaying experience.

Any advice or suggestions?

Ooh! What a neat idea!

(Welcome to the Forge; sorry, I haven't had the chance to say that before.)

I like this a lot.

Here's my suggestion. Make it a boxed game. Provide 'signal point' cards from which a gamemaster assembles the 'cause of death' for the Earth. (I imagine they'd have some kind of system limiting which can be strung together and how.) The players jump back and forth through that last day attempting to discern the signal points with role-playing. If they figure out which there are and in what order, in the last hour they role-play how they obstruct this conclusion.

That's the only way I can imagine keeping the game form being a 'huge amount of gamemaster work' for a game of 'twenty (three) questions.'

I really like 'the final countdown' (which is out of order), but I'd suggest using smaller dice as the game progresses because imagine trying to roll a 2 or a 13 to see which hour is 'second to last.' (How about a spinner divided up into wedges, if you spin a 'used hour' you play the next one over in the wedge.)

Fang Langford

p. s. That and I'm hung up on this 'for Family Game Night' boxed games like How to Host a Deserted Island.

Hey Gwen,

It's a very cool idea with, in my opinion, a lotta lotta dramatic potential. I like it a lot. And I'm very much struggling against a desire to somehow come on real strong and mesmerizing and get you to shape it according to my vision. But unlike His Overbearing Fangness I've got compunctions against turning the full force of my own design agenda on relative innocents straight out of the gate. So instead I'm going to ask some questions so I'm more clear about your vision, and sort of thereby you'd be bracing yourself a bit...for when I finally blast you with my personal design agenda:

1. Do you envision the player character group travelling from hour to hour en masse, having and sharing all scenes together, or at least starting all scenes together, with the possibility of becoming separated over the course of the hour and then rejoined for the beginning of the next scene?

2. Do you envision the GM needing to enforce rigid continuity, where if the group rolls hour 10 the player characters are all in the exact same positions they were at the end of hour 9 that the group played through two game sessions previous?

3. How would you handle player character death?

4. Do you envision primarily investigation during hours 1-23, with a climactic and dramatic doing of important things during hour 24? Or do you expect players to use an incremental process of saving the world, rearranging things, killing people, convincing people to change their actions, and destroying things, over the course of their reliving of hours 1-23? At one point you write that you expect the characters to "collect clues, ask questions, kill major players or protect major players." That seems pretty active and incremental to me. Later you write that they are "observers, interrogators and information collectors" and that the "last hour should be filled with debate about who should die, what should blow up, what should be preserved and how to accomplish these tasks." I don't think you can afford being equivocal on this. Saving the world is either incremental, via determined action over the course of the entire 24 hours, or it's not, with all decisive action being reserved until the last hour.

5. How much disagreement is enough to trigger the pre-emptive end of the game? For example: At the beginning of play, the characters witnessed the destruction of the Earth from street-level Times Square by a swarm of giant locusts consuming all the buildings. At the very end of hour 10, they saw the hatching of a winged creature, all covered in fluid, from an egg in an incubator, but were unable to take action before the end of the hour. When finally an hour previous to 10 is rolled and the characters find themselves in the position of taking a hammer to that egg, I say, "What if the thing we saw hatching wasn't the mother locust?" Is that enough disagreement to trigger the end of the game?

Paul

1. Do you envision the player character group travelling from hour to hour en masse, having and sharing all scenes together, or at least starting all scenes together, with the possibility of becoming separated over the course of the hour and then rejoined for the beginning of the next scene?

2. Do you envision the GM needing to enforce rigid continuity, where if the group rolls hour 10 the player characters are all in the exact same positions they were at the end of hour 9 that the group played through two game sessions previous?

3. How would you handle player character death?

4. Do you envision primarily investigation during hours 1-23, with a climactic and dramatic doing of important things during hour 24? ... At one point you write that you expect the characters to "collect clues, ask questions, kill major players or protect major players." That seems pretty active and incremental to me. Later you write that they are "observers, interrogators and information collectors" and that the "last hour should be filled with debate about who should die, what should blow up, what should be preserved and how to accomplish these tasks."

5. How much disagreement is enough to trigger the pre-emptive end of the game?

Hey Gwen,

I like your plan for handling character death. But it would suck to be the player of a character who died early into the game. What do you think of maybe allowing the character to continue on as a ghost, in some limited capacity, perhaps able to influence emotions and move objects?

My own idea for Long Goodbye (which is a fantastic name, by the way) would be for the GM to go around the room, rolling an hour for each character, which would allow for the framing entirely separate scenes throughout the timeline (or optionally for combined scenes if the same hour got rolled for more than one character). If someone rolled an hour they played already, I'd put them in a different location. I can see it being pretty cool if as a player I got framed into a gunfight scene in the lobby of a hotel, at the same time as a previously played scene with my character on the mezzanine. I'd also ditch the requirement that all 24 hours had to be played and frame everyone to the 24th hour the first time it got rolled. So players would sometimes entirely avoid finding themselves in the exact physical circumstances they were in at the end of some of the hours. You know the scene in The Poseidon Adventure where Gene Hackman jumps to the gas shutoff valve? Characters could do that kind of thing at the end of an hour, gambling they might not ever roll the next hour and end up demised. I think ditching the 24 hours requirement would also make the last hour that much more tense, since the players would be working with incomplete information when it came down to their final decisions.

Another thing I'd do personally was include reality TV style epilogues for each character if the game ends out of confusion or argumentation. Go around the room, with each player narrating, "It was Jim's fault...if he'd listened to me..." The GM could take the last epilogue, and do it from the perspective of a significant NPC who might comment from an informed or dramatic perspective, "I only wanted to see my wife one last time before the virus had eaten so much of my brain I wouldn't have recognized her."

Honestly though, I think you have it well thought out for yourself. I think your clarification of what constitutes confusion and argumentation should become part of your game document. I think you should pick a rules system and run it. Extreme Vengeance would be good if you want an action movie style. It really is a solid game underneath all the wretched attempts at humor. The Window, The Ladder, or EPICS would be good for something less actiony.

Paul

Gwen wrote: This is one thing I forgot to mention. If a character dies, the can continue to play ONLY if the hour rolled is BEFORE their death. For example, if someone were to die in hour 14, they can still play them game if in hour 1 - 13. Everything after hour 14 they are "dead" and unable to play.

This way hour 24 will be more stressful, perhaps having only one or two people left alive to accomplish the tasks.

What about the following situation:

Game starts.
Characters go to hour 13
Characters go to hour 21
Characters go to hour 9
Characters go to hour 6, one of them dies.

Oops.. not only can the character only play hours 1-5 now, but he somehow mysteriously turned up in hours 9,13 and 21 even though he was dead.

It's a really good idea, but I can see a lot of problems with it. If you can sort those through, it could be a really interesting game.

I'm curious - how much was the series "24" an influence?

Gwen wrote:
This is a great example of an Argument! If a situation like this would arrive, the players would have to sort this out for themselves and come to an agreement, otherwise there is a PARADOX and the game ends.

I guess, from a design aspect, it would be much simpler, if the PCs were part of an organization that could detect "end of the world" problems, and which sent back agents regularly to fix such problems. As such, the PCs would know what was going on...

Blecch! Here's an alternative:

Ever find yourself at work, but you can't remember driving there? The route is so worn into your brain that you drove there on autopilot. How about the idea that a person's life of travel forward in time has natural eddies that circle him/her back by a few hours or days; it's just that the life is so worn into your brain that you generally autopilot through the experience. In this case though, the end of the world was so shocking that the reliving is characterized by awareness of what's to come.

Paul

Worked for Assimov. I never get your tastes, Paul. ;-)

Anyhow, I could accept a croc of some sort where the character just "knows" that he's there to save the world.

But mostly this is Paul's play preference coming out. He'd prefer a Narrativist version I'm sure. As such he's simply advocating the option I already enumerated for that rout more or less.

Mike

I feel like I should say something; I'm just not sure what.

We did a time-travel based world, The Perpetual Barbecue, in Multiverser: The Second Book of Worlds; this was more like Groundhog day, in that the player characters relive the day again and again (actually, in two alternating versions, through which they find the clues to why it's happening). That's very different from what you're trying to do, but it may be instructive.

The critical point, in my mind, is you need an event script, a point-by-point outline of what every non-player character is going to say and do, of everything that is going to happen. In essence, you need a story that is happening, so that at any given moment the referee knows what is happening and can reveal it to the players. At the same time, it has to have flexibility in it, so that you can incorporate changes made by the players.

There's a problem which surprisingly no one has noticed. If the players play hour 7 and later come back for hour 8, there's certainly some logic to starting them in hour 8 where they ended in hour 7; but given the random nature of the situation, it's just as likely that they'll play hour 8 and then later play hour 7. How are we going to know where they end hour 7 to start hour 8, if these are played in reverse order? Or do the players have to take into account where they were at the beginning of hour 8, and try to get there? Or is that all completely irrelevant, in which case where they start in hour 8 has nothing to do with where they ended hour 7, regardless of the sequence?

If you're going to tamper with time, you need, I think, to get into your head the difference between temporal order and sequential order. If the character is killed at noon, is it worse for him to have already appeared at six pm, or for him to subsequently appear at six am? Is it controlled by the order events happen in time, or in the order they happen in experience?

As much as I enjoy time travel, the concept here gives me nightmares. It isn't, as Cole thinks, that you can't change the past; it's that you can destroy it utterly if you're not careful, and if you try to do so intentionally your best hope is to fail. But then, I've spent a bit of time thinking about how to handle time travel; my Temporal Anomalies site might be useful in helping get to the bottom of it.

--M. J. Young

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=0004C31F-B4E0-1D4E-90FB809EC5880000&pageNumber=1&catID=9

Scientific American Article wrote: THE NOTORIOUS MOTHER PARADOX (sometimes formulated using other familial relationships) arises when people or objects can travel backward in time and alter the past. A simplified version involves billiard balls. A billiard ball passes through a wormhole time machine. Upon emerging, it hits its earlier self, thereby preventing it from ever entering the wormhole.

RESOLUTION OF THE PARADOX proceeds from a simple realization: the billiard ball cannot do something that is inconsistent with logic or with the laws of physics. It cannot pass through the wormhole in such a way that will prevent it from passing through the wormhole. But nothing stops it from passing through the wormhole in an infinity of other ways.

I took it that when the hour is up, a new hour is randomly picked from the 23, but the players stay in the same spot. Just the time changes.

This makes for a more consecutive journey, it may get all too much otherwise.

ie.
Players are a X, it is 18.59.
(3.00 is rolled)
Players are still at X, but it is now 3.00

This also allows for racing to get to a certain place, and so on.

Oh and once again, Hi forgites.

I just had to drop a line in here to say that I think this iz a really neat idea.

Sure, it has a lot of sticky points that need to be worked through, but lots of unique ideas have that problem. (To say nothing of how difficult time travel can be just in general.) The easy ideas are the ones that have been done already, right. :)

Good luck, and I hope to hear more about it in the future.

- Ziriel

OK, guess I have to stop lurking ;-)

First of all, please continue working on this, it sounds VERY interesting, I'd love to play it...

Why do you want to randomly determine which time will be next? Why not let the GM decide?

thoth wrote:

Scientific American Article wrote: THE NOTORIOUS MOTHER PARADOX (sometimes formulated using other familial relationships) arises when people or objects can travel backward in time and alter the past. A simplified version involves billiard balls. A billiard ball passes through a wormhole time machine. Upon emerging, it hits its earlier self, thereby preventing it from ever entering the wormhole.

RESOLUTION OF THE PARADOX proceeds from a simple realization: the billiard ball cannot do something that is inconsistent with logic or with the laws of physics. It cannot pass through the wormhole in such a way that will prevent it from passing through the wormhole. But nothing stops it from passing through the wormhole in an infinity of other ways.

Ideas about various things:
Ever play Chrononauts(I think that's what it's called)?
This is DARN cool idea!

0)I'd use cards instead of dice. Just shuffle at the beginning and you have an hour order. It avoids the 'trying to roll that last hour problem.'

.5)As part of charachter creation players should pick where they are 24 hours ago. The GM would have to approve these.

1)The players start in a position to save the world(i.e. the end of the 24th hour), but they don't know what to do. Then the teleporting starts. You could say the agency picked them because the were the only people in the 'right place at the right time'. :) If the pllayers want they could even have a cutscene with the agency where the learn how the game works. (random hour teleports, avoid paradox, that sorta thing.ect)

2)I'd actually say players can't die, aside from blatent stupidity, which ends the world due to paradox. (Because we already know they were alive at the end, to witness it).


3)I'd actually put it on the players to maintain temporal coherence, sorta like this. When a new hour starts, do this:
1)If players have NOT played the previous hour, each player selects where they are.
2)If they HAVE played the previous hour, they are where they were at the end of the previous hour.

The could cause alot of fun racing around to get to where you should be, as it your not where you should be, it's a paradox.

Players need to arrange things so that they don't invalidate stuff they do in later hours. To take the egg example. They may find the egg in hour 12
but not get to do something to it until hour 5. They can't actually smash it, since they say it in hour 12, but they can, say drill as small hole and put poisen in in, or some such. (They just didn't see this hole later, or the player patch it.)

Basicly, detail the players have observed can't be changed, detail not yet observed is fair game.


I'm basicly viewing this is as the players bodies pass through time normally, but their mind kinda jumps around.
Also this gives the GM a chance to create 'clues' for the players, by refering to events that have 'happened', but not been played yet. Then the players can flesh these clues out. (Why am I holding a dentist drill and a rubber hose?)

(Was I the only one reminded of the Star Trek TNG finale, or am I the only
one geeky enough to admit it.)

As for coherence:I'd make each player write down a few sailent points about where they are at the beginning of each hour, then it's their job to be in that situation again.



This could be done as a Narrativist or Simist game. Either way would be fun, although the Sim version would be alot of work on the GM;

(Sorry for the core dump. I was gone from the Forge for a while do to having to write an article, so I didnt' get to do this for a while)

M. J. Young wrote:
Which proves that scientists shouldn't attempt to do metaphysics. If you parse that down, it ultimately comes to "God would not let it happen." I'm a theologian, and I know better than that.

Actually, most scientists do not believe that traveling backwards in time is possible. This is the most completely sound theory. And it's pretty much proved by Paradox.

Also, nobody from the future has come back. If they had, I'm pretty sure we'd have heard about it.

Damion, if the players solve the "problem", then it will be a paradox that they saw the end of the Earth. So, do the players lose either way? Either they fail to save the Earth, and their vision comes to pass, or they save the Earth, thus creating a paradox (why would you try to save the Earth if you didn't know it was ending?). Kerflooie, there goes Earth.

As I see it, any travel to the past would cause paradox. You weren't there, and now you were. The point is that either you allow BS theries like alternate timelines, or Blammo, no Earth (and no game).

Mike

How did I lose track of this thread?

Worked for Asimov. I never get your tastes, Paul.

Can you name a single time travel RPG that doesn't feature some organization dedicated to protecting the timestream?

If you really want to understand my tastes relative to time travel, read Memories, by Mike McQuay.

Paul

Damion, if the players solve the "problem", then it will be a paradox that they saw the end of the Earth. So, do the players lose either way? Either they fail to save the Earth, and their vision comes to pass, or they save the Earth, thus creating a paradox (why would you try to save the Earth if you didn't know it was ending?). Kerflooie, there goes Earth.

As I see it, any travel to the past would cause paradox. You weren't there, and now you were. The point is that either you allow BS theries like alternate timelines, or Blammo, no Earth (and no game).

Thoth, Mike--

• This is really hijacking the thread; we've gone a long way from trying to design a time travel game to discussing the metaphysics of time travel. I suggested other forums for this.
• It is also probably over the line in terms of the forum purpose here; we are no longer designing a game, but discussing a theory behind a theory which might give rise to a theory which provides the concept for the setting of a game--not really Indie Game Design stuff, I think.
• I've answered all these questions on the aforementioned Temporal Anomalies site; it's an Event Horizon Hot Spot, a Sci-fi Magazine Site of the Week, and included in the undergraduate metaphysics curricula of schools not otherwise associated with me. That doesn't make it right, but it does give credibility to it.



But since it's being discussed here, I'll dare to abuse the forum by responding.

thoth wrote:

Quoting first what I wrote: Which proves that scientists shouldn't attempt to do metaphysics. If you parse that down, it ultimately comes to "God would not let it happen." I'm a theologian, and I know better than that.

I don't see how you see it that way.
How I see it is, "it happens no matter what". If the future ball strikes the past ball, the past ball will eventually at some point in its own future become the future ball and strike the past ball. As i'm reading it, what happens between the points that the ball gets hit and the point it hits it past self is irrelevant.

Mike Holmes wrote: Actually, most scientists do not believe that traveling backwards in time is possible. This is the most completely sound theory. And it's pretty much proved by Paradox.

M. J. Young wrote: Thoth, Mike--

• This is really hijacking the thread; we've gone a long way from trying to design a time travel game to discussing the metaphysics of time travel. I suggested other forums for this.
• It is also probably over the line in terms of the forum purpose here; we are no longer designing a game, but discussing a theory behind a theory which might give rise to a theory which provides the concept for the setting of a game--not really Indie Game Design stuff, I think.
• I've answered all these questions on the aforementioned Temporal Anomalies site; it's an Event Horizon Hot Spot, a Sci-fi Magazine Site of the Week, and included in the undergraduate metaphysics curricula of schools not otherwise associated with me. That doesn't make it right, but it does give credibility to it.



But since it's being discussed here, I'll dare to abuse the forum by responding.

A quick note: I agree wholeheartedly with damion about using cards instead of dice. It really would solve the having to roll a certain hour problem. In addition it could give the GM a chance to peek at the shuffle before it iz played and make some notes and plans. It would certainly help the GM organize the flow and keep things from becomeing to convoluted and full of paradox. It would be especially handy if you were planning to have the game run more than one session. That way the GM could plan ahead, and the group could always look back at the cards if they forgot which hours they had already hit. You could use a red suit, ace through queen, for the day and a black suit for the night. Or, you could make your own neat-o cards and include them with the game. (Extras are always fun.) Does this appeal to you at all?

MJ,

I've only argued theory to point out that the game can proceed as written. I guess my point is that any attempt to look to closely at time travel theory is going to be problematic. So the best idea is to go with the designer's notion, and just give the players a strong incentive to ignore it. Allow anything, so long as everyone seems comfortable with it.

As far as the "Fixed Time" theory, the biggest problem is that you are prevented from going back in time because, well, you weren't there, then. See, that's what eveyone misses in time travel theory. Everyone thinks that you have to kill someone to have an effect on events. Nevermind that you displace space with the mass of your body. Simply appearing in a place that you were not previously is a paradox. You don't need to go through all the convolutions that people do to get to Paradox. How could you travel to a place in time and space that you hadn't previously been?

The wormhole theory, even if correct (the more likely fact is that what we do not yet understand is what is wrong with the theory; there is more wrong with the math right now, than right), does not allow time travel as we envision it. Sure, one can go to extreme lengths to make time travel work if one wants to. But do we need that?

Like I've said, the closer you look, the more unlikely and difficult it all becomes. So just don't look very close. The idea of the game is not to discuss issues of time travel so much as to create an entertaining story about the subject, and provide a complex puzzle to solve. Which I think it will do just fine.

Mike

Mike Holmes wrote: As far as the "Fixed Time" theory, the biggest problem is that you are prevented from going back in time because, well, you weren't there, then.

EXAMPLE wrote: I walk down the street. A future version of myself walks up and pushes me out of the way of oncoming traffic. I thank him, and travel back in time, pushing my earlier self out of the way. He thanks me and travels backwards in time.