Time Travel

[Red Baron]

Time travel seems to be a massively under-utilized trope in both fantasy and even sci-fi gaming. For being such a staple of literature, I'm really surprised that I have never seen a "ring of time-travelling", or similar item, which might send players back and forth in time.

The closest thing I see tends to be "visions from the past", ghosts, or "time-stop" spells. Any time travel that does occur seems to be in the order of 1000 years rather than in the order of days in order to avoid paradoxes, and to push some plot. The more interesting part of time travel for me is figuring out how to resolve those time travel paradoxes where players decide to go back 2 days into the past to get the magic sword before someone else does. You then have really fun choices to make: is the previously (in the future) looted treasure there now or has it already been claimed (in the future)? Can you bring someone back to life who died by preventing their death in the past? I have seen an extensive amount of writing on "what to do when you have two groups playing, and the group that is farther behind in time reaches an area the group further ahead in time went to?" I think there's a large amount of crossover between the two, in terms of different methods of resolving paradoxes.

[Punkrabbitt]

There was a AD&D2E supplement called "Chronomancer" that dealt specifically with these ideas.

[countingwizard]

I've let my players use time travel powers before due to a wish, and it doesn't work very well. The entire game turns into, "enter room > do thing > undo bad things > redo thing but right".

I think time travel works better over longer distances of time, so that players aren't able to directly interact with themselves. You have to have a setting that's much more thought out though. I don't think I'd be able to do it without running something like Greyhawk or Planet Eris, just because of the amount of detail involved.

[hamurai]

Inspired by Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle I once allowed time travel with the drawback that machine allowing had the adjustable variables of time and space and the more precise you adjusted the time, the less precise you could adjust space - so if you wanted a very precise "place" in time, you could end up pretty much anywhere. If you set the location to be very precise, the time you traveled to was rather random.
So, time travel for my players was always a dangerous adventure and while I didn't let them turn up back in time in a solid rock, they could end up inside a mountain cave where some monsters were just discussing who or what to eat next.

They got dice to adjust the time and location, a d2 being very precise, a d20 being very random. They allocated dice pairs: d2/d20, d4/d12, d6/d10, d8/d8. They rolled both dice, one for time, one for space. A 1 was a perfect fit for what they wanted. The higher the result, the farther away they had traveled.

The adventures pretty much "wrote" themselves once they discovered the possible effect and decided to undo some major bad decisions of their own. They got a bad roll and from that point on they pretty much only tried to get back to their normal timeline in a place which wasn't completely hostile. Took them some time. They were less careless afterwards...

[makofan]

I ran a Sailor Moon/Cthulhu/Evangelion/Amber time travel campaign for seven years. Actions in the past could and often did make changes in the future, but if the character was present when the future-altering event happened, the character would not be affected

[Starbeard]

Dungeon Crawl Classics has a deity/wizard patron or two who grant special temporal spells. I was running a B/X game where one character who could cast spells, but they had to be rolled randomly out of the DCC rulebook at each casting. They were on the Isle of Dread and exploring a large cave when they began to be harassed by kopru. The retreat didn't go well, and most of the party died until the player pressed the panic button and cast a random DCC spell, which ended up throwing her back in time several hours. She used loose rocks to write a warning to the party at the entrance of the cave, then we rewound the clock to that point, and they figured out a way to sidestep the issue.

It was pretty satisfying for everyone, but I can see how having semi-regular access to that sort of magic might get stale after a while.

[Deleted]

It's hard enough to track a party in two different rooms, I couldn't imagine trying to DM for a party split into two different time lines. Besides, time travel only works in fiction (on the rare occasion that it does actually work) because the author can ensure that no one traveling through time does anything logical.

I've used time travel before but under very strict limitation. 1) They entire party has to go 2) they have little or no control on where they go and, more importantly, how they get back. Basically the Land of the Lost setup.

[geoffrey]

From page 33 of Monsters & Treasure, under a Ring of Three Wishes:

Typically, greedy characters will request more wishes, for example, as one of their wishes. The referee should then put that character into an endless closed time loop, moving him back to the time he first obtained the wish ring...Wishes that unfortunate adventures had never happened should be granted.

[asaki]

I just ran a time traveling adventure on Saturday. They wanted to play 5th Edition, so I thought it would be fun to take them from Phandalin, which was ruins in 2nd Edition, to the nearby logging community of Kheldell, which is ruins in 5th Edition (according to the Wiki, anyway). I just needed a small town in Forgotten Realms that was near a forest, and I thought the time travel might mess with their heads a little bit...but when the town greeter asked them "You came from Phandalin? The ghost town??", one of the new players asked him what year it was. Kind of spoiled the surprise ending, but they still had fun with it, and were shocked when they tried going back to Phandalin.

We've messed with time travel before, as adventure hooks in an older home-brew game we were playing, and we basically had gods breathing down our neck the whole time, scolding us for messing with the time currents, and threatening us if we ever tried it again.