Time travel and its impacts are probably the hardest thing to use in any kind of game. It is far, far too easy to tie yourself in knots going forward and backward and trying to keep on top of a timeline as it wriggles and changes under you.
For a change I'm not going to write about the Dungeons & Dragons homebrew world I run. Instead, this post is very much going to be one where I bounce ideas around. Many years ago, I was involved in a long-running science fiction game. It was homebrewed and primarily narrative, and very much space opera themed. We were all big fans of Heinlein's Starship Troopers, EE "Doc" Smith's Lensman books and similar early sci-fi source material.
Each of the players took the role of the ruler of a multi-galactic empire. We used a fairly accelerated timescale of 1 real-world day equalling 2 game years. It gave our industries the time they needed to build huge space armadas ! It also meant that the rulers would age and die, and we'd end up playing their descendants and heirs.
There was a huge amount of solo gameplay as we created the internal histories of our empires and conquered unaligned worlds and galaxies, interspersed with more communal activities every time a war between us broke out. The actual rules we used were pretty flexible. Other than the timescale, it would often be a case of working up a quick-play set of homebrew rules anew for each war, building on the strengths and weaknesses of the rules we'd developed for the previous war.
Image by Roy Snyder from Pixabay
Time War
On one particular occasion, we tested out some ideas for a time war. They were never deployed "in anger", as we came to the conclusion that the ideas were good, but the record keeping could rapidly become overwhelming. But just to give a flavour (and maybe enable someone to turn a good idea into something actually playable), here is an outline;
The Time Track and Game Objectives
The main feature of the game was a long term "time track", covering several thousand years of a world's history up to the present day. Using artistic license, we decided that every 50 years would have a key event of some kind or another in the world's history. Thus, the time track was effectively a string of boxes each representing 50 years drawn on a very long piece of paper (as I recall, the back of an old roll of wallpaper did sterling work for this).
Present day time would advance at the rate of two years for every player-timescale day (we were playing it in a kind of play-by-mail manner, meeting up face to face every few days).
The goal was to take control of the world being fought over by influencing it's history in the past. To do this, players would send teams of agents back and forth along the time track.
Agents Zipping Around Time !
These teams of time agents could do one of three things;
Agent teams could move through time. Each team would be assigned an energy budget, and it was changes in their travel which would use energy - accelerating or decelerating their travel rate, or choosing to stop at a particular time. Accelerated travel was possible with the expenditure of huge amounts of energy, but it was cheaper (and riskier) to travel slower.
Once a team ran out of energy, they were stuck where they landed, or even worse, trapped speeding towards the beginning or end of the universe if they'd forgotten to leave enough energy budget to put the brakes on. Teams could transfer energy to each other. A key tactic for teams low on energy was to get to some key point in time, then lurk around to spoil the work of any enemy team going there until another friendly team could arrive with energy supplies.
We tinkered with, but never got around to finalising, rules to allow enemy teams to be robbed of their energy if they lost a skirmish.
Image by kalhh from Pixabay
Time Agents Strike !
The rules we designed for most actions were very much narrative-based. In retrospect, it would have been better to reduce the narrative and use a card-based system for impacts on the timeline.
If two teams of opposing agents met in the same point on the timeline, we had a simple dice-based system to determine if they could intercept each other. If they could, it was fought out as a quick skirmish wargame where generally one side would win and the other side would all be killed. There is definitely room to improve this method !
If a team got to a key point in time and embedded itself, it could attempt to change history, with success determined by a die roll factoring in the skill of the team, the difficulty of making that particular change, and how long the team had been successfully embedded. The effects of the change were handled narratively, which was wonderfully imaginative but sometimes got silly and could definitely be done in a more structured manner.
If time was changed, it was agreed through the narrative how dramatic the change was. Changes would propagate up the timeline at a rate of 500 years per turn until they reached the present. The logic was that changes further in the past had a greater impact, but of course had more chance of being reversed. We used a rough points system, and the side that got to an agreed points value of changes first would be the winner.
Once a change was rippling up the timeline, it would have a chance of changing any other ripples it met in randomly determined ways. More importantly if a team of enemy agents crossed the change or (to improve their chances) could synchronise their movement with it, they had a chance to change it. This was another die roll, using the same factors as before but also modified by how much energy they would choose to expend on it. A successful roll would cancel the change, but a massively successful roll would actually convert it into points for their side.
Image by Sammy-Sander from Pixabay
How It Played in Reality
The truth is, this needed a lot more development and refinement ! As a set of very rough rules played among friends, it was fun, kind of worked, and led to quite a bit of minor arguing back and forth.
On the tabletop, it rapidly became a mess of notes on scraps of paper, tracks drawn on the timeline, and mini-skirmish battlefields dotted with dead plastic Airfix soldiers being used as time agents, innocent bystanders and "local" historical soldiers.
Things we could have done to improve it;
All in all, I think it's an idea with huge potential but which really needed a lot of work to turn it into an actual playable game. An option might have been to accept and embrace the idea that it would be a long-running game, and create rules to turn the narrative parts into actual RPG modules.
Image by mohamed Hassan from Pixabay
"What did you do during the Timewar, Dad ?"
"Everything, son. I had a lot of fun. Which is why I am also your great great great grandfather, grandson and uncle."
