Time Travel in your Campaign

It always seems to come up in superhero stores. Superman turned back time to stop both missiles and save Lois Lane in Superman 1. The Flash frequently goes back in time, and Heroes is a mess of time travel nonsense. Here are some thoughts around time travel in your superhero game.


Bill and Ted it: This is what we call the tactic used by Bill and Ted in their movies. "After we win, we'll go back in time and leave us the items we need now!" (Don't forget to go do those things afterwards!). Based on your future declaration, the items show up, having been placed there.

Of course, this assumes that you'll win, which you might not, and that you'll actually go leave the items there, which you might not. But this can be a clever use of "create object: innate". But how do you deal with the time travel paradox if you've given them the items, but they fail anyway, or for some reason cannot set the items up later?

Changing the Past: The big reason everyone wants time travel is to change the past. Unfortunately, it's can be hard to GM the butterfly effect, especially only if 1 PC with time travel remembers everything (or he doesn't!). Also there's a paradox involved when the PC now has no reason to go back in time to change things in the first place. A 1 point immunity to time paradoxes has been suggested, but think about it- if you're immune to changes in the timeline, you'll always be a part of the ORIGINAL timeline, regardless of changes in the past. That might not be the base timeline of the world, and if you do change the past, you'll go back to the future and see nothing has changed (since you don't move along the timeline).

Even if you say your immunity just protects your memory of the original timeline so you can identify changes happening, there could theoretically be infinite changes happening all the time (we as humans only experience the final one) but you'll experience all of them (or none of them).

Precognition as a "Save Game": I've seen some GMs where the precog can identify that he is looking into the future, then the game goes into "Maybe Mode" where they continue gaming, but at any point the PC can say "I'm done" and they go back in time to the moment he started looking into the future- the entire from that point was a precognitive vision, not actual events. Can be an interesting idea, but things can get very repetitive if he's trying to use precognition to change minor things until he gets the best result. Also, do you remember every die roll, since random chance would be the same, right? Or can he re-roll failed checks each time until he gets the better result?

The Past is Not Set: There is no history but what we make for ourselves: A twist on the line from Terminator about the future. Just like the future may not be set- with time travel the past is not set either. Think about all the characters in movies that come from a future that will never happen. Marty in back to the future visits a 2015 that would never happen (since he erases it later) and COULD never happen (as he and jennifer disappeared in 1985 and haven't been seen in 30 years). People come back in time to prevent tragedies, and if they succeed, the come from a future that never happened (perhaps they disappear as a result, but they still stuck around from a deleted timeline for a while- long enough to help delete it!).

Likewise, with precognition, you can interact with things in the future. You can make changes based on what you see. So can precogs from 10 years ago. While you might argue that they clearly did not, based on the timeline you're already in- but then if someone has postcognition, they might be able to engage in back and forth communication with a precog from the past, thus the future having a direct influence on past events.

The simplest way I've found to eliminate paradoxes is by using the multiple universe technique. You can visit your past, but any changes remain, and you find it impossible to RETURN to your future. You can GO to a future, based on the current state of events, and you can RETURN to your past, but you never need fear disappearing.

So you go back in time 10 minutes, grab your past self and have a conversation. 10 minutes pass and he never leaves, now there are two of you. Kill your past self? It won't matter, because you're not REALLY from the future, you're from the future of an alternate timeline, so no need for paradoxes.

This also allows you to have people from multiple varied futures come back as characters (or PCs) in your campaign. We've had characters from a terminator apocalypse, a planet of the apes apocalypse, a druid controlled apocalypse all while the characters were trying to stave off a zombie apocalypse. Meanwhile they had a character who was travelling back in time and killing has past self over and over so he could win the lottery or the stock market using future tips, but killing his past self because after winning the lottery he wouldn't go back in time.

But most GMs outlaw time travel in general in their campaigns to avoid these complications (especially if 1 PC has it and the others are always getting left behind). For the characters who WANT to play a time traveler without using the time travel power, try the following:

Duplicate: For having your "future" or "past" selves show up from to help you out. You are time travelling, we're just seeing the final timeline.

Create Object: For Bill and Tedding it above- the object isn't being created, you're just justifying that it was left by your future (or precognative past) self.

Regeneration/Healing: Justified perhaps that you time travelled away and healed up normally, but requires you to be able to take actions as a limited to regenerate. Self healing might make more sense, you "heal" by teleporting into another time, healing normally, then returning.

Precognition/Postcognition: Justified by you "remembering" what happened when you travelled to the other time and checked it out in person.

Teleport: You're really just walking to the new location- but you're doing it in the future or the past or something so from a third party perspective you're arriving at the same moment.

Speed/Super Speed: You're altering your connection in space/time so you just appear to be moving faster when really you've slowed down your perception of time.

Luck Control/Luck Feat: You've seen the future and you're doing it for the 2nd time, slightly differently this time in an attempt to change fate.

Thinking this way, you can easily make a time-travelling character without all the paradox and mess of actually travelling through time in an active sense.