Showing posts with label continuum. Show all posts
Showing posts with label continuum. Show all posts

Tuesday, 22 May 2012

Some thoughts on a Time Travel RPG

I've been thinking about how a time travel tabletop RPG for some time now, wondering how it could be put together in a neat way without being burdensome in terms of rules. noisms is responsible for two provocations that started me thinking about it. The first was introducing me to Microscope, which works really well in terms of role-playing and world-building, and which has the neat mechanism of populating a worldline with cards that put things in historical places.

While playing it I thought about how the end result was really neat, but that if you took a picture at the end you might not have a clear picture of the timeline of the player actions (i.e., the order in which the group put things down). A simple way around this would be to just number the cards as they come in to play. That was the first seed which went in to my mind.

The second thing that noisms did was talk about Continuum on his blog:
Part of [what makes Continuum compelling] is all the talk of time-travel combat: trying to "frag" your opponent by making him cease to exist due to historical discrepancy. And undoubtedly, a large part of the attraction was the air of enigma surrounding this apparently excellent but impossible-to-possess gaming grimoire.
But he went on to say that there were plenty of reviews and notes out there from people who had played the game that it inevitably lead to a kind of railroading. Not so much Doctor Who as the Time Tunnel by the sounds of it: instead of exploring the whole of time and space to explore you have to contend with a "mission" at a particular instant. Again, I have not played Continuum, but having played RPGs that have been presented to me more as "story games" the idea of this described game doesn't appeal all that much.

But it did spark a couple of ideas... (continued after cut!)