Post by hengest on Mar 29, 2021 20:01:40 GMT -5
Most of what I've worked on is all inside the game. What if there was an in-game dysfunction that caused a little back and forth within the player-level reality?
I want to think about a bare-bones setup for occasional time-slip in play that might offer a couple different things:
Here's the idea.
1 ref (or, I guess, two in communication).
2 groups of players, one group for campaign play and one group for domain play. Probably fewer domain players.
The domain group is ahead in time by anywhere from a few months to a few years.
So the campaign-level play is reasonably expected to take place in and around the domains of the domain-level players (of course, there could be domain-level NPCs as well). The domain-present is the campaign-future.
The added interest comes in with the effective time-slip. If something happens in the campaign that is inconsistent with the domain-present, the domain-present changes to accommodate it.
So the domain-players make choices that eventually the campaign-players will catch up to. They determine the shape of things in the future.
But if the campaign-players make enough trouble, accomplish or change enough (or just the right thing, whether they know it or not), the future gets knocked out of its rut and onto a track that follows from the changes the campaign-players have caused by their actions.
Strictly speaking, it's not really a timeslip. Time only goes in one direction and there's not really any travel. It's a kind of quasi-timeslip because both groups can affect each other without actually travelling or being "aware" of anything odd going on. For the campaign-group, the future is the future. Events outside their control happen. Any major changes that affect the domain group are going to have to be shown to them in some way, of course.
***
Imagine a creek with two sets of parties wading upstream separated by some ten feet. The rear party is always downstream of the forward party. Under normal circumstances, what the forward party drops into the water flows back to the rear party. The rear party is in the wake of the other party.
But if the rear party gets very splashy, some of what they do is going to land on the forward party. Or if they stomp really hard or drop something huge into the water, the forward party is going to feel the shock.
Not a perfect analogy, but it could describe (roughly) how things would work.
***
The above might be used purely as a game-level technique. "This can happen because there are other people playing in your past." End of sentence.
Or it could be that plus an in-world oddity or mechanism that accounts for it.
For example, the world tends towards predictable narratives. Pushing the limits of those narratives goes against the natural desire of the world. This makes the world, oyster-style, squeeze domain-level characters (who are known for shaking things up) out of the present and into the future where things are less determined and more amenable to being pushed around by domain-level powers. They aren't out of the timestream, but are in a more flexible and less determined part of it (but it doesn't feel flexible to them, since they want to handle and do handle more power than normals or campaign-level PCs do).
To avoid the conceit becoming trivial, it should be impossible for the PCs to consciously manipulate any of this, for magic to affect the timestream directly. The material described above should be simply how the world works. Extremely effective and successful (high-level, in D&D terms) PCs might in effect "move up" in the timestream naturally, as a smooth consequence of their activities. It seems unlikely that domain-level PCs could ever "go back" in time, although this thought might be explored further.
***
Consequences for the ref, in a reasonably long-running campaign, might include:
[/div][/div]Consequences for players day-to-day are minimal (just play), but both groups should understand that neither they nor the ref "control" everything. It could inject an element that imitated the unpredictable qualities of reality, but this unpredictability would be different from limited randomizers like dice.
I want to think about a bare-bones setup for occasional time-slip in play that might offer a couple different things:
- a slightly different kind of interest at the player level
- a way to get to domain play for those who want it without a long campaign leading up to it (considering how little time anyone has these days)
- a kind of meta-mechanic that might be suggestive after some play (at the ref / planning / worldbuilding level)
Here's the idea.
1 ref (or, I guess, two in communication).
2 groups of players, one group for campaign play and one group for domain play. Probably fewer domain players.
The domain group is ahead in time by anywhere from a few months to a few years.
So the campaign-level play is reasonably expected to take place in and around the domains of the domain-level players (of course, there could be domain-level NPCs as well). The domain-present is the campaign-future.
The added interest comes in with the effective time-slip. If something happens in the campaign that is inconsistent with the domain-present, the domain-present changes to accommodate it.
So the domain-players make choices that eventually the campaign-players will catch up to. They determine the shape of things in the future.
But if the campaign-players make enough trouble, accomplish or change enough (or just the right thing, whether they know it or not), the future gets knocked out of its rut and onto a track that follows from the changes the campaign-players have caused by their actions.
Strictly speaking, it's not really a timeslip. Time only goes in one direction and there's not really any travel. It's a kind of quasi-timeslip because both groups can affect each other without actually travelling or being "aware" of anything odd going on. For the campaign-group, the future is the future. Events outside their control happen. Any major changes that affect the domain group are going to have to be shown to them in some way, of course.
***
Imagine a creek with two sets of parties wading upstream separated by some ten feet. The rear party is always downstream of the forward party. Under normal circumstances, what the forward party drops into the water flows back to the rear party. The rear party is in the wake of the other party.
But if the rear party gets very splashy, some of what they do is going to land on the forward party. Or if they stomp really hard or drop something huge into the water, the forward party is going to feel the shock.
Not a perfect analogy, but it could describe (roughly) how things would work.
***
The above might be used purely as a game-level technique. "This can happen because there are other people playing in your past." End of sentence.
Or it could be that plus an in-world oddity or mechanism that accounts for it.
For example, the world tends towards predictable narratives. Pushing the limits of those narratives goes against the natural desire of the world. This makes the world, oyster-style, squeeze domain-level characters (who are known for shaking things up) out of the present and into the future where things are less determined and more amenable to being pushed around by domain-level powers. They aren't out of the timestream, but are in a more flexible and less determined part of it (but it doesn't feel flexible to them, since they want to handle and do handle more power than normals or campaign-level PCs do).
To avoid the conceit becoming trivial, it should be impossible for the PCs to consciously manipulate any of this, for magic to affect the timestream directly. The material described above should be simply how the world works. Extremely effective and successful (high-level, in D&D terms) PCs might in effect "move up" in the timestream naturally, as a smooth consequence of their activities. It seems unlikely that domain-level PCs could ever "go back" in time, although this thought might be explored further.
***
Consequences for the ref, in a reasonably long-running campaign, might include:
- stress (let's be honest, it could happen)
- less worry about being creative or avoidning railroading with future events, since the domain-PCs are determining them for the other group
- increased investment in running multi-mode campaigns (perhaps PbP / phone / text for domain-level, face-to-face or a quicker PbP for campaign-level)
[/div][/div]Consequences for players day-to-day are minimal (just play), but both groups should understand that neither they nor the ref "control" everything. It could inject an element that imitated the unpredictable qualities of reality, but this unpredictability would be different from limited randomizers like dice.
