[DGD] time travel

[Noah Gibbs]

  The topic has some parallels in DGD/MP rollback mechanics only in the sense that you could use that for your rollback.  However, that doesn't do roll-forward, only rollback.  So that's only of use if your time-travel rollback loses that state completely, which sounds un-fun to me as a game mechanic ("oh shit, somebody completed the 'destroy your robot nemesis before he can kill you' subplot -- guess we're all lost three or four levels, plus any loot from the last four months.  Well, not Trevor -- he was a newbie, so his character is just gone.")

  So realistically, you wouldn't want to represent this stuff with atomic functions and simple DGD rollback.

  The interesting part about this mechanic would be the sort of character design.  Just wiping out progress when time-travel backwards occurred would be awful, unless character progression was very simple and linear and you could easily get it all back by time-travelling forward again.  So character design would have to make something other than levels and statistics interesting.  For instance, I could see a mechanic where the player made choices at various points in character development (ranged versus melee?  vicious versus defensive?  take an area-of-effect attack versus an especially damaging one-target attack?) which would very roughly parallel the World of Warcraft talent trees.  So you'd wind up specifying your character talents by travelling back and forth within the character's history and making those choices with the character.  So your character would sort of be in a constant state of partial respec.

  But if you did that and handled levels in some relatively obvious way (i.e. made them constantly increase with time, never decreasing) then you'd wind up having to play your character at various points in his/her history, often with fewer powers than the final version.  So you'd lose a lot of the sense of constantly increasing power that most similar games present, and instead you would mostly get a constant increase in specificity.

  Of course, you could start the character with a relatively weak build initially, which would give you back a bit of the whole "constantly increasing power" thing.  But if you didn't actually "rewind" the character, and had them play at full level except for the occasional time-travel choice, then you'd be reducing a lot of the time-travel effect, and mostly you'd have a really weird, probably somewhat annoying respec system that was never actually finished.

--- On Fri, 2/20/09, Shentino <shentino at gmail.com> wrote:

> From: Shentino <shentino at gmail.com>
> Subject: [DGD] time travel
> To: "All about Dworkin's Game Driver" <dgd at dworkin.nl>
> Date: Friday, February 20, 2009, 11:08 PM
> Me and bct were having an interesting discussion about time
> travel in a mud.
> 
> Some issues:
> 
> 1.  Rollback or replay of a character's past or present
> (especialy that of a
> PC), if there was a significant change in the past that
> owuld also affect
> the present
> 
> 2.  All the wonderful things of causality.
> 
> It might be kinda fun, but how does one track this stuff? 
> And how to make
> it interesting?
> 
> I'm talking perhaps more than just chrono-trigger style
> "time-based
> geography" separated by millenia, but treating time as
> a fluid continuum.
> ___________________________________________
> https://mail.dworkin.nl/mailman/listinfo/dgd