[DGD] time travel

[Noah Gibbs]

  The problem with making time-travel a phenomenally hard skill is that it would mean only a very few players could ever use it, yet many of your players would be inconvenienced by it.

  The problem with simulating forward is that if you're suddenly fighting a dragon instead of digging up treasure, you've lost all progress in the current task, and probably the ability to complete it at all (does the task even still exist?).  So that would almost make time-travel griefing by definition.  Players would hate it in every case where they noticed it -- even when it didn't cost them progress or a quest, they would have to check and see if it did, which would worry them.  Or to put it another way, players love to ripple, but hate to *be* rippled.

  You could either make quests be outside the timeline (with appropriate in-game justification and quest design), which seems somewhat limiting, or you could just drop quests as being especially important in your MUD.

  Similarly, simulation forward would give the player back a lot of the *power* of the time lost, but would change the character from a set of choices the player made and history earned, and give the player some other set of statistics, based on things the player didn't choose.  That's likely to be a lot less fun.  Many players enjoy thinking about the time they fought such-and-such...  And you just took that away.  Now they may have fought a different critter, offscreen, but it's not the same because they didn't do it.  The character has some new achievement, but the player didn't do it, and probably doesn't care about it.  In trade for this advancement they don't care about, you took away what they *did* care about.

  So you'd need some kind of outside-the-timestream advancement, because otherwise the player has no reason to care about the character, because everything in the timestream could be taken away at any moment, for reasons having nothing to do with the player's decisions.  That's not fun.

  Now if you make the things in the normal timestream be fairly generic (yeah, yeah, I've got a +4 sword instead of a +4 glaive) and easily replaceable, but some other mechanic the player *does* care about that is unaffected by the timestream, that'd be okay.  You'd have to figure out what that sort of advancement would be like, though, which would probably depend on the reason for time travel.  Does the player work as a troubleshooter for some time-travelling agency removing anomalies or bad historical events?  Does the player work *against* people like those to restore the original integrity of the unmodified timeline?  Perhaps the player can collect interesting artifacts or bits of possible history and save them back at headquarters, for instance.  *Those* wouldn't be affected by rollback, so the player could get attached to them without worrying that they'd be taken away arbitrarily.

--- On Sat, 2/21/09, Shentino <shentino at gmail.com> wrote:

> From: Shentino <shentino at gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: [DGD] time travel
> To: "All about Dworkin's Game Driver" <dgd at dworkin.nl>
> Date: Saturday, February 21, 2009, 1:45 PM
> My biggest wonder about time travel:
> 
> If you should consider time as just another dimension (say,
> dinosaurs versus
> star trek) where the current millienium or epoch is just
> another coordinate
> like what continent you are on, then time travel becomes
> passive, like in
> Chrono Trigger.  Great for tourists.
> 
> However, if you want to let players count on being able to
> go back in
> history and actually change it (and let's face it,
> players LOVE to ripple),
> then you're going to have a mess on your hands dealing
> with causality, not
> to mention data retention as you keep tabs on the mud's
> history for rollback
> purposes.  A hard cap on how far back in time you could go
> would probably be
> required, and you may of necessity need to make time travel
> such an insanely
> hard skill that few but the gods could ever pull it off.
> 
> Also, the cascading rollback phenomenon would,
> unfortunately, be a ripe
> target for griefers looking to force players to rollback,
> or at the very
> least stall the mud while it processes "time
> wakes" that either
> instantaneously rebuild the "future" up to the
> present, or otherwise march
> forward through the time line until they assimilate and
> replay the present.
> 
> I'm guessing that you'd need to evaluate a
> player's performance somehow, and
> then resimulate it NPC style in the event of a rollback and
> reroll forward.
> Perhaps a "you feel strange and your vision gets
> hazy..." type message would
> explain why, owing to the butterfly effect, your character
> happens to be in
> china fighting a firedragon instead of in haiti digging up
> an ancient cursed
> treasure.
> 
> Good heuristics and tracking of how skillfully a player
> acted in the past
> would likely be a good guide for the game system on how his
> actions would
> change if the "wave of time" were to wash over
> him again.
> 
> That said, making it happen would be a phenomenal
> accomplishment.
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