[DGD] time travel

[Shentino]

This whole thing reminds me of when Q allows Picard to undo an event in the
past that, in addition to letting him be captain through daring, also cost
him his life in the present due to a bad heart.

On Sat, Feb 21, 2009 at 2:01 PM, Noah Gibbs <noah_gibbs at yahoo.com> wrote:

>
>  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.


I suppose that's true.

Which is one thing my "score the player's gameplay" would at least partially
solve.  If, during history, a player proves to be victorious and skillful,
his "robotic luck" score would rise, and should a rollback or replay take
place, how skillfully the player played the game would factor into how
luckily his character would fare during a rollback if he elected to let the
system do it automatically.

Deja vu would probably play a role as well.

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.


Good point.



>
>
>  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.
>

Another good point, though it's possible that a player, playing the role of
his character's soul, might remember some things, deja vu style....and I
suppose that a soul could be immune to the consequences of causality.

It does stink to have your achievements rolled back (just imagine if the
Ent. E hadn't stopped the borg from spoiling First Contact).  So perhaps
"time guards" enforcing the "Temporal Prime Directive" could make melding
the delta one of their missions, and if the "time wake" is successfully
neutralized and winds up having a noop effect on the time line, then it
would disappear and the future wouldn't be ruined.

Most likely showstopper:  managing the "4th dimension" in this manner would
probably be prohibitively expensive in resource usage, and unless you had a
high-end box to run the server on, anything big would probably cause a huge
stall as the timeline "reboots"

I seriously had doubts it would be possible from an administrative POV,
since it would require massive deltas (perhaps not unlike the ones you
mentioned wrt. lazily defined PCG), but it does make for an interesting
topic.