WWBEMD?

[cosmicfish]

Originally Posted by gamerguy

I really think you should check these out to get a feel how time travel may/should/could work.

There are many options for time travel, but, and this is important, this is not really a time travel story. We get to select how time travel works, but we do so to support the real story, that of a plucky band of high-tech saviors 150 years post apocalypse. The details really only matter with respect to being internally consistent and steering towards that story.

There are parts of this that I like. At the end of the tv series, for example, it looks they address the observer effect and how to work around it (see also the movie Millennium and Heinlein's last few books). But this story focuses more on the story of the time travelers, BEM in our case, and really we only really care about the world as it exists after his last change... if any.

[Sprocketteer]

Bruce's real grave?
Or a marker for an extra special cache?
His time machine ?

[mmartin798]

Cache marker. One of the modules has a tomb stone with Bruce Morrow on it and the freeze date of the team as the date of death if I remember. There is a cache right there.

[gamerguy]

Originally Posted by cosmicfish

There are many options for time travel, but, and this is important, this is not really a time travel story. We get to select how time travel works, but we do so to support the real story, that of a plucky band of high-tech saviors 150 years post apocalypse. The details really only matter with respect to being internally consistent and steering towards that story.

There are parts of this that I like. At the end of the tv series, for example, it looks they address the observer effect and how to work around it (see also the movie Millennium and Heinlein's last few books). But this story focuses more on the story of the time travelers, BEM in our case, and really we only really care about the world as it exists after his last change... if any.

I agree. I put this forward as a possible look into BEM's mental state as the time counts down, especially if he tried and failed in his attempts to right things. I see the story primarily as a psychological take on the main protagonist. As I watched the series, primarily the last quarter, with my sons I kept thinking this would be how BEM felt. Just my take.

[tsofian]

That is the problem with Time Travel. Once it is part of a storyline the storyline is a Time Travel one. Either a universe has time travel or it doesn't. Once it does that colors everything about the universe, directly or indirectly.

Every entity in the Morrow Universe has had their lives changed by the Time Traveling Morrow. He delayed the War, he changed his own timeline, delaying the war cost him his wife and child from the future. He then went back and tried to re-change the timeline again.

Terminator is a Time Travel story. There are large numbers of characters that will never know they are in a changed timeline, but that doesn't mean it isn't a Time Travel story.

[cosmicfish]

Originally Posted by tsofian

That is the problem with Time Travel. Once it is part of a storyline the storyline is a Time Travel one. Either a universe has time travel or it doesn't. Once it does that colors everything about the universe, directly or indirectly.

Every entity in the Morrow Universe has had their lives changed by the Time Traveling Morrow. He delayed the War, he changed his own timeline, delaying the war cost him his wife and child from the future. He then went back and tried to re-change the timeline again.

Terminator is a Time Travel story. There are large numbers of characters that will never know they are in a changed timeline, but that doesn't mean it isn't a Time Travel story.

That's like saying that because we have astronauts, every contemporary story is a space travel story. In TMP, neither the PCs nor anyone they meet are time travellers. This is not a time travel story, it is a story on which time travel has occurred to someone else far from anything actually happening in the story.

BEM's story is a time travel story, the only one in that universe.

[tsofian]

Originally Posted by cosmicfish

But this story focuses more on the story of the time travelers, BEM in our case, and really we only really care about the world as it exists after his last change... if any.

I do not see any difference between these Characters not knowing the Timeline is changing around them and the Characters being one of many iterations. It doesn't matter a bit to the characters in the story. As you said: "we only really care about as it exists".

[cosmicfish]

Originally Posted by tsofian

I do not see any difference between these Characters not knowing the Timeline is changing around them and the Characters being one of many iterations. It doesn't matter a bit to the characters in the story. As you said: "we only really care about as it exists".

As I discussed in another thread, there is a difference and it should matter a lot to the Characters. My comment was in regards to building the current setting - since all the time travel is done with, everything should be fixed and immutable.