You Can('t) Fight fate: A 24-Hour Single-Player Time Travel RPG

So, as of approximately 21 Hours ago, I began making a single-player tabletop RPG; and as of about 20 minutes ago, I finished it.

It's heavily Inspired by low-budget Time-travel flicks like Primer and Timecrimes, and mechanically inpired by Hikikomori (Which can be found here: http://dsg.neko-machi.com/hikikomori.pdf), another single-player tabletop RPG.

I might make an actual PDF later, but I'm tired, so for now you can find it in all it's Google Docs glory here: https://docs.google.com/a/ucdavis.edu/document/d/1ky7Vq6suEOU7zvwLpc2hTjj8TXU0CUgcZ4Zl-RKQ30A/edit

Discuss, Criticize, point and laugh at any obvious mistakes, etc.

I'll give it a look.

So Preparing decreases your chances of success. That seems oddly thematic.

Also, I'd like to wonder whether it's intentional that Fight Fate and Let Things Happen have a level of reverse psychology to them. If your Divergence or Misfortune is above a minor point, and you want something to happen according to plan, Fight Fate. If you want to change your destiny, Let Things Happen after you've released the butterflies.

Mechanical questions!

1. Does murdering a murderer before he commits the murder cheat the original death?
2. The question you've been waiting for: what happens if you murder a past self? Are all his^note for lack of a better pronoun future actions, and things that happen to him, nullified?

edited 6th Oct '13 2:41:18 PM by Ramidel

The reverse psychology behind Fighting Fate and Letting Things Happen is intentional; after all, the most common way to cause future events to happen is to try to avoid them.

As for your mechanical questions: I actually totally forgot to account for those possibilities. I'll fix that.

So killing a murderer can butterfly away deaths (I assume that Something Going Wrong off of any ignored crisis is also automatically Fought), and intentionally killing a past self yourself triggers a nearly-unfixable Time Crash.

One thing is implicit in the rules but should probably be addressed anyway: in a nonreplacement game, I assume you need to track all stats except Divergence individually for each iteration of yourself? (Leading to the possibility of one iteration going mad or committing suicide; the possibility should be addressed, but hopefully it's less harsh than directly offing yourself.)

"Replacement" and "Chrono-cloning" time tech lead to dramatically different games. This is interesting, but it may mean that you need a separate codex for each time travel variant. Chrono-cloning in particular is exactly as complicated as you'd expect from a time travel game that allows for something like that.

No, you don't need to track the stats of past selves, the only stats you're concerned about are your "current" self; as-is any non-ignored stat changes caused by actions from a past self effect your current self.

I think I'm going to change the first Travel Back Roll to be a choice with an optional roll, since what's really happening is you're choosing between different levels of simplicity in information tracking and management; I'm adding a third option where you track stats on all chrono-clones separately like you assumed.

And yeah, what kind of time travel is in effect definitely changes things, and if I really wanted to do chrono-cloning justice I'd probably end up doubling the length of the document; I might do it sometime in the future.