The Order of the Stick

One way to dodge both prophetic fallacy and the issue of free will is to have only the macroscopic events be deterministic, like Doctor Who's "fixed points", but the events around and leading up to them be mutable.

For example, the heroes will always arrive at the final Gate and do battle with Xykon, but who exactly does what to whom, who says what, the individual dice rolls, and so on are not preordained.

This gets very muddy, because what if everyone goes completely Off the Rails? What you end up needing in those cases is a Game Master (in whatever form that takes: a writer, a deity, "the will of the universe") who can re-rail the story via Deus ex Machina as required.

The Belgariad and its sequels explore this concept extensively. There is a Purpose of the Universe, and it does have a grand scheme in mind, but it's constantly having to shepherd finicky mortals around, getting them to do and say the things they're supposed to lest the whole thing go awry. It's established on several occasions that blind chance (or extreme willfulness) can disrupt those plans, which (we discover) is what made things get out of whack in the first place.

Edited by Fighteer on Oct 31st 2018 at 3:24:48 PM

Another thing I loved about the Belgariad was the mention that is is possible to Screw Destiny and avoid both predicted futures, but no one dares to because for each side, one of these futures is victory.

Edited by Medinoc on Oct 31st 2018 at 7:27:55 PM

The fixed points in Doctor Who still don't make sense. Suppose something like the Kennedy Assasination is one. If that's true then it also affects a ton of other stuff unrelated to the event. The US has to exist, Kennedy has to be born, etc. If history is littered with these points the number of paths you can take to get somewhere seem very small.

That's obviously true, but it works well enough in-universe, where the rules of time travel are basically arbitrary.

What happens if it's just some guy named Kennedy getting shot? John Kennedy, local pharmacist, was shot behind the convenience store last night, there are no suspects?

I think we have a trope for that sort of revisionism, but honestly I haven't seen any time travel stories that play such a thing straight, not unless they are willing to go out on a limb and rewrite the entire history of the latter half of the 20th century. Stupid Jetpack Hitler seems to be an exception, and if it's not a fait accompli, one plot goal of the protagonists will be to fix whatever broke the original timeline.

The works that play it straight generally utilize multiverse theory, so you have timelines where Kennedy was and was not killed.

Thanks, it's Richard Nixon, the Used Car Salesman.

Edited by Fighteer on Oct 31st 2018 at 4:56:59 AM

Nixon The Used Car Salesman

This is why I hate Time Travel stories. Chrono Trigger was an exception. And that's more because the game was actually fun as opposed to me actually liking the time travel stuff.

There are two other systems that come to mind from this conversation.

One is Erfworld where prophecies, once made, basically become a sort of “probability golem” written into the fabric of reality that will try to nudge the dice rolls towards their own fulfillment. It’s possible to delay a prophecy indefinitely if you’re both able to and really, really good at rigging the game right back at it, but it won’t go away until it’s fulfilled.

The other is Legacy of Kain, which I’ve always mentally compared to Doctor Who’s system because it’s the total opposite: history is fixed except at weak points, which can be created by engineering a paradox. The fact that one of the main characters is a walking paradox makes him Immune to Fate, but ironically he’s easily manipulated the old fashioned way. Cue everyone else trying to do exactly that.

Edited by Anura on Oct 31st 2018 at 2:58:07 PM

And in the end poor Raziel could only Screw Destiny by accepting his own.

Stable Time Loop is the only satisfactory form of time travel, in my opinion. Well, there's also the "you can't change your own past, you can only create a brand new multiverse branch" which is at least consistent, but usually not very satifying.

Creating brand new timelines or very clever stable time loops are the only ones I feel actually work. And stable time loops don't really work on a large scale. What, did everyone lie to your time traveler their whole life about this bad dude Hitler who lived a long time ago but actually died in infancy?

Stable Time Loop can be interesting, but is inherently full of Mind Screw. I like them if they are done well. Completely new timelines can be done well and really badly, and it usually falls into the "badly" category if done at historical scale. It always bugs me that the history is completely changed, yet the same characters somehow exist, just a bit different. It is more apparent in alternate universe stories than in time travel ones, but the concept is the same: something happened in the past that changed everything. One example is Sliders^note I only saw the first two seasons, after that I found it boring, where in each universe the main characters seem to exist, even if the world is completely different. A more blatant example is the Maze Of Many arc in Goblins.

But if you change history on a personal level, then it can be made more believable. For example, The Butterfly Effect is a good take on at deconstructing Set Right What Once Went Wrong, if you ignore some of its pretty major inconsistencies, such as some of the time travels result in a Stable Time Loop, while others create completely new timelines, and while the whole plot is kicked off by the former, the latter is the one that causes the main conflict in the film.

I prefer the You Already Changed the Past variant, where the time travel is already accounted for in the sequence of events. You aren't changing anything because your "changes" already happened; you're just living through the outcome (or making it happen).

This sort of time travel can play hob with the notion of free will, but it makes for some really great reveals.

If I like any Time Travel story, it's one where history is mutable as a side-effect of whatever magic or tech is used to facilitate time travel — most sci fi and fantasy stuff is outright Reality Warper territory anyway.

If one wants to add a reason for the setting's history to remain mostly stable despite time travel being possible, one approach I favor is the Clock Roaches. Yes, you can change history by travelling through time...but the timestream has powerful guardians who will punish such attempts.

Legacy of Kain takes care of the free will question by outright stating that free will is an illusion due to the Wheel of Fate. Even time travel alone can't change anything. The only way to truly change anything is through a temporal paradox breaking time such as having past and future selves in the same location. Which is why Raziel has free will since his spectral Soul Reaver is actually his own future self. He's a walking temporal paradox.

Edited by M84 on Nov 1st 2018 at 8:29:14 PM

What's the real difference between Stable Time Loop and You Already Changed the Past? The two seem to be based on the same principle.

I don't like the kind of time travel when a higher power is just punishing you for changing the past. It feels too arbitrary of a limitation to me. Interestingly, this is exactly what happens in Life Is Strange. This is one of the reasons I consider it an awesome story, but not a good time travel story. By that I mean that as far as its portrayal of time travel is concerned, it's not that well done, but it's not the most important part anyway. It's more about how your character copes with suddenly gaining a superpower, which just happens to be time travel. Case in point: the sequel has a similar premise, but a different superpower.

Stable Time Loop is a description of how the time stream works. You Already Changed the Past is about a specific plot.

You Already Changed the Past is a lot of fun, I agree. The downside is that it can make for a difficult scenario to write yourself out of. In many cases, that's kind of the point. That changing the past is futile is the final word, either resulting in a Downer Ending or forcing the protagonists to reaffirm the need to fix the present instead of looking to time travel for answers. Depending on the nature of the story, either of these approaches can have value.

But in other cases, writers will be left unsure of how to actually get out of the hole they've written themselves into, resulting in the protagonists solving it by changing the past harder. "If all your choices are accounted for, then just make DIFFERENT choices!" is the lazy writer's solution to the You Already Changed the Past dilemma, betraying a fundamental misunderstanding of what the trope actually means.

Also, since we're discussing time travel, I am obligated to bring up the most hilariously pointless stable time loop ever.

Edited by TobiasDrake on Nov 1st 2018 at 8:07:40 AM

There was one Twilight Zone episode that handled time travel that way. A time traveler tries to change the past and fails each time. He then decides to retire to the past and resolves to leave things be — but he can't. He tries to avert another disaster and ends up causing it. He finally learns his lesson and returns to the present, deciding to focus his efforts on improving the future.

And I just realized that we've gone on a tangent here. Heck, time travel so far hasn't even been a plot point in the comic at all.

Edited by M84 on Nov 1st 2018 at 10:34:15 PM

The strength of You Already Changed the Past tends to be the character changes between Character-Prime and their Future Badass self, rather than the events themselves being different (because they aren't). Harry Potter actually did that part pretty well, there's a tangible difference between the Harry that gets saved from Dementors and the Harry that does the saving. The character gets to learn from living through the timeline from one limited perspective, and then apply what they learned when they experience it again from another. It's almost like an in-universe Once More, with Clarity.

The whole point of You Already Changed the Past is that time by the nature of time travel, you cannot change the past because there are no multiple universes, as are there with other time travel mechanics. There is just no way to defeat the system. And yes, it can be difficult to write properly.

Actually, we started out from prophecies, which work quite differently, though it shows many similarities to time travel.

Homestuck does some interesting things with time travel. History can't really be altered because it's all one gigantic Stable Time Loop, any offshoot timelines end up dissolving after a few months thanks to Delayed Ripple Effect of the actions that allowed them to exist having never happened in the past/future (same thing). That only changes when one character gains a power that allows them to alter the narrative, which outright causes past panels of the comic to be updated with new features.

One interesting feature is how different universes interact. Since time is the same as any other dimension, when looking into a universe from outside you see its entire history along with everything else. You can talk to yourself from 5 minutes ago or 10 minutes from now, along the same time-stream, but "past" and "future" have no meaning when looking at another universe because it's all the same thing from an outside perspective, and that universe has the same perspective on you. As such, communications between universes can be confusing if both sides don't take care to synchronize the order of their conversations. This being Homestuck, it takes a while for everyone to catch on to this.

I think it can be done well in some scenarios. You could have a situation where trying to alter the past provides the traveler with new information that allows success in the present. It's also good for stories where the writer wants to use time travel to provide exposition without bringing up any thorny questions of whether or not the characters are messing things up somehow.

And even the character with the power to affect the narrative is ultimately part of an even bigger loop. The same loop that both creates and defeats the Big Bad.

When it comes to prophecies...one twist that I kind of like is when the prophecies are outright bunk meant to manipulate people.

Edited by M84 on Nov 2nd 2018 at 12:58:39 AM

You mean like the "If you attack Rome, an empire will fall" kind of prophecies?