Hey Im back!

who are the player characters? Any of these beings?

No, its a dragon born named Minu, a Tabaxi named max, and a kalashtar named Kosh.

Minu is an acrolyte, who was raised by Bahamut followers; when here parents left her when she was young to protect a certain item, and died in the process.

Max, Doesn't know his parents at all, he just survived as a thief and is now running from the law.

Kosh, is completely new to this realm and doesn't really understand it so he kind of is slowly learning about things around him. He kind of just appeared.

What happened to the rest of this conversation from the General Chat? Should that be migrated here too?

This actually was posted the same time I posted in the General chat. so that's why the entire conversation from the other chat isn't here.

Ah. Do you want the existing conversation migrated to here?

That would be Awesome! You can do that? I didn't know you could.

I can't, but the moderators can.

← 37 messages moved from TRPG General Chat

@TaylorSpaulding I love Tabaxi thieves! Amazing synergies between Feline Agility and Second Story Work, plus Cunning Action alongside specializations in Perception and Stealth

But that's off-topic for this chat

Hahaha! You're fine, they are pretty cool. So, this campaign rebirth thing I'm planning, is kind of an end of the world type deal; with Konrad absorbing all the gods power at the end. In our campaign, the group is known as the Heroes of Time, which was a group put toegether by Cronopsis (God of Time--which is a snake) and Bahamut (which is still a dragon), as a fail safe for Konrad.

Now this is when things get confusing because we get into time and stuff. Because in the future Konrad stole Cronopsis's power; which allowed him to manipulate time. So, he went back in time to try to kill the Heroes of time; which then caused Cronopsis to create the Heroes of Time--which is a group that is always put together in some form or fasion, sent on a mission to destroy Konrad--to stop Konrad

Intriguing

Konrad could never get rid of them, so in the timeline of the group I'm playing with... they don't know much about Konrad, however he knows alot about them.

Anyways, I could go into it more... but uhh, it gets really time travel confusing. So these campaign rebirth session are suppose to kind of kick off that spectrum.

Are the mechanics of time travel/manipulation things the PCs can interact with in the game, or are they abstracted away and serving as a narrative frame for the campaign?

Umm, I'm still trying to figure that out. I think we might be giving them the ability in the future. I just don't know exactly how.

Tricky, but fun. I bet your players will love the freedom. Reminds me a bit of Dark Cloud 2, which I hadn't thought of in ages

A thought about the setup you're describing: I'd want to know, as a player, that Konrad only gets to go back in time once and has already done it

Because otherwise, I'm fighting a guy who can go back in time to take another shot at me, as many times as necessary.

Yeah, see every time he uses Cronopsis power to go back in time once; he has to find cronopsis (after going back in time) and redrain the past cronopsis from his power then he can use it again. How it really weakens Konrad when he goes back in time.

so he'll be weak enough that they have a chance to fight him off now, and then they need to prepare to fight pre-time-travel Konrad, who is still at full strength?

that makes sense

Could you, or are you planning to, have the players interact with Faluzure over a single, continuous span of time?

That sounds cool, could you possibly elaborate on that more?

Sure! By a single, continuous span of time I mean something like the party arrives at the dungeon, meets Faluzure, learns about him as they interact with him while clearing the dungeon, and then witnessing his death. That's tricky because people have a lot of expectations for how stories progress, and you have a single, unalterable period of time to do everything that you need

But time travel gives you options to break that up. Instead of chronological order, like A,B,C,D,E,F, you can do something more like E,B,D,A,C,F

Breaking up the timeline also breaks up some of the expectations for narrative flow that people have, and can create an effect where the players put information together in ways that their characters can't. You can also cheat the tropes a little bit-- instead of his being an NPC introduced just to die, players can observe his death and then continue to interact with him. It's no longer cheap, in that they could never have saved him, it's a mystery:

why did he die? Players fill in the gaps as they hop back to times before his death, learning his story even though his destruction is already known to happen.

Whoa that's trippy man! But I like it! That's pretty awesome!

I've had a time-travelling campaign brewing in my mind for a while, but I won't be able to run it for quite some time

@Upper_Case Do they have any agency during this process?

or rather, what agency do you see them having?

@MarkWells Depends on the structure of the campaign, and how the DM wants to handle (or ignore) causality problems. My preferred way, if I were running this general story, would be for the ability to change events at the time of Faluzure's death is mostly "used up", by Konrad or for some other reason

Interacting with the moment of his murder is a capstone event of the campaign, or a chapter of it. Players would have full agency to adjust things when they time-hop into the past, but they get one shot at each time period they hop to. And, due to the complexity of reality, they can only control the outcomes of their meddling to a certain degree

The PCs themselves can't be Back to the Future-ed out of existence, and will typically not have the resources and positioning to force major changes in the game setting. So they can help Mabel fix a problem in a town through time travel, but can't short-circuit the whole campaign frustrating Konrad's conception

If the purpose of the time-hops is to allow them to learn about Faluzure and the events leading to his death, rather than to try to change history, then it might play better as astral projection.

(so that they don't waste a lot of time banging against the guard rails)

For sure. As long as it's not too heavy on those moments (cut scenes get old quickly at the table), it's much easier than dealing with the consequences of time travel

Though I'm not 100% clear on the setup (@TaylorSpaulding is this decided yet?). It seems like any given time period might see the Heroes of Rebirth assembling, whichever specific people fill those roles at that moment, with the story covering several different Heroes at widely separated time intervals. But the story may also cover just one instance of the Heroes which happens to be most salient to the plot