Time travel

I use it all the time. It takes some "finesse" to use well, but once you get the hang of it, it can be pretty fun.

Sometimes I have the players go back in time to learn something about the history of the world. Sometimes I have them go forward in time to learn about potential disasters (probably ones that they have been ignoring).

I also had a game world that had large areas where time ran at different speeds than everything else. Players had to be careful how much time they spent in specific areas, as the clock was running at different speeds for different things.

Sometimes I send the players really far in the future or past to make them think they have went somewhere else entirely, only to have them notice things that look oddly familiar.

Sometimes I give the players time altering abilities:

In a near-future high-tech game I ran I gave the players "Tachyon Bullets", which, when fired, caused a time dilation effect around the impact area ("slow" on your enemies).

I gave one player the ability to communicate with his past and future selves. This let him retroactively prepare for things, but it had its limits. Basically, the bigger the change to history it caused, the more likely it was to simply become it's own timeline, and then be of no help to him (his other timeline self though would be doing fine, I guess). This is a really good "fix" for almost any troublesome time-altering abilities.

I let one player have the ability to see a few seconds into the future all the time. This basically gave them a bonus to anything that would be assisted by a little foreknowledge (like dodging attacks).

I've been wanting to try a full-blown "Time Travel Campaign", with players having complete control over where ("when", whatever) they go, but I haven't found a good group for it.

/r/rpg Thread