Essentially, I created a setting (unintentionally) in which hundreds of people would die and evil would triumph if the PCs couldn't be multiple places at the same time.
It finally occurred to me a few minutes ago that: This is Steam Punk. Let's time travel.
I want the time machine to have similar function and limitations as the Time Turners from the Harry Potter books: Cannot travel to the future unless returning from the past, can only travel to a set time in the past, and they can only remain in the past for a limited amount of time before causing harm to themselves and time itself. And like with the Time Turner, when they journey back in time, their "future" selves would exist the same time as their "past" selves during this time. This way, they will be able to fight two battles at once. They can return to the moment they went back in time, but they must board the time machine before time runs out or, well, bad things.
I am a new DM, so I need a little help fine-tuning this. I only want them to be able to travel once, back to the moment hell breaks loose; there are two battles that need to be won to defeat the evil that's rising to power, and they need to fight them both simultaneously to make that happen. So, they (ideally) win one battle, make it to the time machine, go back in time a few moments before THAT battle began and fight the other battle, (ideally) returning the instant they left.
1. Am I overlooking something important? And,
2. What limit should I put on the length of time they can travel backward (how much time should I allow for them to fight a battle)?
3. Should one of the PCs be the inventor of the time machine, or should they discover it?
1. It's timetravel, so you will overlook a lot of things.
2. A fight is usualy about 3 to 6 Rounds so approximatly 18 to 36 Seconds. For a oneshote about 15 - 30 Minutes should be enough
3. i would recommend discover unless you're playing a high level party one shot, but still i would recommend discover (see 4.).
4. Add in some good old paradoxes, because it's timetravel. They could fight the same BBEG in both fight (Maybe with different Minions or in a different machine, since it is Steampunk) and loot the Time Turner from the Dead Body after the first fight, then travel back and fight the other fight only to discover, that they are fighting the same guy who has just pulled of the same trick. That will let the Heroes and player wonder how this could have worked.
5. This is a difficult setting, in which you have to be sure, that your Players will follow your (rail)road. While it's a cool idea, it's a diffcult one to pull of.
The trick with time travel is that , for it to have real impact, it needs to have after effects on the current timeline.
One way to make this happen, which might be a bit trippy for your players, is to have them pull a Bill & Ted on the boss.
For reference, in Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey, they defeat the bad guy by remembering to go and put things in place afterwards by going back in time, meaning that the things are there at present. Like I said, it gets a little trippy.
So you could give them a device which means that, every round, they are sent back in time and have a short window of time to complete some task before they are returned to their current timeline. This can be a sandbox, or it can be slightly railroaded. When they come back, if the task was completed it takes effect in their turn. Effectively their action was to go back in time and spend a day building a cage to hang from the ceiling to drop at this precise moment, which it then does when they ping back to the present.
Another option is to have cheeky side-effects of their time travels appear in the final boss fight, which will be entirely unintentional and will make them say "oh, that's what that was!". As I'll give a (IMHO) cool example:
The party are doing some quest in a magic lab, and there is a huge bell sat on a stone circle in the room. There are two levers beside a sealed door. Whichever they pull first causes magic to arc around the lab, and the bell disappears with a weird clanging sound. The second lever opens the door. The circle doesn't do anything else when the lever is pulled again.
In the boss fight, the players may notice a similar circle in the ceiling of the cavern. in round 3, they hear a loud, weird clang from above, and a giant bell falls from the stone circle in the ceiling and crashes down, dealing bludgeoning and thunder damage. The players all go "oh, so that's where that went!". They also realise that this is when they were in the lab, and perhaps remember what they did immediately afterwards. Maybe have them operate in initiative order in the lab, with lots of random things to press which do random things. Whilst they are there, before the battle in IRL time, they don't know what they are doing, so cannot plan it, and might be doing it at random. When they get to the battle, the effects happen in the same order as they did in their lab time, at the same initiative, meaning they need to remember what they did and when!
I think it's important that the exact mechanics, working and constraints of time travel remain "fudgable" so discovering the time machine that the PC's future selves build is as much personal connection you should allow to it.
I suggest this because you want to remain in complete control of how it works and you don't want to have to explain how it works or exactly why something the PC's do with the time machine doesn't quite work to their plan because you "fudged" it so it works to your plan
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“It cannot be seen, cannot be felt, Cannot be heard, cannot be smelt, It lies behind stars and under hills, And empty holes it fills, It comes first and follows after, Ends life, kills laughter.” J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit, or There and Back Again
While not strictly "Steampunk" what you are talking about sounds very much like the movie "Terminator." Two people travel back in time, one to make changes to past so as to preserve their victory, the other to stop them from doing so. The Terminator is the villain of the piece, Sara and Kyle are the heroes. Consider how this turned out. Did they win? More or less. Sara survives. Did they prevent Skynet from existing? Nope. They actually caused it, by crushing the Terminator and leaving the pieces of it's CPU to be found. That's a classic paradox. Sequel after sequel has come out and nothing changes.
Can you still make a great story out of this? Sure.
1 - Yes, you overlooked that time travel causes paradox.
2 - The time limit will depend on the scale of the battle. How many creatures on each side will need to be defeated?
3 - By no means should one of the player characters invent the time machine.
4 - A party of adventurers is typically 3 to 5 people. Make sure they don't need to defeat more opponents than they can handle.
Given that I went and compared what you were doing to a movie, it would be somewhat hypocritical for me to point this out, but the first thing that troubled me was the mention of Harry Potter. Conversion of different setting from popular media is always very rough.
I'd suggest a time limit of one hour. The players get to make a commando raid and try to take down the big boss and his associates before the battle takes place. They will have to find a machine to travel in time. Letting the players build one, and an Artificer would be perfect for that, risks your setting being destroyed entirely. Assuming they succeed in both of their missions, the paradox effect needs to be pretty minor or it won't be much fun. I'd say once they come back, nobody will be aware that anything has changed and. Don't hold back any experience or milestones, just have NPCs be baffled if the characters try to talk about what they did. They won't be believed and could end up being mocked if they keep insisting that something which never happened was changed.
As a note, be careful about how you handle any treasure the characters might pick up. If they lose something of their own, they would get it back. This could be played for drama, say if a sword breaks or a wand runs out of charges. They would all be back and whole. Items picked up along the way might encourage further mining of the past, with all the problems that this entails. Even gold can become a problem, just like any other item. People wonder when they see new things, and sure, they may easily shrugs things off, but spending large amounts of money draws attention and could get results the characters might not want, like the local ruler's tax collectors paying them a visit.
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Essentially, I created a setting (unintentionally) in which hundreds of people would die and evil would triumph if the PCs couldn't be multiple places at the same time.
It finally occurred to me a few minutes ago that: This is Steam Punk. Let's time travel.
I want the time machine to have similar function and limitations as the Time Turners from the Harry Potter books: Cannot travel to the future unless returning from the past, can only travel to a set time in the past, and they can only remain in the past for a limited amount of time before causing harm to themselves and time itself. And like with the Time Turner, when they journey back in time, their "future" selves would exist the same time as their "past" selves during this time. This way, they will be able to fight two battles at once. They can return to the moment they went back in time, but they must board the time machine before time runs out or, well, bad things.
I am a new DM, so I need a little help fine-tuning this. I only want them to be able to travel once, back to the moment hell breaks loose; there are two battles that need to be won to defeat the evil that's rising to power, and they need to fight them both simultaneously to make that happen. So, they (ideally) win one battle, make it to the time machine, go back in time a few moments before THAT battle began and fight the other battle, (ideally) returning the instant they left.
1. Am I overlooking something important? And,
2. What limit should I put on the length of time they can travel backward (how much time should I allow for them to fight a battle)?
3. Should one of the PCs be the inventor of the time machine, or should they discover it?
4. Any cool ideas to add?
Thank you in advance for your help!
1. It's timetravel, so you will overlook a lot of things.
2. A fight is usualy about 3 to 6 Rounds so approximatly 18 to 36 Seconds. For a oneshote about 15 - 30 Minutes should be enough
3. i would recommend discover unless you're playing a high level party one shot, but still i would recommend discover (see 4.).
4. Add in some good old paradoxes, because it's timetravel. They could fight the same BBEG in both fight (Maybe with different Minions or in a different machine, since it is Steampunk) and loot the Time Turner from the Dead Body after the first fight, then travel back and fight the other fight only to discover, that they are fighting the same guy who has just pulled of the same trick. That will let the Heroes and player wonder how this could have worked.
5. This is a difficult setting, in which you have to be sure, that your Players will follow your (rail)road. While it's a cool idea, it's a diffcult one to pull of.
The trick with time travel is that , for it to have real impact, it needs to have after effects on the current timeline.
One way to make this happen, which might be a bit trippy for your players, is to have them pull a Bill & Ted on the boss.
For reference, in Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey, they defeat the bad guy by remembering to go and put things in place afterwards by going back in time, meaning that the things are there at present. Like I said, it gets a little trippy.
So you could give them a device which means that, every round, they are sent back in time and have a short window of time to complete some task before they are returned to their current timeline. This can be a sandbox, or it can be slightly railroaded. When they come back, if the task was completed it takes effect in their turn. Effectively their action was to go back in time and spend a day building a cage to hang from the ceiling to drop at this precise moment, which it then does when they ping back to the present.
Another option is to have cheeky side-effects of their time travels appear in the final boss fight, which will be entirely unintentional and will make them say "oh, that's what that was!". As I'll give a (IMHO) cool example:
The party are doing some quest in a magic lab, and there is a huge bell sat on a stone circle in the room. There are two levers beside a sealed door. Whichever they pull first causes magic to arc around the lab, and the bell disappears with a weird clanging sound. The second lever opens the door. The circle doesn't do anything else when the lever is pulled again.
In the boss fight, the players may notice a similar circle in the ceiling of the cavern. in round 3, they hear a loud, weird clang from above, and a giant bell falls from the stone circle in the ceiling and crashes down, dealing bludgeoning and thunder damage. The players all go "oh, so that's where that went!". They also realise that this is when they were in the lab, and perhaps remember what they did immediately afterwards. Maybe have them operate in initiative order in the lab, with lots of random things to press which do random things. Whilst they are there, before the battle in IRL time, they don't know what they are doing, so cannot plan it, and might be doing it at random. When they get to the battle, the effects happen in the same order as they did in their lab time, at the same initiative, meaning they need to remember what they did and when!
Make your Artificer work with any other class with 174 Multiclassing Feats for your Artificer Multiclass Character!
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I think it's important that the exact mechanics, working and constraints of time travel remain "fudgable" so discovering the time machine that the PC's future selves build is as much personal connection you should allow to it.
I suggest this because you want to remain in complete control of how it works and you don't want to have to explain how it works or exactly why something the PC's do with the time machine doesn't quite work to their plan because you "fudged" it so it works to your plan
“It cannot be seen, cannot be felt, Cannot be heard, cannot be smelt, It lies behind stars and under hills, And empty holes it fills, It comes first and follows after, Ends life, kills laughter.” J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit, or There and Back Again
While not strictly "Steampunk" what you are talking about sounds very much like the movie "Terminator." Two people travel back in time, one to make changes to past so as to preserve their victory, the other to stop them from doing so. The Terminator is the villain of the piece, Sara and Kyle are the heroes. Consider how this turned out. Did they win? More or less. Sara survives. Did they prevent Skynet from existing? Nope. They actually caused it, by crushing the Terminator and leaving the pieces of it's CPU to be found. That's a classic paradox. Sequel after sequel has come out and nothing changes.
Can you still make a great story out of this? Sure.
Given that I went and compared what you were doing to a movie, it would be somewhat hypocritical for me to point this out, but the first thing that troubled me was the mention of Harry Potter. Conversion of different setting from popular media is always very rough.
I'd suggest a time limit of one hour. The players get to make a commando raid and try to take down the big boss and his associates before the battle takes place. They will have to find a machine to travel in time. Letting the players build one, and an Artificer would be perfect for that, risks your setting being destroyed entirely. Assuming they succeed in both of their missions, the paradox effect needs to be pretty minor or it won't be much fun. I'd say once they come back, nobody will be aware that anything has changed and. Don't hold back any experience or milestones, just have NPCs be baffled if the characters try to talk about what they did. They won't be believed and could end up being mocked if they keep insisting that something which never happened was changed.
As a note, be careful about how you handle any treasure the characters might pick up. If they lose something of their own, they would get it back. This could be played for drama, say if a sword breaks or a wand runs out of charges. They would all be back and whole. Items picked up along the way might encourage further mining of the past, with all the problems that this entails. Even gold can become a problem, just like any other item. People wonder when they see new things, and sure, they may easily shrugs things off, but spending large amounts of money draws attention and could get results the characters might not want, like the local ruler's tax collectors paying them a visit.
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