Hi,

I had this idea that players would be trapped in a time loop kind of situation.  At the very start of the campaign, they are level 20 and fighting against the big bad boss, who at this point has plot armour and slaughters them all. 

However, because they are trapped in a time loop until they beat this guy and save the world, everything just resets.  

The characters are reborn (without their awesome level 20 powers obviously) and the actual campaign starts with a session two of the prequel, with then meeting each other as children, becoming friends and going off in some little kids adventures together.  

Then between session 2 of the prequel and session one the main campaign, there’s a timeskip - during which the characters grow up.  

At the start of session one of the main campaign, we see them joining the heroes guild and going off on their first quest, which leads them onto a whole adventure that ultimately ends up with them being undertaking the quests and adventures that they must have taken to get to level 20 and be fighting a world destroying threat.  

Eventually, if the campaign lasted long enough they’d face the same big bad thing that they faced in the prequel.  

Can I have your thoughts on this please?  Have any of your ran a campaign like this, how did it turn out of you have.  

Ultimately, do you think it could work?

Thanks 

Forge

I think it would be an enormous amount of work, both for you and them, for something you'd immediately throw out, so I'd avoid it.

Mechanically I do not see any reason why this cannot work - you simply have to build a level 20 character, copy it, then de-level it for subsequent sessions.  

Here is the one concern I have:  Part of the fun of D&D is building your character as you go.  You make small decisions at a time and, while you might have a general idea of where you want to end up at level 20, circumstances might change that transform the path you are going to take.  By having the players already create their level 20 persona, they might have preconceived notions of what they want their character to be which could devalue the journey of discovering who their character is.  

There are groups that can handle that, of course, and who would be able to still enjoy the discovery--maybe even go so far as use differences between their "old" level 20 character and the path they are on for story elements.  But there are also groups where it might decrease their enjoyment of the game as a whole.  Which type of players you have is something that only you, as their DM, can predict.  Just wanted to raise this issue as a potential hiccup so you could think through how your party might react. 

Mechanically this *can* work, but I'm with the two previous that it probably shouldn't be done. 

As Caerwyn has pointed out, you're asking your players to write their future, and then stick to the events required to achieve that future. At every plot point, the absolute correct decision has to be made to bring them to the precise conclusion that you've placed in front of them. At every level up, the same choices have to be made to achieve this already chosen form. There is no room in this for a PC to die, which lends itself to the idea that they all have plot armor. Once you set the constraints for the ending, everything in your world has to lead precisely to that point. This becomes less and less a discovery of the characters' stories, and more like a predetermined script.There is a type of linear adventure that will allow a DM to do this, but it requires a Conductor and some rails.

Now, as a positive suggestion: If you were to use the level 20s as a previous incarnation of the current heros, the new party could be re-incarnations of a failed attempt from a different timeline. Meaning the level 20s fail their attempt and have to start over in a new time, or new multi-verse. This can relieve you of having to stay on script, but still contains the requirement that the heros alll have to finish the journey. Which might be handled by resetting the campaign whenever a PC dies. This can be done narratively, without the use of a character sheet. The players can vaguely describe their PC actions, roll dice and so on, but these are just the final few moments of their loosing battle. Maybe they only have one or two turns before the BBEG goes nova and kills them all, whatever. Then the screen goes all white, and when their vision returns.... start new character here.

However you play this, good luck and have fun!

I think this is a potentially really cool idea, but yeah... it's definitely a lot of work. Just filling out the spells known for a level 20 spellcaster is quite a task unto itself. As cool as it would be to surprise players with parts of this, I think it'd be best to let everyone know what your plan is ahead of time, so they're not either overwhelmed at suddenly having a level 20 character sheet in front of them, or disappointed when they find their level 20 character just kind of dies and they have to go back to level 1.

Here's how I would recommend doing it... have everyone roll up the character they're actually going to play for the campaign. Name, Class, Background, etc. Then you, unfortunately, have to do the hard work of creating level 20 versions of all those same characters, which you use for the first session that sets up the concept. These are the "wrong" versions of the characters... maybe their spell selection isn't as good, maybe they're different subclasses than what the player actually wants to play as... maybe they're completely different classes entirely. Either way, this is the group that fails. So the players have this in mind as something that went wrong, and won't feel that they need to try and become these same characters again... doing everything differently this next time is the point, after all. But the important part is to let the players know that this is what's happening just to avoid overwhelming anyone or disappointing a player who only likes one version of the character.

If they’re in a time loop, why can they kill the boss when they meet it the second time?

When they are little kids or just regular adventurers do they remember being killed during the first boss fight? If so, that’s a lot to put on a 7-year-old. If not, are they really in a time loop, or is it really just more of a flashback?

What if one of the characters dies? Or one of the players leaves the campaign? And then you bring in a new player who wasn’t there for that first fight. How did they get into the time loop?

Personally I’m not a big fan of time travel stories. They are inherently paradoxical and often seems like a cop-out used by someone who’s written themselves into a corner.

One thing that I might see working is running a 1-shot with some level 20’s who are just going to die. Then after the good guys lose, now the new characters have to grow up in this world where the BBEG has actually accomplished their plans. Then, when they eventually win, they get to succeed where the 1-shot characters could not. And since they’ll likely be much more invested in these characters it will be very satisfying.

Quote from Xalthu >>

If they’re in a time loop, why can they kill the boss when they meet it the second time?

When they are little kids or just regular adventurers do they remember being killed during the first boss fight? If so, that’s a lot to put on a 7-year-old. If not, are they really in a time loop, or is it really just more of a flashback?

What if one of the characters dies? Or one of the players leaves the campaign? And then you bring in a new player who wasn’t there for that first fight. How did they get into the time loop?

Personally I’m not a big fan of time travel stories. They are inherently paradoxical and often seems like a cop-out used by someone who’s written themselves into a corner.

One thing that I might see working is running a 1-shot with some level 20’s who are just going to die. Then after the good guys lose, now the new characters have to grow up in this world where the BBEG has actually accomplished their plans. Then, when they eventually win, they get to succeed where the 1-shot characters could not. And since they’ll likely be much more invested in these characters it will be very satisfying.

 
What I was thinking was that after they lose the fight and die, Amaunator, who I have turned into the God of Time for my world, and who has a vested interest in destroying the big bag guy, before he destroys the world as a whole, reversed time, to a point where the player's characters were not yet born, but about to be. 

They don’t remember anything about their lives since they essentially weren’t born - to them, this is their first life, although who knows the number of times that Amaunator has reversed time to give them a do-over essentially.  

Each time Amaunator reversed time, the characters lived the same life over again, fought the same battles, became the same heroes, but with little differences.  

Each time they have gotten closer and closer to victory but have yet to win.  

Perhaps this life will be their last, and they will finally defeat the world-destroying evil and save everyone, breaking the time loop in the process.  

I also thought that although the primary campaign would start pretty straightforward, with the characters going on their first quest and so on, they would eventually meet with a “Time Prophet” - an avatar of Amaunator.  Since the Time Prophet is an avatar of the God of Time, they can see all past lives that the players have lived, and he becomes their mentor and guide.  The Time Prophet tells them about their past lives and the evil they are destined to fight and helps them journey towards their ultimate grand destiny as saviours of the world.  

How the player's characters achieve that destiny remains up to them.  The Time Prophet only guides them along the path to greatness.  Offering Knowledge and wisdom when the need arises but never truly intervening or attempting to change the outcome of events.  

Further Edit:

It should be stared that the Time Prophet can not see into the future.  Only the past.  However, as an avatar of the God of Time, they have the unique ability to see all past events and since Amaunator has pretty much locked the world into a time loop, causing things to repeat over and over again, in an attempt to once and for all defeat a ravenous hunger, the Time Prophets ability to see the past has caused them to spawn a new power.  

Now the Time Prophet can not only see the past but all past cycles of time, and by looking back Into these past time cycles, they can see the past, the present and the future (sort of, they can see the future of past cycles). Each cycle is slightly different, but each ends the same - with the world's destruction at the hands of immense ancient evil.  One that different versions the God of Time and his allies have battled for aeons on many other worlds across the realms of the multiverse. 

Some battles the God of Time and his allies have won, others were lost, and those respective worlds devoured.  The world the players will play in is the last.  If it is not defeated here, it will become powerful enough to unravel and devour all time, which is why Amaunator has taken such drastic actions.  He can't let it win; he must defeat it here, but as a God, he can't directly intervene either.  He risks much even doing what he has done and locking the world into a time loop and cresting an avatar to gather and guide his champions.  

Now his allies on the mortal plane must do the rest.  Knowingly or not, they are the chosen ones—the only ones who can save the world.  

The sense I get to this is to think of it as kind of a "What If...?" story... where these characters have gone through the same loop multiple times, but each loop has something different. "What if the Ranger is given a cloak of Elvenkind?" "What if the dragon attacked the next town over instead?" "What if the Half-Orc was a berserker?" Just different little changes each time, and whenever you get to the end of this campaign just pick the most shocking or impactful choice that the players made during this playthrough and credit that as the big moment that changed their future.

thank you all for your thoughts.  You’ve giving me stuff to thinking about when planning this out. like, how can I kill the players characters without letting them in on the plot.

My initial thoughts was just to tell them we’d be playing a one shot with their characters all at level 20 and then giving my bad guy plot armour, so he doesn’t fall below a certain amount of health and then after a while he pulls out a nova move that kills them all. 

Then we’d start the main campaign and I wouldn’t tell them that the one shot was actually part of a prequel - them in a past cycle of time.  

That would not be satisfying to the players though.  

Im struggling with how I can do this, without the players knowing that’s what I’m doing.  

Are the players/their characters supposed to know that the heroes from the prequel and themselves are one in the same? 

Quote from Caerwyn_Glyndwr >>

Are the players/their characters supposed to know that the heroes from the prequel and themselves are one in the same? 

 
Not in the beginning.  They do find out when they eventually meet the Time Prophet, but in the beginning they aren’t meant to know.  

Don't put in an unwinnable fight. That's one of the most unsatisfying thing you could do, especially in a level 20 power-trip one shot. Make it a hard fight, sure... hard enough to put level 20 characters in legitimate risk of dying. But have it be one of those situations where killing the BBEG actually triggers the apocalypse. Like... maybe they're some kind of immortal with some kind of world-ending force trapped within their body that wants to die, but is unable of killing themself, so the only way to do it is to create enough chaos that heroes will become powerful enough to kill them. So now, when your players do figure out the time loop thing they encounter their biggest hurdle... they know that this being sowing discord and death across the land has to be stopped without actually killing them, and thus they have to figure out how they can be trapped in a pocket dimension, or frozen in time, or maybe have the deadly energy extracted from their body without triggering the end of the world... I'd say don't plan on a single specific solution to the problem but maybe seed a few different potential solutions and let the players decide which one they want to pursue.

Ok, so whatever the PCs do in their level 20 format will make no difference to what happens - so this is a cut scene, not a game. As such, you can get a better result without running this.

What I recommend:

Start the PCs off as children, but have them all be affected by something that binds them together - a birthmark in the shape of a sundial, unusual eye colour, they were found on the steps of an orphanage in a storm etc. This will give the PCs the knowledge that there is something special about the group. It also allows, if one or more of them die, that they can meet other lost children who bear the mark.

In the middle of the campaign, theme the world around the doom event/BBEG that they ultimately will be preparing for. The whole world should be affected by this: the BBEG must be a whispered name, an invader from a foreign land/plane. The PCs start off dealing with small time cultists and allied evil monsters, then as they delve into ancient ruins they learn about the legendary warriors who defeated it in the past. I regularly put in friezes on walls of ancient temples, dream sequences that the PCs play roles in that show them historic events, NPCs who can tell them lore, research opportunities and so on.

Throughout their adventures they can discover 'flash back/forward' memories of their own, a feeling of having done it before, deja vu and can even see their own defeat in the future. They should realise that the heroes of the past, long dead, were them in previous lives and they fight some sort of constant time warped battle.

This could be really fun, but the main dangers of running the L20 one shot is that characters may die, leave the game, or be abandoned. Also, I don't advise planning to level 20 - unless this is a decade long running group, play to run a game from levels 1-4 with a complete story arc. Few campaigns reach level 20.

Your big problem with having a fatal one-shot is going to be the players feeling like their time is wasted--they will feel that they spent the entire session just being led to the slaughter, and that is never fun. 

Since you want to keep things vague, I would be careful in how you set the stage for your players--make them realize it is a prequel, without them knowing their characters are the subject of the prequel adventure.  Maybe say something like:

"Hey, so I am going to be doing something a little weird--we are going to do a one-shot as a prequel.  I would like everyone to make their own character, but it would be great if you could each build a level 20 character as well for the prequel one-shot.  Feel free to build whatever you want, though I want you all to play as [homebrew race]."  

Your homebrew race should be called something like "Memory" and be as generic as possible. Throw some powerful feats applicable to any class on them and make them playable, but give no detail about what they look like or such.  In game, describe the setting and the figures as shifting and out of focus--think when Frodo wears the ring in the Lord of the Rings movies, where the only figures that is crisp in his sight are the Nazgûl (or the BBEG in your one-shot). 

Start of the one-shot, set the stage by describing both the night's sky and the weather.  You can use star patterns and the season to allow your party to pinpoint around where they are temporally.  Let's say winter for illustrative purposes. 

They TPK at the end of the session.  Then, right when the past person dies, say something like this:

"Each of you wake up from the dream--if dream it could be called.  It felt so real you half expect to see wounds on your body mirroring those the strange figures of your nocturnal wanderings.  As the hot summer air rolls over you, you cannot help but remember the bite of winter winds and the feeling of snow, crushed underfoot.  Never had there been a dream more vivid, and, even as the specifics of the dream fade from memory, your mind settles on a more apt, more damning word--prophecy.  Looking out toward the rising sun, you feel a pit in your stomach--you know, more surely than anything you have ever known before, that evil stirs in the night, and those who would stand against it are powerless.  Armed with the knowledge of prophecy, you know what you must do--you must find these other heroes, those who would perish without your aid and forewarning, and you must join them lest the land fall to evil."  [End session there]. 

That should keep everything relatively vague, and, if anyone asks, you can say discovering who those heroes are is an important part of how you can help them win against the darkness.  That is not technically a lie, though it is hiding the truth a little.

Quote from TWForgeCleric >>

 Im struggling with how I can do this, without the players knowing that’s what I’m doing.  

 I’m not a big fan of keeping secrets from the players. I mean, having them unravel the mystery of the plot is one thing, but this is keeping secret the premise of the whole world, and it’s making more work for you in the process.
At some point, you have to trust your players to separate what they know from what their characters know and role play. 
And telling them also fixes the unwinnable fight problem others have mentioned — which is a real problem. If you decide what’s going to happen before it starts, what’s the point of playing? That’s not a group telling a story, that’s you dictating one. If they know going in they can’t win, at least they can have some fun with it trying ridiculous stuff.

I strongly disagree with telling the party the fight is unwinnable--I think by making it clear that the entire one-shot is a prologue and having an epilogue where they "wake up" as their real character, you have sufficiently covered your bases that no reasonable player will be upset.  After all, they know from the start that the prologue is only setting up something, not the end-all-be-all of the one-shot, and they are immediately provided the a feeling of accomplishment, as the characters they actually care about are given information that will help in the real campaign. 

Beyond having sufficiently covered your bases, this also provides for a better narrative.  Xalthu is correct--if they know the fight is fait accompli, they will either not try or joke around... and from a narrative perspective, that is absolutely not what you want.  As a storyteller, you are using the prologue to demonstrate "this evil is so powerful that a group of level 20 adventurers cannot kill it."  If the players are joking around or not really trying, they are not really going to full the weight of "an entire party of max-level players went up against this thing, tried their hardest, and died--we need to figure out something that can stop it!"

Sure, on a metagame level, maybe they will understand that is what the prologue represents, but it really is going to lack the long-term feeling of existential dread that underlies the entire point of the prologue.  It is always better to give a player a fear that permeates their subconscious, rather than exists in their surface level thoughts where metagame information lives--that is just storytelling 101, "show don't tell."

Same goes for giving the players the information that they were the figures in the dream.  By burying the lede on that, you give the players a mystery to solve: "Who are these people", which could dominate the first act of the campaign (up until they meet the Time Prophet you mention).  If they already know that they were the characters, the first act of the campaign climaxes with.... them getting information they already know.  Again, that is just bad storytelling, and you are failing in your job as DM if your "big reveal" is "your characters now have access to the metagame knowledge you have known for a number of sessions."

If you want this as background for your game, I would recommend not playing it out with game mechanics -- do it narratively. I would start at the Time Prophet, and let each player describe what awesome things they did in the previous Final Battle, and how they fell in the end.

I'm 100% in the "don't just make it an unwinnable fight" camp.

The whole concept of this game is that it is tied to the decisions made. For your level 20 cutscene to have proper impact, it needs to be a 1-2 shot fast-paced action session with loads - and I mean loads - of details.

Your current plan seems to be "You fight them, you die, do better", emulating a game where you've been playing for over 24 hours solid and died whilst forgetting to ever save, making you start from the beginning again. At level 1, level 20 seems so, so far away that it will make the players disheartened. Maybe start at level 7-8 at least, so that A: they are powerful enough to have attracted the attention of the time god, and B: they can get started right away in the actual relevant plot, rather than slaying some goblins who stole the towns turnips.

I'm going to pull some stuff out of the air for this as an example of what I'd do with it:

The level 20 (or perhaps 15, depends on how set you are on getting to level 20) start session wouldinvolve storming the citadel of the BBEG who is intent on destroying the surface world and scorching the sky so that the underdark can reign on the surface, typical world-ending stuff. The party will storm his castle, fight through his powerful minions, and chase him to the highest roof of the highest tower to throw down. After an epic fight, in which some of them might even die, they can defeat him. As they do so, the BBEG laughs and tells them they are too late, as a beam of light arises from a distinct structure in the mountains opposite, scorching the sky and unleashing the army of the underdark, which they see swarming from cracks which open in the ground. They won the fight, but the BBEG still won, and the world was lost. The tower collapses, and they fall to their deaths, and wake up in the past.

Now, for this to have any weight, you need them to remember it - otherwise any decent non-metagaming player will act on what their characters know, and will not let this influence them at all when they make decisions, ruining the whole theme of the game! hence why I'd skip the childhood part and jump in as level 7-8 characters. Perhaps they all share a dream whilst sleeping in a specific place, which makes them realise it may be prophetic.

Now, for the details! Again, pulling stoff from thin air in the moment here so you can probably make some far better ones, but the concept is that there are things they will face on the way which will influence things they saw in their dream/vision/prophecy.

• They will have a quest at this distinct structure in the mountains, perhaps driving infernal forces from the building for the nice people who own it. Perhaps the building is built by a mad architect (think ghostbusters) so it amplifies some power, the owners are entirely unaware of. They might have the option to destroy the building, but ruin their reputation.
• They will have an opportunity to choose between something they really want and hunting down a beast. The beast is described as one of the distinct minions they faced which slowed them down a lot on the way to the boss, so killing it now will get it out of their way.
• The ground cracked within a baisin where the party are petitioned by the local population to help them to destroy a dam being build by the dwarves, which would flood the valley and drive the goblins from their caves. The dwarves don't care, but if the dwarves succeed, then the valley will be flooded, lessening the subsequent army.

All those sorts of things. Pick some choices which you feel you can predict the players answers to and then make the "wrong" decision helpful to their future - the party will always help the goblins, but if they do so, then the end of the world is more likely to happen. That sort of thing.

Distinctive details you can throw at the party for their oneshot which they can (hopefully) make notes on:

• a particular coloured magical energy that helps end the world, which they might then find as an artefact they are asked to retrieve
• distinct enemies to face on the way to the BBEG, which they then have the option to face in their timeline (give them big moral decisions, like "Kill this minion you know is going to slow you down and might mean the world ends, or save this bus full of tabaxi orphans?")
• distinct locations which they can encounter earlier, possibly destroying or exorcising to make them safe
• distinct weapons or items used by the BBEG, maybe seen being put into a security vault by a rich NPC, so they have to plan a heist to steal them before the BBEG does (national treasure style)
• NPCs who they saw being killed in the final scene, who they meet in the sorts of circumstances which make them friends, or more if your campaigns dip into romance. Then give them the choice - accept the NPC's help at the final battle, knowing how they are destined t odie, or to try and keep them out of it? Perhaps them being left behind is what made them go it alone, when you saw her get stabbed on the balcony by a baddie and thrown to her doom. Maybe refusing help from George the friendly ogre slows you down more than having him there (but seeing him crushed)? Having the vision include unfamiliar NPCs with notable deaths will make it more heartbreaking for the players when they recognise them - for example, if the vision saw a huge knight in shinign armour with a lisp save the party but get crushed, they might not twig it's George the lovable ogre until he turn up in full plate armour and says "Thith Helmet ith too tighth!", and that shock value at that moment, knowing George will die if he comes with them (unless they change it), is going to be so good.

And most importantly: if they make decisions which impede them at the end, remember failure is always an option, and they need to feel like there are consequences. They could fail to save the world - you need to plan each of these key decisions, and decide how many of them made wrong are too many for their success.

So, in summary:

1.  start later than level 1, so it doesn't take forever for them to get to the vision scene
2. fill the vision scene with important details that clearly have consequences that slow down the party
3. let them beat the BBEG, but lose the war/ see the world end
4. Let them remember the dream/vision/whatever
5. let them build connections with things in the dream as they work towards the day.
6. let their decisions determine whether they have time to succeed.

Good luck with it! it sounds liek fun, but definitely needs refining (as others have said, level 1-20 is a hugely long time, and chances are the players will have forgotten that session 1's details if you go through that much before you get there!

As pointed out, this idea has numerous flaws and problems. Just the fact that you will kind of have to force the players to play characters of a similar age and from pretty much the same background is a bad idea considering how much it limits character ideas. Which sucks for the players. Also, the whole idea as playing as children is not everyone's thing. And what happens if a character dies when they're still a kid? So many things to deal with in general.

That said, there is one thing you could try that could make this work. It's really simple. Ask. your. players. Just ask them. "Hey friends, I have this idea for basically a time loop campaign. Is that something you would like to play?" Maybe give them a few more details but if they say yes, try it.

I would handle this "Intro Fight" as essentially prologue that can be incorporated into a session 0.

Rather than roll up characters, I'd just ask my players for general archetypes. Bob wants to be warforged abjuration wizard. Sally wants to be some kind of rogue but not sure on the subclass. As specific or general as they want to be.

Then you tell the story of the fight together. Each player describes how their character comes into the fight and what they do. You describe what the big bad does. No rolling, no spell selection beyond "I want to use Meteor Swarm" or whatever. This should take 15-20 minutes and then you narrate the defeat.

Now your players create characters. They already have an archetype in mind and perhaps the battle gave them some extra inspiration on who their character is or who they want to become. You don't have builds carved in stone that you need to emulate, you don't have an hour long character creation followed by a 2-hour hopeless railroaded battle, and you can quickly move on to the part of the story where the players get to make choices that matter.

Not all battles need to be BATTLES. Especially when there's only one possible outcome. Treat this like the brief opening scene it is and move on to the real game.

edit - just realized Panta said basically this 3 days ago. Oops