I use to prefer 2nd edition since I thought 3rd and 3.5 made you too damn powerful too damn fast. This is after years of playing AD&D 2nd edition, so the feats felt too powerful to me. And to be fair, they can easily break the game. These days I favor Pathfinder (effectively D&D 3.75), but 2nd edition is still a solid rule set. Granted classes like ranger, druid, and paladin are nearly impossible to get the stats for if using 3d6 down the line (my preferred stat rolling system). But that just means it hurts even more if you got the stats to play a paladin and due to your actions in-game fell. Thus you had more of a drive to redeem your paladin.
Ranger required: Ranger: Str 13, Dex 13, Con 14, Wis 14
Druid required: Druid: Wis 12, Cha 15
Note that you need a 13 or higher in every stat except INT, and then try rolling the required numbers using 3d6 in order.
I had exactly two of them, and in the beginning, they ran like bitches many times, because I was no way going to try and do another character with those stats.
2nd edition had rules specifically for what to do if a character didn't qualify for any class. Namely pick one of the basic classes (fighter, thief, cleric, wizard) and bump the required attribute up to 9. More often then not, you qualified for at least one of the basic classes. Some of the advanced classes like Ranger and Druid were easier to get, but still difficult. Paladins though? Yeah, that was bloody difficult to roll the stats for, even with 4d6 drop the lowest and arrange to taste.
The rules for multi-classing (non-humans) and dual classing (humans) also got a bit complicated. I personally favored playing a half-elf fighter/mage. But that was mostly so my character could contribute at low levels after using my ONE spell per day.
I have no issue with businesses printing books to make money. My issue was that 3rd edition was apparently buggy enough and not tested enough before release they had to do a 3.5 edition so soon after it came out, when the basic three books cost about $100 as a set. Second edition? Those came out over about a decade, and even then one could play with just the three core books. First edition? Same thing. I admit, the to hit charts in first edition were clunky, and the THAC0 system in second edition was buggy at higher levels, but the systems were tested and functional before they went to print. Yes, they came out with many supplements to enhance gameplay, but none were really needed to play the game and none changed the fundamental workings of the systems.
The fact that several key systems, not to mention two of the basic classes, needed such major revisions they needed to come up with a ".5" version tells me they didn't spend anywhere near enough time in playtesting.
(Besides, with all the first and second edition books I have, I can run or play D&D without any of the new books. Why keep buying new systems when nothing keeps me from using the old ones?)
3rd edition was basically AD&D 2nd edition with simplified AC/To-Hit math and the stuff from Player Options: Skills and Powers added in, possibly from Player Options: Combat and Tactics as well. Not sure since I never had that book. And if just using the core books, 3rd edition (3.5 as well) is fairly well balanced, provided the DM remembers that the monsters can use their combat feats too. It's only when you add in all the many additional books that got released that 3rd edition became unbalanced as hell.
Then again, 2nd edition also could quickly become unbalanced as hell if you included the splat books. Especially if you included Complete Psionics.
Then let someone else do it. Like the other Taylor. Just save each other's mothers, and they're fine. Just make sure the clones are exact, save 'em after the accident, and make sure nobody notices (which is perfectly doable with Assassin's Cloak), and you're golden.
I think you and several other people are overlooking what the Varga said happens in time travel cases. Namely, that the people who's lives are changed go insane because they remember both timelines and begin to lose the ability to distinguish between what is real and what isn't.
Nowhere is it claimed that this is only true for the people doing the changing, and nowhere is it mentioned how large a change is necessary for this to happen.
In the case of replacing Annette with a clone, they'd have to get every single little detail completely right - every word, every gesture, every action taken might need to be the same so as not to affect Taylor's memory of the crash. Remember that she was on the phone with her mother at the time - so unlike with Ripley, there's plenty of places where they could screw up.
And you can't just say 'well because she's a clone it would all be the same'. Because the butterfly effect still applies there - you simply *can't* get every last detail 100% correct, because even the very bodies of whoever shows up displaces air that hadn't previously been displaced. It's a bit like the problem nature documentary-filmers and zoologists run into: by their very presence they are altering things.
Mind you, a great many of those changes probably don't matter at all. (Like the displacing of air). But you've also got questions like 'How would you convince the clone to go through with this?' 'How do you convince the clone to follow the script'? 'You do realize we're murdering a person we created, right?' and so on. The answers to those questions seem pretty likely to end up having some kind of impact on the final sequence of events.
What 'both timelines'? Remember how Amy had to create a xenomorph to implant into Ellen because there wasn't one, because the one she removed was the one she implanted in her earlier in the timeline?
Closed time-loops are a thing. A very popular thing. And it's not like there's any difference between the way Taylor remembers it and the way that same timeline is with Annette replaced with a perfect replica, since the one she and Danny buried was the replica to begin with.
Unless time travel works on a two-depths level. Aka something like "There's time, and there's meta-time. One is local to the current universe and can be traveled and changed. The other is multiversal and can't be."
After all, if the Entities had shards that allow them to move backwards in time, their race's goal of coming up with a solution to entrophy on a cosmic scale makes even less sense than in canon.
Depends on the power requirement. One could (probably) come up with a potential-energy equivalent that "works" in that regard.
(There's an analogy between weak memory models and time travel here. The Java memory model actually had to add an explicit rule to disallow "out-of-the-blue" values, analogous to causal loops.)
I've played 2nd ed, Pathfinder, and 5th ed. I think I prefer 2nd ed, actually. Pathfinder has too many unintended interactions for my liking... though overall I still find 2nd > PF > 5th, all else equal.
I love this take on the Lizard-Fu that's going on with realities, and definitely hope to see more of it.
IMO, Taylor/Varga doesn't have to go back to save her mother. Let Miles, Daniel, and Peter do it, with Metis along for the ride for inference timing. They could do a simultaneous beam out of Annette and beam in of a barely living clone... right before the impact. They're using Asgard Transporters, so it'd be pretty instantaneous. Yeah, people may see a flash, but could disregard it as a camera phone taking a picture or something.
And better yet, don't tell Taylor or Varga until it's over as a fait accompli. No massive shenanigans that the EB's would see, no crazy things others may see. Cloaked/Shielded from orbit. Don't even need a landing party.
And Lisa could pull it off... Twice, for each set of Heberts.
What 'both timelines'? Remember how Amy had to create a xenomorph to implant into Ellen because there wasn't one, because the one she removed was the one she implanted in her earlier in the timeline?
Closed time-loops are a thing. A very popular thing. And it's not like there's any difference between the way Taylor remembers it and the way that same timeline is with Annette replaced with a perfect replica, since the one she and Danny buried was the replica to begin with.
In Ellen's case, there were enough oddities to require investigation, which is how the closed loop came to be.
In Taylor's case, there are NO oddities requiring investigation, and since Taylor was actively talking to her Mother at the very instant the accident happened, no opportunity to intervene unnoticed. Beam in/beam out take too long and make noise in this circumstance, and there is ZERO history of The Family at that point in time. Plus, there will be witnesses (weather they admit to seeing something or not) of an accident in a city at that time of day. There is no time for intervention, there is no opportunity for an intervention, and there is no chance an intervention can be carried out without altering the timeline.
Besides, and I don't know the answer for this one (but it will make all the difference in the world,) when exactly did Annette die? We've all been treating things like she died in the car. But what if she died in the ambulance on the way to the hospital instead, complete with witnesses noting the exact moment of death? Or in the hospital for that matter, again with witnesses right up to when she died? If the exact moment of death is observed, then how exactly do you make the switch without it being observed in turn?
Without a VERY compelling reason beyond wanting to save Taylor's mother, the likelihood that a stable time loop exists that would let them save Annette is too slim to even consider possible.
I love this take on the Lizard-Fu that's going on with realities, and definitely hope to see more of it.
IMO, Taylor/Varga doesn't have to go back to save her mother. Let Miles, Daniel, and Peter do it, with Metis along for the ride for inference timing. They could do a simultaneous beam out of Annette and beam in of a barely living clone... right before the impact. They're using Asgard Transporters, so it'd be pretty instantaneous. Yeah, people may see a flash, but could disregard it as a camera phone taking a picture or something.
And better yet, don't tell Taylor or Varga until it's over as a fait accompli. No massive shenanigans that the EB's would see, no crazy things others may see. Cloaked/Shielded from orbit. Don't even need a landing party.
And Lisa could pull it off... Twice, for each set of Heberts.
I think all the lizarding fits together pretty well...
Sounds do-able, and I suspect you could hide the flash using a hologram... Another approach would be to use a Star Trek transporter, and then an advanced replicator to produce a brain-dead body, that you swapped for Annette... Or, if the crash wasn't an instant kill (minimal head damage) do a swap after the crash and apply a one-shot healer...
A possible hole - you'd need to ensure that Lisa was thoroughly firewalled from the local shard-net, or she'd leak data into it, which'd badly butterfly things.
The time travel rules I used for TV are as has been stated those used by DSR, and designed by the author thereof. They were the result of a lot of careful thought, both because they were an integral part of a fairly extensive plot, and because the author didn't want to leave time travel on the table as a viable method of doing more or less anything. Like myself, they find the mere concept something that is heavily overused and more often than not misused to the point that a story employing it tends towards the absurd very quickly. It's incredibly difficult to do correctly, but very easy to do badly, and this is indeed the normal result.
You pretty much have to base your entire story around the concept to do it any justice at all, as in the Doctor Who universe. There, temporal shenanigans are the entire point, but if you add it in as an afterthought it seldom works in a plausible fashion.
The DSR approach was that time travel is in fact rather simple, but doing it in a way that doesn't have excessively unpleasant ramifications is the ultimate NP-hard problem. People can get lucky, and in canon Ranma they in fact do with the time traveling mirror thing, but well after the fact they work out how incredibly unlikely that actually was.
If you don't get lucky, well... The problem solves itself. At the lowest level, the Multiverse makes sure you aren't around to do the time traveling in the first place, by retroactively editing you out. At the highest level, which is seen in the story, it deletes the entire reality strand that's causing the problem. Including everyone and everything in it that have ever existed or ever will exist.
People who know about this consider the mere concept of time travel a capital offence. Because that's better than the alternative, and they can prove it. With the casual travel between realities that the story shows, in the last major incident of this nature there were plenty of survivors who could tell what happened when their home universe went away. Note that this was made worse by the way that the people who build the time machine in question made it so powerful it could almost succeed.
You can think of it like an auto-immune system response; The multiverse reacts to time travel like a biological system reacting to an infection. It self repairs after killing off the problem microbes, and the bigger the infection the more vigorous the reaction to it. If lopping off one of its own fingers is required to fix things, it'll just do it. No ultimate power or omniverse-level intelligence needed, it's simply doing what comes naturally.
There are exceptions in a few very rare cases where time travel does work, to a point, and no one knows quite why. The Doctor Who universes, for example, seem able to get away with it. The Star Trek ones do as well, although in a different way. Everywhere else it's a terminally stupid idea to even attempt it, since you have no idea whether you can get away with it or not. And if you fail, you'll never know.
This is why there are people who will turn up and make sure you stop.
You do not want to meet these people
The relevant bits of DSR are this one (quoted with permission):
"A damn time machine. They're always trouble," Yori muttered, looking disgusted. "Not a good idea at all. I'm beginning to get an idea of what might be wrong."
"What do you mean?" Ami asked. "Aiko mentioned you didn't like the idea of time travel, but I'm not sure why."
"It's a massively dangerous thing to do," the martial artist explained, sighing a little. "Probably the most dangerous thing you can do. I only know enough about it to steer well clear, but I know some real experts who could explain in detail that would make you lose sleep for a month why you should never interfere with time. Basically, it doesn't like it. At all. And it has ways of... resolving... paradox, ways that seldom work out well for anyone involved."
"I know quite a bit of theory and math behind various models of time travel," Ami said, looking fascinated. "General relativity permits it in some variants, although with a number of very weird possible outcomes. The Novikov self-consistency conjecture solves a few of them but leaves other things even weirder." She shook her head slightly. "It gives you a headache when you start to think about it."
"It gives you a bigger headache if you actually do it," Yori grumbled. "Trust me. I've heard of the Novikov thing, it's not completely wrong but not completely right either. I suppose it might be if you did the time travelling by purely technological means but most of the ways I've heard of people actually doing it use magic, either completely or partially, which makes things even weirder. Magic breaks normal physics horribly. I've travelled back in time once, using a magical artefact. It was an accident, actually. That's the sort of thing that happens to me. It was... annoying." Rei and Ami looked at each other.
"That sounds like an interesting story," Ami said.
"I might tell you one day. Anyway, I mentioned it to this time mage I met once and he got quite upset. Physically travelling in time, in most realities, is actually one of the very few things that is completely forbidden. The results can be, um, fairly dramatic." She shuddered a little, making everyone look at her oddly. "As in, theoretically possibly deleting the entire reality dramatic." Ami went white. "It's happened. More than once."
"What!?"
"The multiverse does not like time travel. It permits it, but you have to be really careful. Try to change things in the past, the old 'kill your grandfather' bit, that doesn't work. Either things just sort of heal over if the change is small enough or far enough back, so you end up where you started just by a slightly different path, or you split off an entire section of time that just removes you from the equation so you can't go back in the first place. Sometimes you can make small changes if you're really careful, apparently, but the reaction to it depends on something he called 'temporal inertia'. Basically, some things have a small amount of it and can be redirected a little, other things have massive amounts and can't be, without huge effort. That seems to annoy the multiverse, which if it notices, takes steps. In extreme cases, very significant ones."
"It sounds like you're saying the universe is conscious," Ami noted, listening with worried intent. Yori shrugged a little.
"I don't think it is, not like you're thinking, and there's nothing like a destined path, either. It's more like there's a sort of feedback system keeping things ticking over, which reacts if you try to deliberately push them off course. The harder the push, the harder the corrective action. The time traveller is the easiest thing to react against, so they're the one who gets an annoyed universe in the face. Which doesn't normally end well for them."
"Interesting. Maybe a lowest-energy course?" Ami mused out loud. "Changing the past is running up against an energy barrier..."
"I don't know, it's not a field I've been all that interested in," Yori admitted. "Especially since I talked to the mage. He obviously did know what he was talking about, and to be honest he worried me enough I lost interest in the whole idea completely. The point is, time travel is dangerous, incredibly so. I got very lucky, I got away with it. He did say that what he termed my 'temporal signature' was a little odd because of travelling in time, though. That might be why this machine of your friend's has trouble with me. Apparently, different methods of accessing time travel are normally dangerously incompatible with each other." She shrugged again. "Again, it's not a subject I know a huge amount about. I think we're going to have to call him in, though."
"It's not that easy, unfortunately. There are essentially an infinity of possible futures, so even picking the one you want is damn difficult. Once you've found the one you want, trying to guide the present towards it depends on a huge number of variables, some of which might be in the distant past. It's a massively complex problem. Some things you can change, some you can't, and you have no real way to know which is which until you try. If you get it wrong, at best you make your own job even more difficult, or even impossible."
And this one:
"I'm not entirely sure. There may be no way to even find out, of course. And it might not have reset to the same point each time. Probably it didn't, in fact, I would imagine that it was smart enough to try alternative methods to achieve its goals when it failed the first couple of times. I would also suspect that the reset point probably isn't all that far back, as the number of variables would grow exponentially the further before a desired change it began interfering. But the problem of manipulating time is that it's essentially impossible to account for all the variables no matter how good you are, you see. Something as simple as that rather drunk D'sage interacting with Yori a few minutes ago could well in some ways depend absolutely on specific events happening in a specific order possibly dozens or even hundreds of years ago. On the face of it, you could have changed it by merely going back an hour or so and preventing him getting drunk, but how do you know for sure that would prevent such an interaction in the future?"
He finished his drink as they thought about it. "The answer is, of course, you can't. You might well avoid that particular interaction, by editing a past event, but in the process set up a sequence of possibilities that led to the same interaction, or a worse one, at some later date. Or even an earlier one. Not fate, or predestination, anything like that, just the fact that there are so many things that all come together to make reality happen it's basically impossible to account for all of them. Even for a massive supercomputer that has possibly millions of years to think about it."
"So you're saying that there was no way to avoid something like that happening?" Ami asked, obviously thinking hard. He shook his head.
"Not at all. There may well be one simple change you could make that would have set everything on a totally different path where that event would never happen. The key thing is, though, that there is basically no way to be totally sure what it is. You could alter one parameter at a time, over and over, until you found it by trial and error, but it would essentially take an infinite amount of time from your perspective. Not to mention that temporal inertia would undo most of the changes before the effect could ripple through to the present, making the entire exercise one of futility in any case." He sighed a little. "And if you made certain changes, which might not even be particularly large ones, at least as far as you could predict, you could well destabilise reality to the point that something very unfortunate happened. It's almost impossible to be sure that any one change is safe, dangerous, or just useless. That's the real danger with time travel, you see. Until you do it you don't know what will happen and by then it's too late."
"It sounds far too dangerous to experiment with," 'Azumi' noted.
He nodded. "It is. With extreme care one may investigate the past through temporal manipulations but it's highly unwise even so. Direct interaction with past events is a fool's game at best. There are laws against it for very good reasons."
In Worm there are, as far as I know, no real examples of time travel. There are things that look like temporal loops, which is a somewhat different proposition. A loop done with Grey Boy's power or Bakuda's grenades starts now and goes forward for a period of time, only to reset to the beginning. At a later point in external time, it appears to be time travel, but strictly speaking it isn't since at the moment it initially began there was no backwards temporal shift. It's a closed loop that doesn't effect external causuality so temporal inertia doesn't come into play.
As an aside, it's not really a proper temporal loop anyway, since the person stuck in it appears canonically to experience time still flowing linearly and not reset even though their body does. In a true time loop that wouldn't happen, everything would reset. But that's not relevant at the moment.
Transferring from one reality to another in the method that the Varga uses in my omakes, and similarly here, allows for some odd shenigans that look like time travel but have some distinct differences. Time between realities isn't necessarily synchronized, and although it generally runs more or less consistently, this isn't a hard and fast rule. So it's possible to exit one reality and enter another one at a point in local time that is prior to your previous visit, or your originating time. Usually this is accidental but if you know what you're doing you can leverage this for entertainment But it still has limitations.
One of these is that it's a very bad idea to try to get around the time travel prohibition by leaving your original universe then re-entering it from another one at a point previous to your exit. The omniverse can see through that, and may take exception. Taylor and friends can get away with what they're doing at the moment as they have Varga magic backing them, along with demon math skills, but even the Varga isn't going to risk trying that in the same universe he lives in, or Taylor herself does. That's asking for trouble as it's far too close to real time travel to be worth even contemplating.
The omniverse lets Greater Demons do all sorts of bizarre things, but there's no point pushing it too hard, right?
If someone from outside did it, without their input, it might work, but if they tried it, all sorts of bad things could and quite possibly would happen. It's not worth it for one person, even Taylor's mother. And she herself is well aware of that, having discussed it with him in the past.
Technical reasons aside, I'm generally against stories that start using time travel to bring people back, because aside from the thing that it normally isn't done very well, assuming it works where do you actually stop? If you can resurrect some random person, why do you only do it once? The temptation is to keep doing it over and over to the point that the story loses all continuity and quickly becomes silly. And if you decide that you're only going to indulge in it a couple of times, you need to come up with some plausible reason for this too, which also tends to break things. Far better to say that it can't be done, or possibly that it can be done but really, really shouldn't be.
Note that coming up with some method to back a person up and restore them isn't subject to these limitations and is entirely viable, if it's done right. But just plotting out various strategies to reach back a couple of years and go 'Yoink! Tada, one mother!' isn't on.
Unfortunately, because Taylor really does miss her mother. So do I and I've never even met the woman
Would I be correct in assuming some form of Postcognition would, unlike physical time travel, be comparatively safe? That is to say, the Universe wold likely not object to one observing past events using means that do not allow those events to be altered?
Let's face it; comprehensive Postcognition would make solving a great many mysteries very mush easier.....
Phir Se claims that his minute-scale time travel allows him to change events, and he used that ability to make light bombs. Whether that's actually time travel or not is up in the air but if it isn't then his shard is pushing real hard to pretend it is.
Phir Se claims that his minute-scale time travel allows him to change events, and he used that ability to make light bombs. Whether that's actually time travel or not is up in the air but if it isn't then his shard is pushing real hard to pretend it is.
Sounds like a thinker/shaker combo, where he uses short term precognition to view model what will happen multiple times while his shaker ability causes his effects in those models to happen. Both are known Shard powers, no time travel required.
Sounds like a thinker/shaker combo, where he uses short term precognition to view model what will happen multiple times while his shaker ability causes his effects in those models to happen. Both are known Shard powers, no time travel required.
That part, yes, but he also claims to have violated causality in small ways regarding family problems. He claims that saving the dead members of his family from dying was within his power, but he chose to go after a villain instead. That implies he can step through his doors, to me.
Again, not impossible, but you have to add mover to the list now and possibly master if his power is generating a projection of him to allow him to appear to step into his own past.
It's not impossible for a shard to fake but he's really reaching into the grab bag with both hands at this point.
Not sure if this has been referred to, recently, but 'Riverworld', the place where all of humanity has been resurrected... Yes, this is a series of science fiction novels first available from the early 1970s... And, no, this isn't the only one, people like Spider Robinson's also had a go...
In general, I really dislike time travel in stories because it is almost never done in a method that make any goddamn sense. Best example I can think of at the moment is Dr. Who. Time travel in that series is just a mechanism of travelling, not actually travelling in time because of the various paradoxes that would have resulted.
The best example of Time Travel I've seen was in a series by Linda Evans. In this series time could not be changed. The past had already happened and any attempt to change it would inevitably fail. For example, you travel back in an attempt to kill Hitler and your gun would jam, you'd be hit by a car, your explosives would prematurely detonate or so on. Your attempt will fail because it had already failed and was just part of the timescape.
In the case of this story, I think you've done it right. Timing events so that history isn't changed in the slightest. As rough as that is on some of the characters, it has to be to accomplish the best possible outcome with the least amount of damage.
Then what the Hell was the point of inventing time travel? If you can't use it to change anything at all, then the invention itself is less than worthless.
Then what the Hell was the point of inventing time travel? If you can't use it to change anything at all, then the invention itself is less than worthless.
Then what the Hell was the point of inventing time travel? If you can't use it to change anything at all, then the invention itself is less than worthless.
Time tourism could be one reason. Although why anyone would want to travel to the middle ages or earlier is beyond me. Then there's the academic aspect. Imagine the joygasm that historians and archiologists would have if they could actually travel back in time to witness first hand things rather then try to piece them together with fragments.
Then what the Hell was the point of inventing time travel? If you can't use it to change anything at all, then the invention itself is less than worthless.
Again, a Time Viewer would be a perfectly safe and reasonable device. There's nothing wrong with looking at the past; just with physically going there.
The problem is, in setting, time travel is insanely dangerous, but also far too easy.....
Would a device that could show exactly what happened say, twelve hours in the past, but not change those events be useless? Hell no. If it was provably accurate then law enforcement agencies would pay a lot of money for such a device. And even if it wasn't admissible in court it would still let investigators where to look for evidence. If it could be used to view the past of a remote location then intelligence agencies would consider it invaluable. If the device can show you what happened thousands or millions of years then the scientific community would praise the invention. No longer would they have to guess and try piecing history together. They could just watch what happened and study ancient civilizations or long extinct animals.
Physically traveling through time is a horribly dangerous thing to do. But just observation? That is safe, and could provide valuable services.
Would a device that could show exactly what happened say, twelve hours in the past, but not change those events be useless? Hell no. If it was provably accurate then law enforcement agencies would pay a lot of money for such a device. And even if it wasn't admissible in court it would still let investigators where to look for evidence. If it could be used to view the past of a remote location then intelligence agencies would consider it invaluable. If the device can show you what happened thousands or millions of years then the scientific community would praise the invention. No longer would they have to guess and try piecing history together. They could just watch what happened and study ancient civilizations or long extinct animals.
Physically traveling through time is a horribly dangerous thing to do. But just observation? That is safe, and could provide valuable services.
Except that event was being observed at the time by those present, and thus the quantum waveforms involved had already collapsed - so this would likely be more akin to going back over previous observations.
Unless, of course, lab results and printouts change whenever someone new observes them.
Except that event was being observed at the time by those present, and thus the quantum waveforms involved had already collapsed - so this would likely be more akin to going back over previous observations.
Unless, of course, lab results and printouts change whenever someone new observes them.
The danger is in observing something that wasn't recorded, intentionally or otherwise. Even minor changes due to something like that could cause massive disruptions, more the further back you're observing.
