You know, Continuum, the time-travel RPG. Anyone here play it? And if so, how did it go? It looks cool, if not a little work, but not my preferred type of time-travel.

I've never heard of it until your post....


 Would you mind giving more details??

 Please ?

 I LOVE Sci-Fi RPGs  in general.
It would be nice to find a Time Travel one that might be fun. HeQ, even good advice on how to run a fun Time Traveling campaign.


- Ed C.

The whole premise is that you can travel in time. Your first act is to go forward in time to grab the best technology to do so. So now you can travel in time at will. Throughout the game, you must track your future actions to prevent frag (like paradox). In other words, if you are stuck in a cell but come back to free yourself, you must remember to do that later in YOUR future. It's got a lot of cool premises, but just misses the mark for atmosphere for me. Still, good stuff.

I picked up the core book and GM's book on Amazon for just under $25.

I played a one-shot of it once, and IME, it was better in theory than in practice.  Keeping track of everyone's future actions got very complicated once everyone started moving back and forth in time a lot, and you actually can't travel that far, which limits its utility.

Quote from: RezendevousI played a one-shot of it once, and IME, it was better in theory than in practice.  Keeping track of everyone's future actions got very complicated once everyone started moving back and forth in time a lot, and you actually can't travel that far, which limits its utility.

 Sounds like a potential major headache for the GM. HeQ, bookkeeping stuff in the TRAVELLER universe can get rough at times - but at least I already like the setting.

- Ed C.

I ran a short campaign of it several years back. It takes a LOT of effort on the GM's part, and some explaining to the PCs about how to keep track of their "Yet" (the list of things they know about the future and therefore MUST fulfill to avoid getting "fragged" by paradox).  But its a really cool game, especially its setting aspects where the characters essentially start out as regular humans but gradually become superpowerful beings, the requirements that they must fulfill to go up in "level" of spanning power (which are very well thought out) and especially the pseudo-history (ie. the secret history of earth's distant past) which was very well written.

The system as such had some glitches, but like I said the foremost issue was the difficulty in bookkeeping all of the character's future-history.  It was the kind of game where an error on the part of a player or the GM could seriously complicate the running of the entire campaign.

RPGPundit

I figured it would be cool yet problematic. Not exactly my cup of tea, although I really like the concepts they used.

Hypothetically - Lets say someone like me wanted to try to run that game. Could any or all of this record-keeping be done on a computer or a laptop of some kind to speed things up ?  Maybe a spreadsheet of some kind?

 I like to get to the adventure and "swashbuckle" in my games as quick as humanly possible.

- Ed C.

The setting is the most exciting and interesting gaming piece I have Ever Seen in a game, and I am not using hyperbole.  The crazy Anti-Desertum stuff is really incredible and inspired.

Unfortunately, the game was nigh unplayable. Literally, whoever said something first was the winner.

GM: The bad guy draws a bead...
Player: And falls dead, a bullet from my rifle piercing his head. I wrote myself a note from the future which I found in my pocket this AM that said "Learn how to snipe, and wait at that watchtower" and I did so. Enemy gone, I win. I wave to my future self, standing there in the guardtower.

It had this element that defied ruling, basically throwing you into this logical posturing game that would be perfect if the rules were just like Amber or something. But unplayable as-is.  And the time/frag tracking was like doing taxes, but less fun (because it took away from the coolness).

And ideology-wise, most people side with the Crashers/Narcissists over the Spanners. Well, perhaps until they learn about Antidesertum.

In any case, I stand by the above setting comment. I bought this game, read it, later sold it because I knew I wasn't going to play it. I later bought it again (driven by nostalgia), read it again thinking I was going to play, and sold it again when I realized that I wasn't.  I finally bought it a third fucking time, and there's no way I'm selling it again. It, and Blue Planet, stay on my shelves as the "Awesome, and yet I'm not going to play it, Ever" games (the rest of the ones I don't play I sell, but not these).

I mined the book and ran a Time Travel game set in the world of Continuum using the Primetime Adventures rules (we treated it as a TV show), and it was Awesome (you could probably do the same with Gurps or whatever, too). We set it at a time where the Continuum hadn't formed yet, and the players were a sort of "Time Cop" agency. So they're using mechanical time travel devices, going here and there and correcting history, living in parallel with Spanners and Narcissists, who are the Real Deal, but can't afford to touch the Time Cop movement because it too was a stepping stone to the Yet of Continuum.


It was awesome. The players uncovered the realization that their own time cop agency was "turning into" what is the Continuum (at a set date and time "3 years in the future", where no one could travel to or beyond that time and return). When they found that out, they started to relook at events in history that they witnessed, and realized that they were pretty much all falling on the Narcissist side of the house, and that their Time Cop organization were turning into the Bad Guys.

It was the best campaign I ran all year last year, 80% inspired by and using the material of Continuum.  As I said, the setting and background are inspired. The system... not so much.

-Andy

I haven't played Continuum, but I have often planned time travel campaigns - haven't got anyone to sign up yet!

Paradox stuff is a headache. My idea is to avoid it by saying that the time traveller's memories and existence don't change, but everything else can, and the traveller can't travel to a time when they existed.

So if you try to go back in time to when you were fifteen years old, you can't do it, nor if you went to 1939 to shoot Hitler, and missed, can you go back and try again, you have to pick another time.

If you go back in time and change the world, it changes, but you and your travelling companions don't know the details until you go to a later time and check it out. If you go back in time and whack your grandpa before he creates your grandfather, you yourself still exist, but when you return to your own time, people say, "who are you?"

Having actually run a campaign of Continuum, I can say that the situation isn't quite as bad as Andy K suggests.  It was certainly not "unplayable", since I played it with no particular house rules.

There are limits to how many times you can go back and save yourself in the past. One of the neat tricks is that you know ahead of time in each span (Level) the amount of "gemeni incidents" you are destined to have, so obviously you cannot have more than those. If you try to, you would frag yourself out of existence.

Beyond that, there's nothing to stop other people from playing around with time in other ways, leading to a "Time Combat" mechanic that is really brilliant, a clever mix between abstract and concrete mechanics, that represent you hopping back and forth through time to try to shift the "present" of your fight with another time traveller to your advantage, trying to do it all without creating any paradox.

Like I said, the biggest problem with the game isn't in any of its actual time travel mechanics (those are all sort of complex but actually work fine); its with the amount of book-keeping.
Its not that the system is fucked up, its that if you or one of your players miss just one detail of something that was supposed to happen in one of the characters' futures, it can create a whole domino effect of the entire party ending up fragged or the campaign getting stuck in a way that is not usually easy for the GM to fix, and because this is the whole nature of the game, you can't just do a standard "GM retcon" ("Oh ok, that never happened" or "well, you went back and fixed that at some convenenient moment"; you can't do that because the whole purpose of the game is to have to be very careful about "fixing things" and making sure in an active way that the things that are supposed to happen, happen).

RPGPundit

Quote from: JimBobOzI haven't played Continuum, but I have often planned time travel campaigns - haven't got anyone to sign up yet!

Paradox stuff is a headache. My idea is to avoid it by saying that the time traveller's memories and existence don't change, but everything else can, and the traveller can't travel to a time when they existed.

The brilliant thing about how Continuum handles Paradox is that it all has to do not with "changing the past" (which is pretty much impossible to do in the game; its mostly the bad guys who try, and they're always doomed to fail), but with not fucking up your own future. Making sure that you do the things you have found out in the past or during your travels that you are destined to do.
You can also deal with some of the "problems" you might create by shunting them over to a future date in your own history, but sooner or later you have to go back and handle them.

RPGPundit

I played a "time travel" game with White Wolf games one time online.  Characters would die (of old age, if not something else) at the end of each "important" era.  Characters were given certain parameters & allowed to change their characters a bit between eras.  We used mages who could remember their past lives to some degree, but they always travelled forward in time (as they were "reborn" in each new era).  Sometimes it was a booger bear to get them to meet up in the new era again.  But, it was very entertaining.

This is a 13 year old necro but i decided why the heck not. Its about time travel anyway.

Recently the game has somehow sunk its hooks in me. I have been thinking of running or playing it but its probably very hard to find players for it. So i decided to reflect a bit here, just some random musings.
Probably its because i watched the tv show Dark and that thing is like a literal ripoff of the concepts available in the game just without the Swarm. It really shows how grim this game could be but at the same time how complicated keeping track of all the moving parts for all involved would be. Also how keeping time travel secret from the Levellers is necessary to avoid Frag and even worse consequences. A time traveling civilisation needs to enforce its continuued existence.

So, where does that leave us the potential continuum players? There is a conversion of the cypher system i was recommended, its on the big purple:

https://forum.rpg.net/index.php?threads/continuum-adapted-to-cypher-system.782029/

Since im not a great Cipher system user i dont know if its very usable, but compared to the original system i expect its better.

What i like from this game is the concept introduced in Narcissist unfinished book. Its possible to escape into alternate worlds. So this game enables one to get into almost any kind of uchronia described in the wide variety of books out there. Of course the Swarm is interested in stopping this just as the Inheritors are.

Physics ideas like Bootstrap Paradox, Schrodingers Cat and the Frag are also usable for generating scenarios and campaigns.

Continuum was a great game that gradually became more and more impossible to run the longer the campaign went.