Summary
- Time travel in Dungeons & Dragons can be a fun and exciting adventure, but it's important to consider its relevance to the plot and the level of player control.
- Be consistent with your time travel rules and explain any differences. Use methods of time travel that fit the pace of your campaign and consider the use of locales like the Temporal Prime.
- Remember the role of gods in time travel stories and establish consequences for altering reality. Use time travel to explore characters' pasts and impossible places, but avoid allowing players to meet their past selves.
Time travel adventures are as exciting as they are confusing, and in 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Dungeons & Dragons, 🌃that is no exception. Wh♊ether you’re time traveling as a one-off or as the beginning of a grand adventure, you want to focus on the fun part of the journey, and not so much on the logistics of it all.
There are plenty of 🅘established rules and timelines in the fifth edition cannon, not to mention the infinite possibilities a homebrew campaign can give you. With so many things to consider it’s only natural to feel overwhelmed, but with just a few tips and clarifying ideas you’ll be running a great time travel campaign in no time.
10 🥃 Consid♍er The Relevance To The Plot
The first thing you want to decide early on is how much you’d use time travel in your sessions. If it’s a one and done deal, any story can have a little bit of time travel. You🍰’d want to keep player control to a minimum in these cases, so once that specific quest is done you won’t have to think about it again.
If, however, you want time travel to be the centerpiece of your campaign, you should always consult with your players. These stories can get messy, and one little mistake can undo entire backstories and 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:character motivations. It’s always more fun when everyone is on the sam🐭e page.
9 Be Consistent 💧
Like with any rules in role play sessions, be them official or house rules, it’s i🍰mportant to be consistent. Nothing is ever set in stone, and much like the rule of cool, if it’s fun you can allow it, but to the extent that it doesn’t completely ruin anything.
For time travel rules, you will certainly end up with some of your own. Just remember to use the same one📖s whenever time travel is brought up, or at least explain why it is different. If the pla🃏yers return to the present without a second having passed for an outside observer, next time they’ll expect it to work the same way.
8 Use Locales ౠLike The Temporal Prime 🦂
While you don’t have to use it, the Temporal Prime is an interesting concept to bring to a time travel campaign: an established demip✤lane where the flow of time can be touched. Entire adventures can take place within it, and you can have all sorts of limiting rules for how mechanics work there.
Yet as stated before, you are not obligated to use it. Time travel stories are complicated enough without the use of a whole other plane of existence in the middle. Consider what story you’re trying to tell, and if it would improve with the demiplane. As a rule of thumb, a 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Doctor Who sto෴ry would use the Temporal Prime, while a Back To The Fu🌟ture one wouldn’t.
7 Rememb🅷er The Role Of Gods
A time travel story within Dungeons & Dragons differs from other similar stories in its use of deities. The Gods are reꦡal and very much present, and they don’t take too kindly to adventurers altering reality. The ramifications in the distant past can undo wars that the Gods were counting on.
If you want to avoid divine intervention in you♎r stories, it’s better to keep the ramifications to a minimum, since it would make little sense to alter reality and not have any pantheon take notice. If you do wa🎃nt players to feel the wrath of the Gods, Mystra is an ideal deity; she’s against chronomancy and will send her followers to anyone messing with the flow of time.
6 Establish Methods Of ﷽Time Travel ꦆ
It is true for any form of tr꧒avel that without the method of transportation, you’re not getting anywhere. How you’ll let your players traverse time is what’ll set the pace of the whole campaign. Be careful of giving players free use of such methods, since it will get complicated to keep track of everything they’re doing.
168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Cursed objects or spells with limited uses are ideal, and gathering the materials to get them to work can be a whole quest on their own. If you need more control over where theಌy go, you can use portals that take you to a specific time period. You remove the agency from the players but gain a lot of control over the plot.
5 Use Time Travel To Explore Character's Past
A way you can have timℱe travel work is like in The Butterfly Effect; you go back in time to different points within your life, to the state your body was at that point🔜 but with all the knowledge from the future. While it makes for an interesting plot hook, you’d need to limit it for it to be usable in Dungeons & Dragons.
Players can use it to undo a rather tragic turn, or return to a few minutes before t🌳hey were captured by the guard. Just keep the time traveled to a minimum, unless it’s for a very specific occasion. It would be impossible to keep track of otherwise.
4 ꦚ Use Time Travel To Explore Impossible Places
In more traditional ways of time travel, characters go physically to🉐 the time period they need to access. This will definitely need a lot of house rules so it won’t get out of hand, or you can just let chaos do its thing and deal with the fallout later.
However you wish to approach it, always give yourself time to think things through. If the players changꦯe something too drastically in the past, set th𝓀e return to the present in a follow-up session. That way, any odd ramifications can be ironed out, and you won’t have to improvise a whole timeline on the spot.
3 Don't Let Players Meet Their Past Selves
While it could be an entertaining encounter, players meeting their past selves is needlessly complicated, and the metagame implications are too big. If you take con൩trol of the past self, the given player might not like the way you’re role-playing them. And if you give them control, the spotlight would be on one player for too long.
This is why it’s best to have a tighter control over how they travel, or at the very least have a set of house rules that prevent certain interactions. If you only let them travel to the 💞futur💖e, for example, every time they travel is to a different future, so it would be impossible for the players to meet each other.
2 Don't Worry About Paradoxes
While in Sci Fi the danger of a par🅷adox can bring about the end of the universe, in Dungeons & Dragons we have an easy solution to that: magic. You could ﷽also let them end the universe with a paradox; it would be an original ending, at the very least.
The basic idea is that either the Gods or the very flow of time needs to keep time in balance. So whenever the players do something too paradoxical, you’d have ways to remedy it. If they kill their character’s grandfather, you can have them still be born from different paren🌺ts and still be essentially the same person, since their “soul” remains the same.
1 Always Have 💦Consequences
There are two things that make time travel fun. One of them is the journey to places beyond your normal reach, to ancient pꦛasts or distant futures where things don’t quite work the way they do in your world. The other part of time travel that is fun and interesting is the consequences.
Once you go back to your time, how have things changed? Is the city now a wasteland, is the kingdom ruled by monkeys? If once they go back, everything remains the same, players might feel like it was a wasted trip. Even if negative, 168澳🐈洲幸运5开奖网:consequences can make your world feel alive and have player꧋s invested in the story, maybe𒆙 wanting to try another time bending journey to fix their mistakes.