Issue 11, Time Travelling, Plots and the Present.

Read the bottom half of this strip

http://www.dresdencodak.com/cartoons/dc_040.html

Quantum Theory...?

*Head explodes in true Peter Jackson tradishon*

It would actually be very inefficient if the universe could be so easily destroyed and that's why I don't believe that time-travel is as detremental as people make out.

I subscribe to the Babylon 5 method (also the Twelve Monkeys method) - everything happens, did, will and always has happened that way and nothing can change it. Going back intot he past means you become the past influencing the future so that you end up going back into the past. A cycle much like the rest of nature.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Dispari I don't know why Dink thinks she's not as sexy as Jay was. In 5 posts she's already upstaged his entire career.

Personally I prefer the whole Cable you can go back and change things but in doing so you don't have a future to go back to.

This has me thinking a bit, There's a Task Force/Strike Force under the name of Trading Places.

It basicly involves you and your team in the fight over Sirens Call as shown in the comic issues of 10 - 12. If you play your heroes your basicly fixing the timeline so that things play out as they should be... but Villain side Arachnos wins and essentaly takes over the world.

... How? Is this the case of a broken timeline? Or are Villains and Heroes constantly fighting for their particular timeline to win? Maybe solving this will help solve a bunch of the "Alternate Timeline" questions we're having?

Spoiler alert!

with the task force at the end villains are basically told, "Yeah and it should stay that way...unless someone comes along and borks it up" which is basically what the heroes version of the taskforce does. Invariably, the villains then go back AGAIN (running the taskforce a 2nd time) but then the heroes simply counteract that by going back a 2nd time themselves.

It also works the other way around, the happy shiney future gets borked up by the villains, so thus the heroes go back and change it etc. etc.

[ QUOTE ]
The problem with the quantum idea is that the can of worm is opened by travelling forwards, thus observing the outcome of possible future events which then would cause them to have to be the actual events because you've observed the outcome...

[/ QUOTE ]

Don't go confusing things further by going forwards too!

The slightly random wobblings from the Militia forums

Time travelling and changing the past is imposible by the equation:
Event X causes Person Y to go back and prevent Event X.
But if Event X never happens, Person Y never goes back.

Now some would state that a "Chronologic anchor" would preserve Person Y's motivation, but with Event X never happening Person Y has no motivation to preserve.

As such timetravel becomes pointless, aside from going back and learning from the past, trying oneself against a foe before he is imprisoned so one might be prepeared for once he is no longer so.

So you can't change the past to change the present, but you CAN know your past, change the present and thus shape the future.

Well put.

I had a really big long post about how the citadel could possibly be at the edge of time or in a 5th dimesion where time is irrelevent and thus when in this place all timelines past, present, future, alterenate, finshed or ongoing occur at once, and that we are trying to save at least one timeline by preparing it sufficently to deal with the thing that eventually ruins destroys the galaxy, and how mender silos using the carbon law is now also exempt from the timelines being absobed into all time itself therefore making it possible (using this fictional law) to find or create such a place like the citadel, but it got really long and headahcey.

[ QUOTE ]
Time travelling and changing the past is imposible by the equation:
Event X causes Person Y to go back and prevent Event X.
But if Event X never happens, Person Y never goes back.

Now some would state that a "Chronologic anchor" would preserve Person Y's motivation, but with Event X never happening Person Y has no motivation to preserve.

As such timetravel becomes pointless, aside from going back and learning from the past, trying oneself against a foe before he is imprisoned so one might be prepeared for once he is no longer so.

So you can't change the past to change the present, but you CAN know your past, change the present and thus shape the future.

[/ QUOTE ]

This really does make sense to me, well put.
The whole "chronologic anchor" is what my villain made, or is making at this moment why? Because he is from the future and thusly wants to stay in the past, where he isn't classed down as evil, just misunderstood.

[ QUOTE ]
Time travelling and changing the past is imposible by the equation:
Event X causes Person Y to go back and prevent Event X.
But if Event X never happens, Person Y never goes back.

Now some would state that a "Chronologic anchor" would preserve Person Y's motivation, but with Event X never happening Person Y has no motivation to preserve.

As such timetravel becomes pointless, aside from going back and learning from the past, trying oneself against a foe before he is imprisoned so one might be prepeared for once he is no longer so.

So you can't change the past to change the present, but you CAN know your past, change the present and thus shape the future.

[/ QUOTE ]

If you travel to the Ourborous zone, if that exists outside the normal timestream, then the motivation to go back to change things would still exist, as the changes to the timestream wouldn't effect you, until you left Ourbourous?

As for people's backstories being effected by time travel possibilities, for the time being, the mechanism in the game doesn't allow you to go back to any point of time you choose (so using the previous example to stop Crey Corporation becoming evil) and only to a point that the Menders are citing that someone has gone back in time to already and interfered with, with the goal that you are putting it right. The free play missions, where you can access story arcs that you missed are part of COX cannon and therefore if you have written a backstory that is contradictory to that then that is your error. As far as I am aware, the story arcs that exist don't allow you to stop Crey forming, otherwise a whole villain group is borked.

So, as far as I can see, the way time travel is played out in COX is that it is 'Policed' by Ourbourous and therefore you should still be able to have your existing backstories in place, with maybe the amendment of

'...now working with Ourbourous to try and stop Crey corporation before they start and pay them back for what they did to me. However tracking down the exact locations and time periods that would prove the most effective and least detrimental to this timeline is proving tough. Who knew that temporal mechanics would be this complex?'

Just a thought....sorry if I singled out the crey example - I'm not meaning to have a go, but from my expreinces on the test server, I found the 'time-travel' missions to be quite controlled / restricted by Ourborous and therefore failed to see the backstory issues that could be encountered by this. If it was time-travel in the case of 'you could travel to anywhere you wanted' then, yes that might be an issue.....but who is to say that (like the example above) that if you did something like 'Stopping Crey being Evil' that someone else isolated by the timestream would go back and undo your undoing by then helping Crey be evil, thus creating a never ending loop.....very much like the Ourborous logo!

//\\
[]
What I was trying to get across, but easier to understand...

Lo i find it very funny that this has somehow gotten 2 the point of being a philoshical chat about time wen its a game and as we all now anything is possible in games.

As it is a game time doesnt matter because its a game if it was real then if u did alter something u would have multiple split lines of time were one was affacted and the second line wasnt and so and so on.

But as it is a game it doesnt matter!

[ QUOTE ]
Lo i find it very funny that this has somehow gotten 2 the point of being a philoshical chat about time wen its a game and as we all now anything is possible in games.

[/ QUOTE ]

More importantly, a game about comic-book superheroes, where all different methods of time travel are possible.

I think that in the end, everyone's personal rendition of time-travel will work, so long as nobody tries god-modding everything, for one simple fact:

We've already had time-travel plots for over two and a half years now.

[ QUOTE ]
Nene goes back in time. Changes X. Timeline splits into A and B, Nene returns to her original timeline (A) where things are the same. B is the timeline where different things happened due to the change. Nene goes back again. Timeline C is created. Repeat ad infinitum.

No one goes back and kills (MajorNPC/character) stops event and changes the gameworld, et cetera, et cetera. Problem of time travel plot majorly effecting everyone solved.

[/ QUOTE ]
This is very similar to the idea posed at the Militia Forum discussion of this topic. The idea being that what makes this timeline be this timeline, as opposed to one of the infinite alternates, is the precise history of events.

Riled got a little closer to that in his post, for instance:
[ QUOTE ]
If they went back in time to god-mod kill you when you are a bubby, then they wouldn't come back the the universe you still exist in...so they unfortuantly god-mod them-selves out of the game >_<

[/ QUOTE ]

Sadly, this falls over in three particular points.

1. Traveling to alternate dimensions/timelines differentiated by often just one small event is what the Portals do at Portal Corporation. The Ouroboros Time-Travel is additional and different, so we cannot simply fudge it to be the same thing.

2. The idea of every litle different event creating its own full universe of a timeline isn't one that can be easily accepted in connection with a super-hero or super-villain game-world. Why? Because you have just taken away all heroics and villainy. Every heroic attempt will automatically create thousands of alternate timelines, just as real as one's own, where the hero actually made things worse, or where the villain failed miserably. Anything there is a chance for will automatically create an entire alternate universe where it happened.

For you heroes who don't kill, this means an obvious situation where however tiny the chance of some freak accident causing you to kit too hard, or a weakpoint, happens in some alternate universe. For each blow you strike, every possible chance of it going wrong is spawned into a new timeline different by one life. Per blow, per opponent, per battle, per mission... a million alternate universes where you killed, just for one where you are.

It just doesn't sit with the heroic situation to knw that in many alternate universes, you automatically not just fail, but make things worse, through your actions.

3. This is the really big point. We only get to make up our own canon where the game developers haven't provided or created one. They get to god-mod quite legitimately because they are the game devs and thus the gods of the gameworld.

There are a quite a few posts in ths thread talking about how a player sees time-travel. Interesting, but ultimately entirely irrelevant to a discussion about the gameworld. The way time-travel works is however the gameworld has it work. It is our job as RPers to then make it real in our characters lives, no matter how much we as players might think it impossible. I mean, hello? Super-strength lets you tear up chunks of concrete to throw? So you have finger-skin tough enough to be forced through solid concrete without causing so much as a hangnail, yet some guy smacking you with a fist can hurt you?

Its a game. The gameworld isn't supposed to be real, only just plausible enough for us to suspend disbelief and play it.

[ QUOTE ]
3. This is the really big point. We only get to make up our own canon where the game developers haven't provided or created one. They get to god-mod quite legitimately because they are the game devs and thus the gods of the gameworld.

There are a quite a few posts in ths thread talking about how a player sees time-travel. Interesting, but ultimately entirely irrelevant to a discussion about the gameworld. The way time-travel works is however the gameworld has it work. It is our job as RPers to then make it real in our characters lives, no matter how much we as players might think it impossible.

[/ QUOTE ]

This is the point that has stuck with me all along. The whole point of Ouroboros existing is so that they can change the past to save the future. Therefore, according to game canon, it is possible to change the past. That's what's presented to us and therefore it is up to us to try and work with it even if it is the most scientifically impossible, most difficult to work with, headache inducing (delete as appropriate) stance available.

We are of course entitled to disregard the game's stance on time travel as we can with many parts we disagree with but then that tends to only work within groups and will create conflicts when coming into contact with other roleplayers who see time travel differently. But then, hey, how's that different from normal?

Once the initial rush of time-travelling passes and the novelty wears off, I would hope to see it become something that doesn't crop up in plots too often given its potential for causing trouble. But I'm sure we'll work something out.

Well put, Dante. Godmodding with it will still get a /ignore, and good plots can do whatever the hell they like with it, as far as i'm concerned, i mean, when's game canon ever spoiled good plots? (That and game canon has natural origins asking for enchies, and physical categories of "Blaster" "Scrapper" etc, so i tend to take it with a pinch of salt)

Well I'm pretty sure our conversation has clarifed a few things.

1) It is possible to change the past, however before the changes can affect our timeline, the menders (possibly exempt fromthe timeline as we disscussed inorder to exact change) would simply go back and try to rewrite history for the better. The only things that would have change is the things you should have done (Flashback story arcs you haven't done yet) and the character himself. I even imagine that the menders make it so even tho you are present in the historical event, the glory went to the appropriate people to make sure history is restored or changed for the better.

2) God-Modding using time traveling is impossible, as the menders would simply rewrite hisory in order to correct the mistakes a time traveling idiot would commit. If RP-tool went back and kill Zortel as a baby, it's very likely the menders would send someone to save her before she was affect, or if Zortel knew the secret she could just say "HAHAHAH oh my god! Yeah right! Liek teh menders would let you use the pillar of ice anf fire for that!"

3) Some fun will and can come outta this. I personally look foreward to little plots that will start with RPSGs using flashback and the TFs (as they are rather short) for a alot of things. The Militia has already disscussed using the base Pillar as a sort of VR training sim, instead of actually time traveling. Plus think of the Pocket D convos! "What's wrong Twilight?" "I think I may have help the council take over from the 5th column...."


So nothing to worry about here folks move along.. move along

I think the best is : "what will make a good story/plot for the characters of *you and your friends* ?"

If you want to change the present by modifying the past, go for it.
If you want to say it's impossible to change the present, that's also nice.

Now, just be careful to not force, even indirectly, your views on others who are not sharing the same paradigm on time than you.
Probe, ask, see and avoid problems.

The question about time travel is to me absolutely no different than the question about magic, the nature and existence of god, angels and demons when I am regularly confronted to players who have definite stances on those topics which aren't allowing much room for other views to exist. Something that annoy me to no end.

Whatever your views on time travel and the way you would like to play it, try to find room to conciliate different views without IC clashes.


For the record, I don't believe modifying the past is possible.
Now, I wouldn't let that stand in the way of a good story.

[ QUOTE ]
Whatever your views on time travel and the way you would like to play it, try to find room to conciliate different views without IC clashes.


[/ QUOTE ]

Personally, I think the easiest way to avoid IC clashes is for everyone to follow the game canon in this. Yes it causes problems for some characters (such as Doctor Temporis!), but in the long run if everyone uses the game canon explanation for time travel, it'll pretty much negate the chances for that kind of clash.

This topic is naturally of quite some interest to me - for obvious reasons - and deserving of a longer post on the subject than this. However, I don't have the time for that just at this second, so I'll merely comment that I don't see the introduction of Ourobouros in it's current form affecting DocT's background and concept adversely. Hopefully later on I'll be able to hold forth on the subject in general in my usually long-winded way.

And, of course, for that little bit of extra tinfoil hat goodness at the end - the Doctor's personal logo is, and always has been, for those who've seen his costume ever since server-up back in 2005 in Europe: an Ouroboros Loop

What's the diff between an Ourobouros loop and a Mobius strip?

[ QUOTE ]
What's the diff between an Ourobouros loop and a Mobius strip?

[/ QUOTE ]

A mobius strip is a one-sided shape ususally represented from an angle to make it look like the infinity sign (an 8 on its side, the boards don't appear to be able to accept the actual sign). Ourobouros is usually repesented as a snake eating its own tail and forms a circle.

Well just because the in game group uses one method of time travel does not mean that others don't exist. Unless the NPCs explicitly state that there is no other means of time travel (which I doubt NCsoft will do because of how many people it'll [censored] off)