"Time travel games - aka controlling 'ooh shiny'" Topic

One of the biggest problems I have with the hobby is "ooh shiny! I must have that".

The end result is I have a handful of minis that I invariably don't use, as I don't have enough figures for a game.

I came up with an idea to let me use all of the figures I buy (which cover almost all historical periods by the way):

Time Travel skirmish games that are based on scenario/objective play. The time travelling characters remain the same for each game (unless some die), but the opponents can be from any historical period.

The characters travel through time to either trigger actual historical events (the burning of London in the 1600's for example) or to 'collect' (read plunder) items for auction in their own time.

This type of game will let me play with any time period, use the 'ooh shiny' purchases and allow me to justify my interest in any historical period.

This got me wondering – should I use the few figures I have representing the time travellers adventure through time wearing the clothes and using the equipment they bring with them (and have a bit of sci-fi mumbo-jumbo about 'cloaking devices' so the natives think they look normal for the time period), or have them wear robes/cloaks so they appear as your average religious group (i.e. use cultists to represent monks for example)?

I would be interested to hear other gamers' thoughts on this idea.

If you can find one, I suggest obtaining a copy of SPI's "Time Tripper." In many ways it is a skirmish combat system in search of a game, but can be great fun to play (even though my solitaire experiences tended to end when the inadvertent time trippers popped out in the middle of some 20th century battle). Yaquinto also did a boardgame on time travel, but I don't know anything about it.

Their plunder would be pretty useless. Take back an antique and it'll fail a carbon dating test, nor will it be aged sufficiently. People will assume its a fake, even if its not.
More useful stuff might be some of the lost books of antiquity.

Guy

Just take a record of the racing results with you, you'll clean up.

They could put the treasure in a hidden spot, zoop back to their time and uncover it.

YouTube link

Mix them all and have fun.

Gecoren- maybe the time travel ages artifacts. Are you really going to argue about quantum mechanics etc given ITS A TIME TRAVELLING GAME!
*smile*

accept no substitutes:
Gallifrey and sons.
drwhominiatures.co.uk

Send 'em back nekkid..

with directuions to the nearest biker bar..:-)

There have been a couple of roleplaying supplements exploring exactly this idea. E.g. Time Riders, originally intended for Rolemaster:
rpg.geekdo.com/rpgitem/50287
Search on the same site for items with 'time' in the title, you'll find a couple more.

Time Tripper (the boardgame) also is a good source of some ideas:
link

I based my time travel RPG on the Fritz Leiber Changewars idea, with two shadowy groups fighting for control of the timeline. I made time elastic enough to cope with the deaths of most people and resilient to actually prevent major changes happening except at particular points. The players were trying to work out what the actual event was which could be changed and try to make sure that things went as they should.
One of the points I chose was the attempted assassination of Lenin by Kaplan in 1918. The actual shooting had to take place, but the effect of the shooting could vary with subsequent branching of the timeline.
One group wanted Lenin to be killed, so tried to replace the bullets with a form of dum dum. The other group wawnted to use low power ammo which would cause a less serious wound.
The players tried to stop the shooting, not realising that it was a fixed time event, but when they didn't manage to they used some future tech trauma gear to heal him more than should have happened. The next few adventures then took place in the timeline they created as a result of Lenin living much longer.
I had great fun drawing maps and creating a new history of the 20th century. Rather spookily, the map I draw (in about 1986) looked very similar to the map of today, with all the small states of Europe coming back. IIRC, I was going to run a Casablanca style game but set in the Free City of Danzig. I never got round to that one, but there were various goings on in a 1960s China which was still run by the warlords. This was inspired by Faraday's Flowers, except the flowers were tac nukes smugled from another time line instead of jewels.
I threw in the occasional Dalek and Cyberman too, since I ahd recently bought some figures! One adventure was similar to 'Day of the Daleks' with the pepperpots coming from the future trying to engineer a nuclear war on Earth so that they could conquer it. This took the players to 1968 and the Prague spring with various Russian soldiers put under Dalek control like in the 'Dalek Invasion of Earth'.

To cut down on players relying too much on future tech, I used a system a bit like in Torg where items which didn't belong iin a timestream had more chance of going wrong. The bigger the difference, the more chance an item had of failing – sometimes with an adverse effect on the user. This also helped to explain why Daleks etc. couldn't just march out of a time tunnel without risk to themselves.

If the players go around collecting artifacts to get rich, IMHO it will cut down on the chance of adventure.

Getting rich by travelling back in time is absurdly simple – walk into a bank (one you have established survives the recent economic nuttyness), in 1950 with $10,000 in CURRENT value in unmarked gold bars. (Any Swiss banker will smile and look the other way – ask any Nazi.)
Deposit said gold.
Walk into the bank tomorrow, and collect the interest.
Convert the interest earned into gold, and repeat, say 20 times.

Do the math…

link

Timelords, by BTRC, covers off time travel to weird and interesting places. It's an RPG, not skirmish, but would have lots of interesting background reasons for being where/whenever the players end up.

Basically, the players move thru time (and to some degree, alternate realities) in uncontrolled jumps, so as to avoid some of the benefits that others have listed above.

(I still have an earlier version around, just in case I need a time travel background.)

No no no!!!!!
STAY AWAY FROM TIMETRIPPER!!!!

HORRIBLE GAME!!!!

Yes, timetripper as a game is horrible by today's standards. But 30 years ago (when I was in my young teens), it was fun. The only thing you can use it for now is as a source of ideas for timetravelling scenarios.

Some interesting replies – thanks guys.

I am leaning more towards going back in time to trigger historical events.

It is interesting that most people commented on "loot" and not what the time tripping figures should look like.

Cloaking devices or actual cloaks? I want to avoid having to buy a new set of characters for each time period they travel to.

No no no!!!!!
STAY AWAY FROM TIMETRIPPER!!!!

HORRIBLE GAME!!!!

Not fair any game where you can shoot a T-Rex with a LAW or a .25cal pistol can not be all bad. (just mostly bad)

For what the figures look like, I'd go with ones that look interesting! My players had a variety including Jerry Cornelius and and Junior Angel. Sort of the Doctor Who idea of clothes which don't fit any particular time but look out of place in all of them. Whether the locals don't notice them because they are 'cloaked' or because the brain doesn't register the wrongness (like Douglas Adam's SEP field) or because the figure represents the character but doesn't show his change of costume all the time is up to you.

Swampster – that is just excellent

This is the Jerry Cornelius figure BTW
picture

In Doctor Who the TARDIS projects a translation field which allows the crew to communicate naturally with any aliens or foreigners they meet.

I think there is a massive on-board historical costume selection, which they sometimes use. More often the crew either escape or suffer ill effects of being wrongly dressed depending on the Plot.

Take all the extra figs of the right scale out of your junk drawer, paint them up a bit odd and let the players pick which figure they want to use. Kind of like "Dr Who" where he picks up strays that seem to always wear what they did in their own time.

I did a small game/or story

Were a unit of British Aiborne was pined down by a platoon of germans with a tiger for back up,

Out of a time portal come Sharpe and Harper, Harper take out the tanks with a volley from the nock gun(which the airborne can't realy understand how he did it) but sharpe says thats what the sergant major does.

Sharpe this needs to be convinced that the germasn(prussians) are bad and the french are nice.
After that Sharpe takes out the 40 man platoon with his baker and cavalry sword.
He then gets promoted to Colonel by Monty(or as sharpe calles him, nosey 2)

Gamertom: Would that game be Timeship? A review is here,
link

And I did like Time Tripper. I still have it around here some place.

Time bandits was a good movie

Riverworld maybe? en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riverworld