Game Pitch:

When a brilliant supervillain finally falls, his technology and artifacts don't just melt into the aether. Okay, sometimes they do, but most of the time? They leave a lot of ray guns and death bombs and suits of powered armor just lying around. Sometimes some of that stuff finds its way into the black market, but S.H.I.E.L.D. is pretty good about confiscating most of the most interesting dangerous stuff.

Of course, it's not all death machines and nuclear robots. Suprevillains have a bunch of fun toys too, like suped up jet skis, instant espresso machines, and flying roombas. The stuff that's not dangerous usually goes to police auction.

That's where you guys got The Box. Somehow somewhere along the line, somebody messed up. See, what you thought you were getting was some kind of suped-up hyper def television. What you really got?

Time machine. Yeah, that's right, you and your friends have a time machine. Creates a portal, you walk through, and bam, you're in another time and place. You have no idea how it works, you have no idea how to set it to send you to a specific time and place, and you have no control over when you come back, but it always sends you somewhere... interesting.

System: Homebrew, kept off the stage and behind the scenes in all but the most abstract sense. Not freeform.

Setting: Fictive. Whatever books, movies, comics, etc happened, happened. I don't want to decide the entirety of what's real before we play, but rather keep it flexible enough to say "oh yeah Indiana Jones is a real historical figure" if the need arises.

Questions? Suggestions? Declarations of interest?

So. Quick question is this a mash up where seperate forces do actually interact, or are they seperate? Expressing interest.

Mash up. Extrapolating the effects of those interactions is half the fun. Though I won't try to shoehorn together properties that really have no reason to interact. Terminators vs Cybermen vs Borg? Sure. Bill and Ted annoy the Doctor? That makes sense.

Buffy shows up on the Millennium Falcon? Nah.

A lot of potential futures seem mutually exclusive, but it's a Time Travel game. Easy for the players to accidentally change history.

I’d be willing to declare my interest!  Can offer more thoughts/ideas if you wish.

Your insight is always welcome.

I really like the premise. The idea of jumping into a who-knows-where time portal sounds fun.

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If you don't want to mess with the notions of paradox and causality and all the usual headaches that accompany time-travel, I've got a metaphor for time that fixes it.

Basically, when you travel into the past, your 'home' time continues to advance (just without you), and any changes you make overwrite things at that time. But those changes advance at the same pace, which means they never catch up to 'home'.

If you jump back to the American Civil War and spend a week scamming people out of gold bullion, when you get home a week has passed and nothing has changed (other than friends and family wondering where you've been). And if you try to sell that gold, it's just as valuable as it was before.

But let's take the classic time-travel goal of killing Adolf Hitler. With this metaphor, you can certainly try, and might even succeed. But when you get back 'home', the history books still show him. If you want to see the repercussions of killing him, you have to wait, because that event's effects advance at the same pace as you. Wanna see what 1940 would look like if Hitler had died in 1939? Go back to '39, do the deed, then wait a year 'cause that's how long it'll take.

Paradox is impossible because changing the past never catches up with the present. It only overwrites events at that point.

I'm going with comic book/pop sci fi rules for paradoxes and time travel. Maybe you kill Hitler and come back and the world is ruled by cyborg Stalinist dinosaurs. Or maybe other time travlers stop you. Or maybe Adolf Schmitler came to power in Germany instead.

The only constant is that players have no intentional control over what the results will be (law of unintended consequence) or what might change the future, but I'm leaning towards "changes have to be big" to avoid players being so worried about erasing themselves that they don't do anything interesting.

Are all of the characters going to be from the modern day and 'normal' people? Or are some of them going to be medieval knights and things like that?

Modern day. Normal is another matter; it's a world filled with superheroes and other strangeness. However, your most unique feature is going to be "access to a time machine."

In terms of "level of exotica" I'm looking for, use these examples as a benchmark:

1. Mutant with a very minor power (I can generate light equivalent to a flashlight)
2. Extreme sports enthusiast who is maybe a vigilante on the side
3. I'm 1/64th Silurian. It means my skin has an olive cast.
4. I was an intern for Tony Stark, so I recognize weird technology when I see it.
5. I was an intern for John Constantine, so I recognize weird magic when I see it.
6. Literally Xander from B:TVS. Yeah, I fought monsters twenty years ago.
7. I met the Doctor once. Maybe I've seen the inside of the TARDIS.
8. I henched for the Joker a couple times. Batman broke my nose!

Aim for "peripheral to other weirdness" rather than suffused in it. Your thing is going to be time travel.

What's most important, I think, is that you play a character who travels through time and then actively chooses to get mixed up in whatever's going on, rather than just sits around thinking about ways to exploit the time portals, or trying to play it "safe."

Okay, thread is up.

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