Tag: science fiction

Once again, let’s look at Edge of Tomorrow as inspiration for your game. I’m having a lot of fun doing this, so I think I might continue on with other movies. Suggestions are always welcome.

Okay, so you have time travel in your game similar to the involuntary time travel from Edge of Tomorrow – why is that? I’m not asking why it exists in the game world, I’m asking what purpose does it serve in your game. There were likely many design reasons for time travel in the movie, but the narrative purpose was to allow Cage to go from a coward to a hero through intense training over a long period of time. It was a training montage, but actually lasting one day . . . one day that occurred over and over again.

You can use this conceit as well. As discussed in earlier articles, this might be to train up characters or to change their intent or outlook. They might live the same event over and over again, unwilling to make the sacrifices necessary to reach the preferred outcome, until they find a solution with which they are happy. This might be teaching them skills, or forcing them to examine their own motivations – which also happened in the movie. Cage didn’t just learn to become a warrior, he accepted self-sacrifice as necessary. He became willing to give it all to save the human race, something he had not accepted at the outset of the movie, in contrast to even the worst of the soldiers which appeared as supporting characters.

How else might you use involuntary time travel in a game? This might not be Groundhog Day, rather you might have the involuntary time travel move the character’s back or forward a set amount of time each time a character dies. It could be moving them back to the ultimate cause of the event that set the time travel in motion – maybe they all died during an epic confrontation with the being or power that initiated the jumps.

The time travel could also send them forward, jumping past events or situations on a road to a final confrontation. They might already be ready for the confrontation skill- and attitude-wise, but must leap over otherwise insurmountable barriers. Imagine your group faces a Balrog with no Gandalf in sight.

“Who’s turn is it?” asks Aragorn.

“Mine, I guess,” says Merry, reluctantly.

And Boromir cleaves off Merry’s head. BOOM. It’s a day later and they are in Lorien. Or, the fight the Balrog and someone dies. BOOM. Lorien.

In this case, it might almost be better as a total party kill triggers the jump. You might even go kind of videogame on this – if a character dies, there will be a jump, but the remaining characters need to complete the scene to trigger the jump. In the fight with the Balrog, even after Merry goes down in the fight, the fight continues until either everyone is dead OR the Balrog is overcome and this triggers the jump with dead characters brought back to life.

A kind of off-the-wall version of this would be fighting some kind of chronologically powered enemy and characters encounter periods of nul-time – time does not pass. The PCs, outside of time, are unaffected, but they cannot make progress – they are traversing time rather than geography to reach the opponent – and they must restart the movement of time by sacrificing one of their own. An interesting twist on this is having that PC permanently gone. A new PC needs to be created. You would need a lot of buy-in for that, and I think it works as a one-shot but nothing more.

I think time travel works best as it is used in the movie – as a method to allow characters to advance or otherwise learn and grow while experimenting with solutions to an apparently insolvable problem. This is much more a one-shot or single adventure rather than a campaign. I think this could wear thin relatively quickly.

You can read more about Edge of Tomorrow at Wikipedia and IMDB.

You can read my review of Edge of Tomorrow here.

You find more Edge of Inspiration articles here.

Last time, I looked at the character arc of Edge of Tomorrow and it could apply to your game. What about the rest of it? What about the time travel?

Just to mention: I’m writing a few articles on Edge of Tomorrow not because I think it is a superlative movie (I think it’s a good sci-fi actioner, but it’s not ground-breaking or extraordinary). I’m writing about inspiration and Edge of Tomorrow because it is a movie I’ve seen recently. I can take a fair amount of inspiration out of almost any movie, novel, or comic, and this is just today’s example.

The time travel in Edge of Tomorrow is interesting because it isn’t voluntary. Much like Groundhog Day (the most common comparison), at a certain point time resets back to another point. In Edge of Tomorrow, it’s the main character’s death.

This is difficult to port into an RPG unless it is one-on-one gaming, or you are using a system with multiple inputs for the same character. My experience and knowledge is with games which have multiple players playing multiple protagonists, and this presents one specific problem for this scenario – is it the death of one, some, or all of the PCs that trigger the reset?

Looking at this, I would decide first whether this is one character’s arc with the others supporting that arc or is this a story arc, one that encompasses the whole group?

Having a single character as the lead with others providing support does not need to relegate the other PCs to secondary status in an RPG. It generally does in a movie, but we aren’t shooting a movie. While the other PCs might not be changing, they can be more active than the PC who is. The main character might be indecisive, hesitant, ignorant, or have any number of personality traits that could make the other PCs indispensable and more active. Each character could have a role to play, a task they must complete within their niche that helps the main character advance or change. These tasks could each require the assistance of the other PCs to move forward. Everyone can be involved even though they are moving through a single character’s arc.

If it is a single character that is important, it is that character’s death which triggers the reset. This creates an interesting conundrum – do all the PCs retain knowledge of what occurred before the reset or are they like Vrataski, who doesn’t retain memories but is aware of the system and so ready to immediately side with the main character following the reset. Either can honestly work and be fun.

If it is a group story, I would argue it is best that the death of any of the PCs triggers the reset. This means the player with the dead PC is re-engaged immediately and it doesn’t split up the group. This also follows the logic of the movie: the Omega alien is said to trigger a reset whenever any of multiple Alpha aliens are killed, and this would map to how it could be done in a group dynamic.

I think the conundrum of death triggering the reset is one of the easier problems to address in adapting concepts from Edge of Tomorrow to an RPG. A tougher one, for me, is why does a death trigger the reset. What is the purpose of time travel in the game? Let’s talk about that next.

You can read more about Edge of Tomorrow at Wikipedia and IMDB.

You can read my review of Edge of Tomorrow here.

You find more Edge of Inspiration articles here.