Peeking through the veil of time, Looking for story ideas Options

[Mercer]

Another argument against an imutable future is that if I "predict" something that I will then force to happen, it robs the pcs of control. If where they end up isn't a function of the choices they make, why bother? Giving players non-option options (choices that don't change anything) just cheeses them off. I've played in games that were so heavily scripted to what the gm wanted to happen that nothing the group did mattered. If its going to go like that, why even bother to show up? The gm can call me later and tell me what happened.

Which is more of argument against meta-gaming than prophecy or time travel, but its all good.

"What'll really bake your noodle later on is, Would you still have broken it if I hadn't said anything?"

[hyzmarca]

What is why I perfer the "All roads lead to Rome" aproach to the immutable future. That no matter what the players do it will end the same way, but untill then their choices are limited only by their imagination. When I say so vauge that the plaers can't work against it I mean so vauge that it could fit any circumstance that the players create for themselves.

THE NPC doesn't have to tell the players his prediction anyway, which wuld make it meaningless to them but the results would be the same.

[Mercer]

But when the predictions are so vague they can fit any circumstance, you're moving away from a guy who can see into the future to a guy who writes fortune cookies.

There was a good episode of the Twilight Zone (one of the hour long episodes, which aren't my favorite) about a guy who had become fed up with the modern world and invented a time machine. He went back and tried to prevent the Second World War, first by killing Hitler (he failed), and again by warning the Japanese of the A-Bomb (no one believed him). He tried to prevent the Titanic from sinking, but he was similarly unsuccessful. So he decided to go back before the modern age and live out his life in post-Civil War America, believing it to be a less chaotic and violent time (he was a scientist, and not a history major, after all).

Living back then, he realized people were just as violent and short-sighted as they were in his time. Then, during an attempt to prevent the assassination of President Garfield, he accidentally killed President Garfield (any chance this guy was a shadowrunner?). As I said, it was a good episode, but it suffers from being boiled down to a synopsis.

But this type of mechanic, that even with time travel (or prophecy) you can't change anything because its already happened works better in ficiton than in role-playing because in role-playing, you don't have as much control. As a gm, while you're trying to make a prophecy and fulfill it, you have 3-6 other people at the table trying to screw you up, whether they mean to or not.

So you have to keep it vague and open to interpretation, but if someone who made those kind of predicitions was going to be valuable to a megacorp, then Microsoft would be hunting Miss Cleo down even as we speak.

[Little Tim]

I think I'm going with Doctor Funkenstein's idea. Using a handful of minor predictions that I can resolve through the GM's ability to describe the world. This way I could use specific predictions that are (I hope) interesting while allowing the players to still play the game. I just have to careful not to abuse this and break the suspension of disbelief.

Perhaps one or two 'medium' predictions to show he can be useful. Perhaps some hints before combat or guiding the rigger during a car chase. Shockwave_IIc's suggesting is good, I think I'm going to end with him saying something like that to one of the PCs.

[Dashifen]

Let us know how it turns out :)