Time Travel Rules

So, it is past midnight and I'm still reading GURPS Infinite Worlds.
Yup, this is dumb.

But it started talking about Time Agents.

There's a bit about paradox. The DWverse is... well, I don't think anyone ever aimed at consistency, so you can't really knock it for not doing what it weren't trying for. But it do get a tad bit confusing. If there are Rules then they're a bit difficult to figure, and always subject to change when someone has a Better Idea.

I still maintain that Father's Day was *not* a better idea for that 'verse. Is very very annoying.

But, there was an interesting bit in the GURPS book about the Observer Effect. Basically, a Time Agent isn't causing paradox when he changes stuff *unless* that stuff has been observed by a Time Agent. Because history, as we know, is just stuff that got written down. A lot of it is about as factual as Shakespeare by the time it gets to us. It don't seem particularly unfair to just ignore History and get on with the doing of things. And even when things are writ down, they often get the particulars wrong enough they're safe to ignore. Nobody wrote that aliens started a fire in London, but if aliens did, then it was True, and not a paradox at all.

But if a time traveller sees something, that something is then beyond changing, because having been observed, it cannot be effected.

It goes on under a heading of I don't want to know!:
Agents hate to observe the death of a friend. Sometimes an agent will walk away from a wounded ally, rather than risk checking and finding out they are dead. If the death isn't reported, there is a chance that help might arrive in time.

Under that rule, Rose's father wasn't actually definitely cat out of the box dead until Rose had to go back and watch it happen.

The Doctor doesn't tend to go back and visit companions he dropped off a while back. Because, you see, as long as he doesn't, there isn't anything to say he *can't*. For personal timeline centuries there was in fact every possibility that the Doctor went and picked up Sarah Jane a couple of weeks after he dropped her off. Maybe a bit more, if you count that Five Doctors thingy. But the only time it could become *definitely* true for the pair of them that he never went back would be if he bumped into her really late in her timeline and she said he didn't.

Which would make such an event a bit of a tragedy really.

As for rushing to the rescue and instead finding a corpse... big time tragedy. Observed, has happened. Cannot be changed.

Might make you a bit hesitant to do the rushing thing in the first place. After all, if you sit back, get a bit of a plan together, grab a time machine and give yourself a bit of a run up, you're bound to have a better chance at it. Right?

OTOH, if nobody does hang back from rushing, if they're always the first to check, then either this isn't The Rule or they don't reckon they could time travel in to change it anyways.

Can't risk doubling back on yourself once in a timeline. Not if accidental contact can lead to wiping out that whole reality. So once you're there, time is as urgent to a time traveller as it is to everyone else.

But leaving something as needs seeing to across town while you pop out across time is not in fact a problem, because you can always pop back (a couple of minutes) later. Sometimes a half dozen incarnations later on your personal timeline, but who's counting? As long as it gets done.


Time travel makes my head hurt.


Just as long as it isn't Crime Traveller style. They set up this 'verse where the whole rule was based around the physical impossibility of creating paradox, however hard you tried. Everything that happened first time around would happen when you travelled back too, just sometimes from a different perspective. It was so... totally limiting, and futile, and they kept on coming up with new refinements to make even more things impossible. They basically wrote themselves out of having any more stories.
Also, it was very bad. But that was a whole seperate problem.


Time travel to be fun at all, changes have to be possible. Otherwise you have to stay home and watch it on trans-temporal TV, which while diverting rather lacks that 'travel' aspect and ends up being about echoes and knock on effects instead.

No fate but what we make.

Or there's not much point trying.

Because some people need rescuing a lot

Have decided on a mission for GURPS:

There's a secret paramilitary organisation that hunts our kind of people. A bunch of humans that decided we don't have human rights. They've got a base somewhere out in the middle of nowhere, and they've got prisoners. One particular prisoner we want back. JANUS can gate you there, and you can carry a return gate in sections. One catch - only your target can get you back.

Interested?

( Read more... )

As ever, the teensy eensy problem of having no group to try it out on remains. I sulk.
I realise there are plans more likely to remedy that than the sulking, but they look complicated. And are not going to get my homework finished.

TCBOO... I mean, The One, with Jet Li

I'm watching The One on one of those channel 5 digital channels... Five US. It lacks subtitles. This is very annoying. Especially since theres bits that aren't in English. I'd kind of like to understand those bits too.

ANYways

they're running around and he's got evil twin problems.
so what I'm left wondering - and I admit I missed the first ten minutes so maybe they answered it but - why is anyone freaked out by this? I mean, evil bazillions, yeah, freaky, but evil twin? Maybe you think you need to have a word with your mother, but you surely don't go to OMG WTF!!!

Killed 123 people. So there's only 124 universes? Meh.


I rather like the setup, especially to set up the martial arts (emphasis art) fun. But the way people are reacting? There's nothing in seeing your identical twin that would have you sent to psych assessment. Or an MRI.

Though as ways to get the identifying differences erased, I do rather like that one.

The evil one likes growly rock music. Oooh, scary. :eyeroll:

... I'm not knocking Jet Li, but I really need subtitles to cope with his accent.

I think I like the film but I can't really tell.


Okay, end of the film reached. That was kind of boring. Didn't really deliver, to my mind. I mean, if it's all about who gets to be The One, then by the end of the film there should not in fact be two of them. Even if one of them goes to always-fighting and the other gets sent to an alternate where his wife is still alive and hasn't met him yet. Which, incidentally, I'd have to call a creepy kind of reward. I mean, hello? Not his wife! Some other completely different lady who happens to look like her! Plus the guy who sent him there was earlier on talking about how some alternate version of him has a husband. How is he to know this alternate her doesn't have a wife? So the ending was kind of dumb.
And the fights were... well, I thought they sucked, but then that turned out to be the 'good guy gets his arse kicked' phase of the fight, and after that they sucked much less. Still, higher magic to skill ratio than I like. All that floaty bullet time defying gravity stuff, not my favourite bit. I like the stuff that is theoretically possible after a lifetime of obsessive training.

Also, the picture quality on my TV is crap. I mean, utter crap. Pixellated, ghosted, blurred, crap. I don't know if it's the signal or my display, but it weren't pretty.

But watching Torchwood is *very* pretty, so I guess when it has the good stuff to work with it do turn out good.


Anyways, took paracetamol, now going to see if the next movie is worth watching. I suspet otherwise, but there aren't much on.

(no subject)

Watched 13 ghosts, or however they spell it. I loved the bit where they sliced the lawyer in half. that was just messed up. I mean, you could see half his brain! Awesome nasty.
But other than that? Eminently missable. Really, a whole lot of nothing much, and too predictable.
Nice FX though. And a very pretty house.

Now on Film Four there is Nightwatch.

And it is *awesome*.

They've even made the subtitles into art. I *love* it.

I don't know if the rest will live up to the setup, but so far it is bloody brilliant.

Film Four +1 has it starting in a bout half an hour, I think. Not that I know anyone as is likely to get the message before then.

But this is just art, seriously, the FX and the... everything. I haven't sen anything quite like it.



On the down side I aren't feeling well at all, but having had a nose bleed today turns out to add to the atmosphere nicely.