I said to myself “It sure would be cool if I made a game where players had the power to change anything.” A lot of time and work later and I have a game that mechanically supports this, but then I sat down to prep. I stared at my blank page, and thought. “What have I done?” “How can I possibly prep a game where the players have the power to change reality?”

After choking on my hubris for a bit. I came to the realization that I had a few options:

1. Get Güd at improv
2. Limit player control
3. Procedural generation
4. Systemic game design

1st I don’t really have any ideas about how to be good at improv. I’m sure there are exercises or something, you would have to ask someone that’s Güd. For me it’s practice, and honestly is very much affected by my mood and health. If I sleep well/eat well pre session, if I feel great and happy I just do better. Unfortunately I am not always in control of stress in my life, I cope, but stress really does negatively impact my performance. I just do my best and no some days I will be more on than others and it’s fine. No real advice here.

2nd Taking away the power from players seemed like an antithesis to several of my core design goals: “Anything can be changed” and “Say yes to players.” Every mechanical thing I did to put limits on the timetravel mechanic felt bad. I wanted players to travel through time, not be afraid to. I wanted them to flex their guile and imaginations. I didn’t want barriers, I wanted “this is so crazy it just might work” to be the default state of the game.

In my games I limited players to traveling through time, but not through space. That way I could put physical distance as an obstacle for players to form a narrative around.I thought time travel and teleportation were too much, and I wouldn’t be able to challenge the players if they were gods. Maybe for some games, but I was aping Gamma World not cosmic gods. It could maybe work with the right story, but I didn’t want to limit myself in that way. I wanted players to have shoot outs and heist stuff.

The other limit I put on my players is that crossing their own timelines would create an anomaly, and anomalies are dangerous. So they can’t just go back and try again in most situations. Seems to be working. I have been able to get the sci-fi mercenary feel for my stories I was looking for.

3rd Procedural Generation. This is something I have used in a lot of games in the past. I love random tables, but I also like the feel of crafted dungeons/stories. To that end I did not make tables for generating the world or NPC. There are plenty of tools for that out there already, and they are easy to find. I did use tables for unexpected results of anomalies, character creation, and treasure tables. It’s easy to pick instead if you prefer, but this stuff feels good to me as random. Where generic locations and people feel worse to me. My players haven’t always been able to tell the difference, when I have done proc-gen before, but I knew the difference and having locations/npcs crafted help me with feeling prepared and therefore I feel more confident riffing/improvising with an established base.

4th Very similar to procgen is Systemic design. If I understand the location and interplay of factions and such I feel confident to improvise. If I know the dungeon ecology and what can happen without the players, I am confident to improvise the cause and effect of their influence, Maybe “systemic” isn’t the right word here, but it’s how Breath of the Wild or Deus Ex work, and that’s the name they use. If you know how things work you can infer how changes affect things. You give players the rules of the world, and you follow those rules to their logical conclusions.

So that was my answer. Try and do all those things, but how? How can I prep a foundation for players to create a story about their crazy plans, without writing the lore of everything or falling down a rabbit hole of endless over-prepping?

I don’t know. Here is what I have been doing, and it’s been okay so far:

1. A clear mission goal: Assassinate X before Y. Bring by X unharmed. Do X at the exact moment Y. Etc. Something with very clear parameters.
2. Knowing the location: Name the factions and a few NPCs and how they roughly relate to each other.
3. Maybe add a couple timed events that happen after a few Doom rolls.
4. Add some emergent obstacles/challenges to put in front of players when appropriate.
5. Repeat this process for Distant past, Recent Past, Present Day, Near Future, and Distant Future. I put more factions/obstacles/events in the time periods where the mission objectives are, and only 1 or two things in times where players won’t have a reason to go.

Here is an example of some prep from a recent game I ran. It has some player choice in letting them choose an assaination target in the beginning, which changes stuff a little. I only used like 25% of this both times I ran it. I’ve gotten better at prepping for Chronomutants since I wrote this, but these were the most organized, so they are the notes I’m sharing. Currently, I am using more shorthand, and it’s  less organized. With every game system I’ve ever ran, my prep gets less structured the more comfortable I get with running a game system. So I guess it’s working.

None of these are “rules” especially the player limitations. Every table is going to need to decide those things on their own. This is just what I have done to make sense of preparing within a system that gives players god-like power. I am sure there are other approaches to this. Once I have more playtest reports from GMs I will add some advice about how to prep a mission to the rulebook.

Have fun, embrace chaos, empower your players

-gary