Timestream Role Playing Game
From: Hamsterprophet Productions
Reviewed by: Ron McClung
Timestream Role Playing Gameis a new Role Playing Game Core Rule book (PDF) from Hamsterprophet Productions.
Whenever I see a role playing game based on the concepts of time travel, I usually have trepidations about it. Time travel deals with so much and opens a can of worms few gamers and fewer authors are willing to tackle. So many gamers have their own approach to time travel and it’s usually really hard to pull off in a game without getting into a debate about what would and would not happen. Despite this, I dove into Timestream. Yet another independent game born from the burgeoning independent game publisher movement on the internet, Timestramis a short treatment of a subject that could take up volumes.
From the website: “Do you like Time Travel? Not headache-inducing, paradox-shy, ‘god-don’t-touch-the-dragonfly-or-we’re-all-gonna-die’ Time Travel, but cool, era-hopping, adventure-having, tell-a-great-story Time Travel?”
Content and System: The majority of the PDF e-book is made up of four major sections:
FOUNDATION: PREMISE & SETTING
This section introduces the game of Timestream, as well as providing an example of what play looks like and general notes on notation, jargon, and definition of terms. The basic premise of the game is a simple system that gives the player/game master a system to run in any era of time. It does not want to focus too much on all the scientific theories or common geek-debates over time travel. It simply wants to be a fun system where players can hop from era to era, exploring and adventuring.
This is the author’s simple way of saying that they want to simplify a complex issue. I am not, however, confident that it can be simplified to a point that it is worth playing in a role playing game. This lowered my expectations, however, as I read. One of the major attractions for me to time travel is the hard hitting subjects people debate when discussing time travel.
CONSTRUCTION: CHARACTER CREATION
The key areas of a character are Personal Information, Capacities (Physical, Mental and Social), Arenas, Style, Goals and Obstacles, and Anchors.
Each character has the 3 Capacities which are rated on a scale of -6 to 6. These are basically generic ability scores, focusing on the three areas of a person. Physical is everything physical, from dexterity to strength. Mental Capacity is everything mental, from intelligence to wisdom. Social is the measure of the person’s social ability, including charisma and social adjustment.
Each Capacity has a set of related Arenas. These are similar to skills but different in some ways. The author tried to make a point to say that Arenas are not skills. Instead they “simulate broad areas of capability that hold universally true.” This broad-based approach tried to compensate for tech-level context in the skill by making it more broad. The system completely avoids the aspect of tech level differences in skills this way. Each Arena is rated similarly to Capacities.
Each character chooses one of three Styles, which are like classes or character types. A character influences time differently based on their style. A character can be a Traveler (focused control of raw time power), a Temporal Manipulator or TMers (broad control of a great amount of time power) or a Thrall (one who draws his power from both but answers to a greater power). Each has different characteristics. Travelers have Aspects and Ranges where TMers have Techniques. These define the basic time powers that each style has. Thralls have only the power that their master gives them.
Goals and Obstacles are a fairly interesting approach to advantages and disadvantages with a stronger focus on the story. Each character has a set of Goals that they strive to achieve and Obstacles blocking that achievement. Obstacles balance out Goals, and both drive the character through the story. They are a good tool for the GM to use for subplots.
An interesting mechanic is the Counters pools. Each character starts with two pools: a Time Pool and and a Strain Pool. Time pools are basically points you use for manipulating time and using your powers where Strain is the penalty one pays for the manipulation.
A second phase of the character generation process involves Anchors. These are people who a character has connections with and who the player wants to see factor into the game. From there, the author encourages the players to draw out a R-map or Relationship map, connecting the Anchors with the player and other Anchors.
This char-gen is interesting but nothing to write-home about. It is fairly simple and tries to be original but instead just uses different terms for similar concepts in other RPG systems. There is nothing in the char-gen system that draws me to the game or makes me raise an eye-brow and say, “Fascinating.”
From page # 1: “Timestream is built upon a very simple dice mechanic that takes moments to learn, but is flexible enough to enable adventure from ancient Rome to revolutionary Russia, from modern Japan to future Ibiza, from any era of the past to anything the future might hold.”
INTERACTION: MECHANICS
The mechanic involves two simple six-sided die rolls (2d6) rolled by both the GM and the player. The GM rolls one set of dice per character rolling for a particular task. All dice are ordered by the total, and the one that rolls the lowest is the loser in the task, while the one with the highest is the winner. Losers and winners have penalties or gains from their action that they can choose from, including gaining a Time point or losing a Strain.
The system, although simple and somewhat interesting, does not excite me either. The writer assumes a lot in regards to the reader, including they assume you know about turn play and combat. There is no mention of how long a game turn is or how combat is run. It is all handled under one umbrella of conflict resolution. Although somewhat refreshing to find a game with less focus on combat and tactics, in my experience, you can not run a role-playing game session without involving some conflict.
One aspect of note is the notion of Time, running out of Time and Strain. These have effects to the character and some are interesting. If a character runs out of Time, several interesting things can happen like Native Shift or Permanent Vu. One can also Break Strain when one has too much Strain. Strain are converted to Strain Dice at a certain point and those dice are rolled with conflict resolution, and if a 1 is rolled on that die, more bad things happen.
What apparently appears as the core of the game is the mechanics behind Time Travel, Aspects and Techniques. Time Travel is a matter of spending Time points and can get up to 6 points or more. The author supplies several mechanics on how to move back and forth between time frames and ways to manipulate time. The Aspects and Temporal Manipulation Techniques provide and expand on the base Time Travel mechanic.
In the end, these mechanics give the GM and players all kinds of opportunity to play with time and in some cases cause time changes against the players will. This seems to me to be a very confusing way to play a game, with many opportunities to split up the party not only in location but in time. On a very bad dice day, the GM could be running several different time frames with individual players. This seems somewhat unattractive to me.
The author supplies plenty of examples to explain his point. I was impressed with that. The system is simple and clearly illustrated in the PDF. My compliments to the writer for that because that is a rare thing.
EXPANSION: SETTING, NOTES & ADDENDA
This section provides the reader with some insight into the principles behind this game and thoughts on how it ought to be played. This interested me primarily because I wanted to figure out why the author thought people would want to play this game. It is quite apparent that the author is passionate about one aspect of a role playing game – the story. This is one area I think he and I would agree, at least in part. It just seems to be that he threw out all other aspects of an RPG to focus on the one he sees as the most important, where as I believe there is a balance between the game aspect and the story aspect. So this is one area the author focuses on in this chapter.
Also interesting in this section are the 5 Laws of Time Travel. It is the 5 basic laws that all time travelers should know. It gives the basic rules that eliminate some of those “what if” questions that always come up in a time travel discussion. In this game, history is self-correcting, for instance. It helps put things in perspective with regards to how to handle the hard time travel questions.
Layout: I am not a huge fan of the cover art and the layout. The art is fairly boring but that is obviously not the focus of the game.
In conclusion, overall I was not impressed with Timestream. There was nothing in it that drove me to want to play it. It had some interesting ideas and mechanics, but nothing in it really made me want to find players and try it out. It comes across as an singular idea that he built a role playing game around. It is lacking in some areas and seems to me to be a incomplete job. This is not unique, however. Many independent games are written this way. I suppose I need to lower my expectations for independent games.
For more details on Hamsterprophet Productions and their new Role Playing Game Core Rule book (PDF) “Timestream Role Playing Game” check them out at their website http://www.hamsterprophetproductions.com/wordpress/.
Timestream Role Playing Game
From:Hamsterprophet Productions
Type of Game:Role Playing Game Core Rule book (PDF)
Original Concept, Game Design, Writing and Layout: Nathan Paoletta
Concept, Self Pause Technique: Greg Porter
Concepts, Item-Powered Characters & Out Of Time: Bradley Mitchell
Editing: Jen Goldberg & Daniel Treibel
Cover Art: Brandon Atencio
Number of Pages:58
Game Components Included:Timestream Basic or Standard Edition in Grayscale, Printer-Friendly and Full Color.
Retail Price:$ 12.00 (US)
Website:www.hamsterprophetproductions.com/wordpress/
Reviewed by: Ron McClung