Time Loops — Transcription

This is Blatonnings.

A show where we turn bits of media into role-playing game sessions, and this week, as you may have guessed, from our, like, absolute props for rolling with that one.

Impromptu skit.

This episode, we are going to talk about time loops and how you run a role-playing game, a tabletop RPG. That is centred on a time loop.

Our mill needs some good gristing.

No, it was very approachable, much more approachable for watching with my wife than Edge of Tomorrow, which I watched alone after she'd gone to bed.

So, yeah, Palm Springs is Jake Peralta.

Andy Sandburger gets, I was, the rest of the bit was, he gets trapped with the person I'm pretty sure is the mother from How I Met Your Mother in a time loop.

And because it's, what, 30, 40 years post-groundhog day, which is obviously the seminal classic of the genre, which we will come back to, I'm sure, because it's like decades post-groundhog day and the trope is well embedded by this point.

They get to skip past all of the learning we're in a time loop, and the mother from How I Met Your Mother, whose character, Sarah, I think her name is.

I think it's a spiritual sequel to Groundhog Day in that it takes all of those concepts as given and really pushes them into something that is like still interesting for an audience who is across the trope.

Not a bad movie.

I'm sure we will talk about that too.

There's also a Star Trek episode that is like a very highly regarded as a time loop app called cause and effect.

It's season five, episode 18 of the next generation.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Oh my gosh.

about it because it's maybe one of the top 10 experiences of my life.

It's just a game mechanic.

Yes.

So there's these take a couple of forms in the stuff that I've watched.

So I think in Groundhog Day, it is like when it hits midnight or like sunrise the next day, it resets no matter what.

If he dies, it resets.

And then another one that has come up a few times across things is if you fall asleep at resets.

You're also waking up in the same place.

It's a complete reset.

You go back to where you were at that time, in that body, and I think the addition of falling asleep to those sort of classic reset triggers really puts a a fun, like, temporal boundary around how far outside your zone of interest you can get, even if you have a time loop, which, like in Palm Springs, doesn't necessarily have a hard reset point.

They can go as far as they want into that like timeline.

But as soon as they fall asleep, they wake up again back in Palm Springs.

So, maybe you can make it 48 hours without sleep.

Um, but like, you're gonna fall asleep eventually.

There is one way that you can be under control, and it is to kill yourself.

Like you can't, you functionally can't die, functionally nothing has consequences.

Again, you know, a fun example of like actually digging into the genre.

Um, in Palm Springs.

like, oh, you can feel pain.

And like, it turns out the worst death is dying slowly in the emergency room rather than quickly.

Like the worst, the worst loops are the ones where I get rescued jumping in front of a truck.

Because if there's no physical changes that persist between loops.

I think one interesting counterexample to this, which is, unfortunately, the thing that you have not and will not seen, have not seen and will not see, is the Star Trek episode, where they are initially not aware of the loop, and they become aware of it slowly over time as a like sense of déjà vu, and then like, a hunch that something is wrong, and then eventually they like,

they figure it out slowly.

I think you can probably canonically sort of say that it is a day.

Yeah, so I think you've touched on a couple of interesting things there.

Yeah, firstly, your goal is to get out of the loop.

Secondly, the way that you get out of the loop is using the only thing that you do have, which is memory, right?

Like, the way that you solve this problem is by learning.

So we have an escape that is powered by learning.

That is what all of these stories fundamentally, have to be because of the constraints of the setup.

Yeah, that can be, that can be like a practical learning.

It can be in a lot of the sci-fi shows.

It's about like, we figure out what the phenomenon is, and in a lot of the movies, I think, because they are, they tend to be more standalone.

So you said, one of them was like, they mess around a lot and see what the limits are, right?

I'm trying things to try and get out, but I'm trying them in a way that is not like stepping back and actually, you know, retaining anything and learning anything between loops.

I'm just frantically trying to assess it.

like trapped in a glass case of emotion type.

Let me out, let me out, let me out.

I think another one is despair.

It's like, almost but not quite the stages of grief.

But like, as soon as Niles brings Sarah into the loop.

There will be scenarios where that gets disrupted as part of play where, you know, Bill Murray just decides not to go to work.

And so, you know, the whole, the whole bit with the groundhog doesn't happen that day, right?

where Niles and Sarah get in the car and try to drive back to Texas and so they miss the wedding.

So like most of the time, most of the play will be interacting with this sequence of events.

I think we can, we can say that.

I don't know.

It's the opposite of a butterfly effect in that, like, changes actually don't propagate as much as you would expect, right?

I, look, maybe that's a good start as a planning tool, but the way I would be thinking about this is as scenes.

So I think this is, for me, a scene-based sort of playthrough, and we have the same scenes come up each time, and the scenes at least start the same way with the same sort of set of initial conditions, and then stuff can feed out of those scenes.

affect them, but like, we have these scenes and each, each scene sort of starts the same way because that's very much how the media is structured, right?

Like, each scene, so that we as the audience know which scene we're in, they all start the same way, right?

They start with, obviously, the very 1st one, we start with the same musical queue each time, but like, the events that anchor each thing start the same each time and and then may or may not be changed.

But I think thinking about things as situations, right?

In our classic prep situations, not plots.

I think it's about like, don't try and keep track of every single event that happens on a timeline.

come back to how many, because I think that's a bigger conversation, but we have some scenes that are available to choose from, and those scenes are like almost like pre-packaged scenarios.

It's like, okay, I'm choosing to interact with this scene now, which does rule out interacting with the other scenes that are happening at the same time, and we're going to see how this sort of plays through.

So it is about kind of like packaging up those events so that they not only are manageable for you as the game master, but also recognisable for the players, right?

the DJ scene because that's the one where you start with like talking about what the DJ is playing, what everyone's doing.

Yeah.

So it can't be yet.

I guess what I'm trying to get at is like, it can't be Lucy, goosey, and you're just doing whatever you want on the timeline.

I think we are playing through something that looks a bit like a tree structure, right, with, with, dare I call them nodes, joined up, uh, throughout the course of your nominally day, um,

Yeah, I think it is.

I think it is one of the few places where you actually.

scenario out, I think it doesn't, there are, there are some video games where it works, but in video games, we are always kind of bounded by the, you know, the engine.

Thank you for anticipating it.

So I think how many loops we go through is more important, right?

So how many loops we go through sets the arc of the whole session?

It sets the, like, too few and we don't feel like we've had the experience too many and we, we get bored.

So we know we want this kind of sweet spot, and yeah, we've just pulled this number out of our butts, but it feels right.

This sweet spot of light, we want to run through this loop.

Call it 6 times.

We can do some maths.

The flip side is, I think once you start splitting this across multiple sessions, you lose all of the mastery, the familiarity that you've built up.

So so much of this is going to be living in players heads at the table.

If you come back after a week, 2 weeks, a month and say like, okay, well, we're back in the loop.

Like, the plot of the films of the episodes lives and dies on what you can remember happening.

And I think by having players doing that, by having them remember previous loops.

Remember that like, oh, that guy's gonna fall over, so I'm gonna catch him.

I think if they're flipping through their notes and trying to win each scenario instead of relying on the only thing that we know does persist between loops, which is memory.

Like, I think if you, I think if you have notes and you're, you're not trying to live this as close to the real thing as possible, I think you're missing out on an opportunity to do something that you don't get to do.

Like, we don't get to live out of time loop, right?

Like we don't get to do that, except in this scenario.

I think by stretching it out and making it non-contiguous and by allowing, like, note-taking and persistence between sessions or even relying on rather than...

By forcing people to rely on note taking, you miss out on an opportunity to actually live in a time loop.

Like, that's that's this thing that RPGs can do that nothing else can.

This is the only way that I can think of for you to actually have that experience of trying to hold a whole sequence of events in your head and navigate it because you've lived it so many times before.

Right?

And I think that's incredible for your endgame for your, like, 3rd act?

Probably talk about like, hey, didn't we just do this?

I think what you've kind of mapped out is probably a better fit for It's it's an arc in a campaign, right?

It's a it's a time loop block of sessions, an adventure, really, is what we're talking about.

It's window of opportunity.

And I think, quite interestingly, we've both narrowed in on different ones because the thing I have been thinking about is like, how do we do a Groundhog Day, how do we do a Palm Springs?

How do we do something like that?

Let me.

I'm running these in something super lightweight, something lasers and feelings, something like one role resolves the whole situation type thing.

Um, We, rather than having a more complex, like web of connections, I think what I'm prepping is a sequence of scenes, and those scenes have starting conditions, box text, if you will.

And each run through, we run through those scenes.

Not necessarily run through them in order, like we have to do them every time, but that sequence of scenes will progress in the same way, every time, and if the players like drive off to New Mexico, like, whatever, um, but there's, in my head, not a lot of like concurrency, there aren't like threads off to the side that weave out and back in again.

There is like one sequence of events to kind of keep track of, right?

Something that you can hold in your head as a player.

Like, this happens, then this happens, then this happens.

A couple of details that you can, your affordances to mess with each scene.

We know a couple of things happen in each scene, and then there's some links from one scene to the next about, you know, if you kill someone in a previous scene or drag someone off and hide them behind the bushes or whatever in a previous scene, like, of course, they're not going to appear in the next scene, but it's like it's a relatively straightforward set of things to keep track of.

We run through these one after the other, and essentially run through a whole loop in, I'm expecting like 5 minute scenes.

Right?

It's almost the opposite.

It's like, I'm gonna give you the same 6 improv prompts over and over again, and we're gonna see where you take it.

Right?

Like it's, it's way, way open.

And because it's, it's short, it's more or less sequential, it becomes something that you can then run through feasibly 5 times in one evening of play without it getting boring.

So, in my head, they're like, each scene is kind of an index card, and we're just like, bang, this scene.

Here are the things that we know are present in the scene.

Here is like kind of what we've learned so far.

We can add to the cards as we go.

and we just like play them out.

It's almost like playing through a, um, a season of something like a quiet year with specifically with respect to the Oracle deck, right?

It's like playing through the same oracle 5 times.

So you know what the oracle is going to bring up.

You know what each situation is going to be and what you get to mess around with each time is how do we respond to that?

So the 1st couple of times you try to play it straight, then we get into our like, let's mess things up and see what happens.

phase of the story, and then we move on by the end to, all right, let's go for the solve.

Let's go for the escape.

Probably after some.

Kick that interrupts that, which is like, oh, we don't get to keep doing this forever or like there's someone else in the loop with you or something like that that like precipitates action bumps them out of the like screwing around and finding out phase.

We have one to 2 more loops to try and resolve this.

That's kind of what I'm thinking.

And so it becomes less, and I think this is the distinction that I'm was trying to get at at the start.

It becomes less about, oh, let's put these characters that we already know through a time loop and and kind of do that character stuff that we see happening in the shows, right?

Like, beautiful vessel for moments like playing golf through the Stargate.

Great character development, really cool to let people do things with no consequences, but they they remember it.

Very TV show.

I think this is much more.

Hey, I want to have a time loop experience.

I'm not interested in seeing how these characters that I know all this world that I'm familiar with behaves in a time loop.

I just want to ride the time loop ride one time.

I don't know, George.

I think that is part of this, like, I think that only happens in the, like, the, the, the, explorer phase, the diversion defhase.

like, I plop the card down.

I'm like, well, none of these things have happened because you've killed everyone who would be doing them and we just like, we continue to play.

Like that doesn't bother me because we will come, we will come back to that set of like opportunities on the next loop as we start to do the part of the story where we try to solve our way out of it.

Just make it up, man.

It's not a colossal amount of prep, but I think having something there to not happen.

The negative space of the events that didn't happen because you messed them up.

Like, I think it's important to have that there and be like, yeah, none of the things that normally happen at this point in the narrative have happened because you've, you've goofed them up, right?

Like, the best man is not giving a speech because you've killed him.

Also, like the wedding ceremony that's supposed to happen is not happening because you've killed the bride and the groom.

We've, like, got to get less murdery.

But I think we can talk about things that aren't happening and then very quickly move that past that into what is happening instead.

Once or twice.

Like.

And then they realise that they, like, this is what I'm saying.

This is an authentic experience.

I genuinely think it is a genre difference, right?

It's a, it's a frenetic, like, one shoddy, like, chaosy kind of improv story game type experience.

It could essentially be a dungeon.

The point is not to to have some philosophical insights about the nature of despair.

The point is like, well, we know that we're going to get out of this because we know there's going to be an episode next week.

So like, how are we going to solve this in like an interesting and novel way.

Like it's, it's, the time loop as a puzzle versus the time loop as a like philosophical experience.

And I think they're both, I, like I think they're both subgenres of the, of the, the time loop medium.

I think your slaps.

I would play in it.

I would never prep it.

Because it's too much work.

There's an interesting thing.

Um, I played brass.

At the start of the game, you're like, oh, whatever.

By the end of the game, you're like, I've only got 4 cards left, which means there's 4 actions left that I can take in the whole game and also what's on the card effects, what kind of action I can take.

And I'm kind of thinking about this the same way, right?

We know that 6 scenes are gonna play out before we reset.

We know that the content of the scenes might be more or less different each time in a way that it is the game master's job to keep track of.

Um, we know that we might learn more about the scenes as we go on.

I would foresee leaving some blank space on the cards.

So that we're gonna be like, oh, as we've explored, we've learned that like actually over in the side room, like these 2 characters are, you know, having a secret deal and we pop that on the card and we now...

Um, but it's like, we have one, two, three, four, five, 6 scenes to like, play out this story and then it will reset, like, you can drive off to the next state, but like, we've got one scene to do it in.

So like, that kind of is acting as a limitation, that the scenes, that the canonical timeline, whether or not the events happen, is acting less like a sequence of cause and effect, and more like an action economy, right?

Not not necessarily, eventually you all go to bed.

Like, maybe there are things that you want to do out there in the world to progress the plot.

Maybe you want to track down an expert in quantum physics and talk to them like, try one, but there's a set number of things that you can do before you hit reset.

And that's really where our cards come in.

Like, I'm going to be slapping the cards down anyway, and it will be like, well, meanwhile, back where you had started before you drove away or, like, canonically, this would be happening about now, but obviously none of that is happening, but this is where we're at in the loop, you have one scene left.

Like, the only movie where it is literally like, and then the loop breaks for no reason is Groundhog Day, but like Palm Springs.

is like they are able to escape the loop.

Yes, because they've discovered how it works and what physical actions are required to break it, but also they have decided that it is time to live their life with consequences again, right?

Like the 2 are kind of interlinked.

But yes, I would imagine there would be a specific thing you would have to do to break the loop. And so the latter half of the session, following some kind of kick pivots towards, all right, what is the solve?

Probably the fastest thing possible because we got to crank through dem loops.

Um, I think it is something.

Like a lasers and feelings, like a one, like a 2 stat RPG, uh, maybe my favourite.

Yeah, I think that would be a good fit.

What are you, what are you thinking?

I think the, but I think you're right.

I think that the OSR sort of deadliness and the shape of like a dungeon crawl where it's like, okay, we're gonna rogue-like style attempt this same dungeon over and over again.

Like, I think that has legs and I think that is probably most people's choice in how to have this kind of experience.

Design a time loop game, run it, and then go back in time, design it differently.

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Really the biggest thing you can do, though, is, well, there's 2 things.

One is to send this episode to a friend, maybe 2 friends who you think will run time loops very differently.

And the other one is to jump on our discord and tell us which one of us was right.

There you go.

There's some engagement bait for you.

Who is right?

Is it neither of us?

Are we both just loopy?