Hey Gauntleters who played Timelines…
I sat down with my home group last Friday to play Timelines, and we did not have the logistical problems that you guys reported having on the show. (We actually added a rule to increase the variability of the timeline.) I have a few questions regarding how you played.
*How many people were in your group?
*How long did you play?
*How many turns did everyone get?
*To what degree did you roleplay out each scene?
*How did you handle it when someone was on the spot to figure out how two seemingly unrelated events turned out to be correlated?
Thanks!
We had five players, and we played for approximately 2.5 hours. We didn’t actually finish a complete play through (or, I should say, we stopped when we felt like we had a good enough handle on things to talk about it), but in that time, each player got one turn as their incarnation of Jamie. We did do a fair amount of roleplaying, probably around 5-10 minutes per scene.
It only happened a couple of times, but when someone had to explain away how seemingly unrelated events turned out to be correlated, it was on the spotlight player to make a final determination, but most people offered their opinion on how it might be explained (this may have been a help or a hindrance in terms of making the gameplay snappy; not sure).
As we mentioned, the gameplay worked pretty well. Our biggest hurdle was the bookkeeping. The way we were doing it, we wrote brand new index cards, with all relevant information, for each new change in the timeline. Added to the regrets each player has to do when they first introduce their Jamie, and it just felt like a lot to write while people were waiting. It could just be we prefer faster gameplay and some groups may not have an issue with that aspect of the game.
We had five players, and we played for approximately 2.5 hours. We didn’t actually finish a complete play through (or, I should say, we stopped when we felt like we had a good enough handle on things to talk about it), but in that time, each player got one turn as their incarnation of Jamie. We did do a fair amount of roleplaying, probably around 5-10 minutes per scene.
It only happened a couple of times, but when someone had to explain away how seemingly unrelated events turned out to be correlated, it was on the spotlight player to make a final determination, but most people offered their opinion on how it might be explained (this may have been a help or a hindrance in terms of making the gameplay snappy; not sure).
As we mentioned, the gameplay worked pretty well. Our biggest hurdle was the bookkeeping. The way we were doing it, we wrote brand new index cards, with all relevant information, for each new change in the timeline. Added to the regrets each player has to do when they first introduce their Jamie, and it just felt like a lot to write while people were waiting. It could just be we prefer faster gameplay and some groups may not have an issue with that aspect of the game.
Adding to this, we did get some rolls that led to a few strange edge cases:
1) We visited the first regret and the ripples changed every other scene, so we literally had to rewrite every single index card on the table before the next person could start.
2) We revisited the first regret and nothing changed except for the last scene (which was ~20 years later). That one in particular felt like we were really stretching to justify in the fiction.
Adding to this, we did get some rolls that led to a few strange edge cases:
1) We visited the first regret and the ripples changed every other scene, so we literally had to rewrite every single index card on the table before the next person could start.
2) We revisited the first regret and nothing changed except for the last scene (which was ~20 years later). That one in particular felt like we were really stretching to justify in the fiction.