Interview Arc: Psychic
Hot damn! Assassin is wracking up that kill count! On the one hand, it’s exciting to see an actually-competent hero in Handbook-World. On the other, I was kind of hoping Occultist would get some friends from the psychic casters club. I guess our three-eyed Psychic won’t be joining the party anytime soon. We’ll just have to wait until Part 4 of this interview arc to find out who makes the cut!
While Oracle is busy practicing her Mr. Magoo impersonation, let’s turn our collective attention to the Handbook’s daily nugget o’ wisdom. Today’s topic is all about the difficulties of “see through time” storylines. And in order to lay out our problem space, I’ll rely on my old pal Mutants & Masterminds. Is it time for another tale from table? Does Gunslinger require a booster seat?
So no shit there we were, hot on the trail of a serial kidnapper. Metahuman teens had been disappearing from our little corner of off-brand Seattle, and our band of super sleuths were faced with a dead end.
“My instruments aren’t picking up any clues,” said our super scientist.
“No one in the neighborhood saw anything,” said our speedster. “Or the 37 surrounding neighborhoods either.”
“I’ve got an idea,” said our magician. He usually did. His PC was a veritable toolbox of randomly useful mechanics. As a “dynamic power user,” he could manifest any effect that fit his chosen theme of portal magic. Mostly he used it to reposition our heavy hitters and go bamf-ing about the map. But with distraught parents and missing kids as a motivator, he’d had a brainstorm.
“I’ll add a temporal component to my portals,” he said. “Rather than making a door in space, we can open a window through time. And if I set this one to last night at 6:49 pm….”
Suddenly we were looking through a hole onto the past, watching the mystery we’d been meant to solve unfold in front of our eyes. I’d have been badly flummoxed, but our GM did a killer job making it interesting. As the masked assailant holstered his flechette gun and bundled the unconscious teen into an ominous black limo, we had a chase on our hands. We transitioned from the investigation into a follow-that-car scenario, hustling to keep up while our magic peephole flew off after its target. We managed to roll well, and so we got to see “the handoff” as half a dozen identical limos met and sped away in various directions.
“Damn!” said the players. “Did they know they were being watched somehow?”
“I mean… You have no way of knowing,” said the GM. “Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to roll up an enemy mage.”
That multi-limo handoff may have been a heavy-handed “you guys aren’t supposed to know this yet,” but I’ve got a lot of sympathy for a GM in this situation. Like we talked about back in our speak with dead comic, flawless solutions are seldom satisfying. Nobody wants to skip past the investigation part of the investigation. That way lies anticlimax! It’s why I prefer mechanics like “get a reroll because you glimpsed alternate timelines” or “ask the fates a yes/no question” rather than “literally see the past/future.”
That’s just my preference though. What about the rest of you guys? What’s the most flavorful version of “peer through time” you’ve seen in a game? And how about the difficulty of glimpsing the future in games featuring unpredictable PC antics? Have you managed to screw up any of your timelines? Whatever your take on fortune telling, tell us all about it down in today’s comments!
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Ahh time, what a lovely FUBAR inducing concept. Personally I try my herdest to avoid anything and everything time related. Too many variables on if you can afect it, will your attemp to avoid it cause it, or is it your inactivity or worse impossible to avoid because fate. And don’t even get me started with past, not even leting me take a role of an Timelord or Doctor himself is worth it.
I knew a dude who claimed he understood Primer on the first watch. I remain skeptical:
https://unrealitymag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/primer-chart.jpg
I was running a Ravenloft campaign, and did a plain-old murder mystery. Unfortunately, I had forgotten about some of the party Psionicists abilities.
On finding the murder weapon, he reminded me of a power he had that let him ‘read’ an item and see the items last half a dozen owners. Crap. Fortunately for me, the murderer had stolen the weapon from someone else the night of the murder, but was still technically its ‘owner’ for a breif window of time, so I couldn’t technically my way out of it, but also, the murderer was a Lycanthrope (a werefox), and had been in hybrid form throughout the entire period of the theft and murder. So I was able to give the player some reward (the reveal of a lycanthrope, and since in Ravenloft, the Werefox is a unique strain that only effects female elves, a significant reduction in the suspect pool) without completely blowing the whole adventure open within minutes.
It’s weird, but the I think that “object reading” is a perfect example of the good version of this trope:
https://www.d20pfsrd.com/alternative-rule-systems/occult-adventures/occult-classes/OCCULTIST/#Object_Reading_Su
Like the rule says, the information gleaned, “Might be a glimpse of the creature’s appearance, a brief vision of what it saw while using the item, or perhaps its emotional state when it last used the item. The GM determines what information is gained in this way.” When I played my occultist, it was a near-ideal excuse for a GM to pipe in plot-relevant information. The info was clear when we needed direction, vague when a sustained mystery was more interesting, and always easy to RP. On reflection, it may be one of my all-time favorite mechanics for RP.
In any case, good on ya for figuring out the most interesting bit of info to pass along. Sounds to me like a working-as-intended. 😀
That kind of divination has never been common in my circle… I remember playing a cleric who used it from time to time for a weather forecast. Speak with Dead has come up a few times lately though…
How did you guys use Speak with Dead?
Alas, poor Gunslinger, always the backseat player. At least assassin is gonna get his just desserts with #4, right?
Possibly literally, if the desserts are poisoned cheesecake. From a sweet lil’ Ratfolk.
I hope Ratfolk aren’t hard to draw.
But who will interview this hypothetical ratfolk?
Whoever would fawn the most over them.
But she’s trapped in the Abyss right now!
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/cute
Come on, Gunslinger! You’ve got a clear view of what’s happening: pull off a trick shot – or rather, a head shot – on Assassin and get that job!
Give him the de Rolo special!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l1YsW2G04XM&t=135s
(NSFW. Violence. Tongue.)
I know about that one. A clever shot – but I have to wonder abput that tongue. Was it augmented or … implanted?
He made out with Sylas until he absorbed vamp tongue powers.
Well, to that, I can say only one thing: Ewwww~! He got Delilah’s swapped spit and Sylas’s vampire gunk and everything!
last time Gunslinger got accepted into a party (https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/rusty-and-co-crossover-part-5-5) it came a bit as a shock to him.
.
.
.
and he had to get healed by Oracle, good things she’s here too. Maybe these two have a thing going on…
I played a divination wizard once whose whole shtick was that she’d peered into the future until it broke her mind trying to find a version of events where she didn’t die horribly. She was mentally at that point in the future, trying to recall all the events that led to that conclusion; which explained why she didn’t know everything, as well as the gimmick of always speaking in the past tense. The latter was both fun and confusing!
The ironic twist was that she still died horribly (devoured by mind flayers), but she got resurrected; so destiny technically escaped?
> She was mentally at that point in the future, trying to recall all the events that led to that conclusion
Solid diegetic excuse for seeing the future without seeing the future. Plot device ftw!
“I imagine some of you were surprised by the weather over the weekend, especially if you caught Friday’s broadcast. I’d like to apologize especially to the former residents of Rogers, Oklahoma. –Caught them napping!”
My typical out is to have the divination spell cast at the end of a session or between sessions to give me time to think up a good fix. (“Which of my spells are most likely to be useful in the adventure before us?” is a common default question.)
I once GM’d for a PC hero with “synchronicity” powers– he was loathe to activate the ability, as I told him that sometimes it had left him standing in a field without any idea why he’d gone there –but following his hunches led him to a long (seemingly pointless) narrative full of “do you follow or fight the impulse not to drink the coffee” questions. The detective eventually ditched the party, skipped the first boss battle to catch a matinee of “Moana,” then exited the theater and rolled a NATURAL 20 on the Spot check to see the clue that solved the case he was working on and led to the SECOND boss battle of the evening.
My weirdest experience was as a player in a GURPS Supers campaign where we all discovered at the end of the campaign that we were trapped in a causality loop and had inadvertently created 85% of the threats we’d been facing. The GM had carefully crafted the plot and encounters to allow for our free choices, but still drive us to the moment where we all arrived back at the beginning of session #1 with retrograde amnesia, staring a strange anomaly that closed as we watched it…
> My typical out is to have the divination spell cast at the end of a session or between sessions to give me time to think up a good fix. (“Which of my spells are most likely to be useful in the adventure before us?” is a common default question.)
There’s this meme in the back of my head that, “TRPGs have an advantage over computer RPGs because GMs can react in real time.” In practice though, I find that it’s hard to react appropriately on zero notice 100% of the time. There really ought to be more “let me think on that for next session” built into the hobby. I know that I needed some in my TSL game.
> The GM had carefully crafted the plot and encounters to allow for our free choices, but still drive us to the moment where we all arrived back at the beginning of session #1
I’d be curious to see the plot outline.
So would I! I remember one detail:
We were often attacked by black-clad weirdos who claimed a past history with us. There was no record of them, but we assumed our unfamiliarity had to do with the aforementioned amnesia. We eventually met red- and blue-clad weirdos, rival factions, who had no knowledge of any black-clad faction. We had to give a macguffin to them, but they would NOT share.
Regardless of which faction (red/blue) we sympathized with, the OPPOSITE faction, denied their holy macguffin and inspired by our questions (in a bootstrap paradox), would then become the black-clad faction that would plague our later missions and (after attacking us mid-transit, damaging the time machine, and getting tossed overboard in the fight) get “randomly” peppered throughout our earlier missions, where they actually DID have a valid grudge against our heroes who had never met them before, prompting our later questions of the red/blues, etc. (I have a headache.)
That GM now holds a doctorate in psychology with a philosophy minor.
He was quite pleased with himself after that campaign.
As a writer, plot is the hardest thing. It takes time, analytical reflection, and a keen sense of dramatic appropriateness. Anyone who can sketch a compelling one in their spare time is my friggin’ hero.
In the 5e book Candlekeep Mysteries, there is a villain who has used divination to a frankly excessive degree, projecting hypothetical paths to godhood only to find them repeatedly foiled by the PCs. The plot of the adventure is therefore a giant trap she has set to eliminate the PCs now before they can stop her later. The book itself does not do that much with this villain, but I found I REALLY liked her concept, and I hope I can apply it to a campaign sometime – a villain who knows EVERYTHING about the PCs, their backstories, their tactics, their adventures, and has become obsessed with eliminating them not for anything they have done, but for what they WILL do. The villain would have elaborate traps and brutal manipulations, but would also be unraveling psychologically as they fail to cut off the prophesized future. How could this simple group of adventurers show up to foil her in EVERY timeline? Is destiny itself opposed to her victory? Impossible! Clearly there is another force just as devious as her trying to undermine her future! She must find it! She will find the PCs’ hidden master who definitely exists and is not just a paranoid delusion and eliminate them! Muhahahaha! Etc.
In the actual Candlekeep book, the villain does have a way to cheat death if the PCs aren’t careful, and because the next adventure is “the PCs open a cursed book and get cursed”, I particularly like the idea of her fighting them, losing, pretending to be permadead and waiting for the cursed item she put in her loot pile to kill the PCs for her. Gives a real legitimate “I knew you were going to do that” vibe when she does actually predict the players’ actions.
> Gives a real legitimate “I knew you were going to do that” vibe when she does actually predict the players’ actions.
…Assuming thy PCs actually go in that direction. 😛
In my experience, the only way to guarantee that is to make the players think the villain wanted them to do the exact opposite. In a way that makes the villain’s actual plan not sound like a retcon, ideally.
Two of my Deadlands players have supernatural insight, one from carrying a cursed watch that mostly makes him immune to surprise, but also leaves him vulnerable to being tormented by spirits and visions (that usually just cost him sleep, but he can spend Fate Chips to get something useful out of them). The other is a Voodoo priest, and can cast a couple of spells that have left me going “oh crap” because they give a glimpse of the location for a specific person.
I’m honestly pretty pleased with how I’ve been handling this. The visions have only come up once, and I used it to tip off the party that the religious leader where they were headed was probably not a good guy and was after the same thing they were, leaving them (wisely) paranoid. The locator spell has been trickier, but I think I’ve done a good job walking the line between blowing the case wide open and being useless. Mostly by providing multiple locations for the murdered people they keep using it on. For the first victim in the Husker attack, they got a glimpse of the path he was dragged on, the clearing where he was buried, and the cave behind that clearing where the Husker was lairing, and an admonition that while all three were relevant they didn’t know which location his body was actually in. For the victim in The Heart of the Matter, I said the spell was struggling, and ultimately gave them two locations again, this time because the body had been cut up and its hands were in one place and the rest of it in another. That led to a big eureka moment from the party as they realized what must have happened.
I always appreciate it when “the spell is struggling.” It makes the magic feel more alive when it’s subject to weird conditions and reacts in an unconventional way.
“What’s the most flavorful version of “peer through time” you’ve seen in a game?”
I once based a game around the Party having (individually and as a group usage) the ability to “rewind time”*, literally reset to an earlier point of the game (this did not let someone unwind their own death, but another party member could).
The catch, every time they did so, it gave their Enemy† the ability to do so as well, the same amount of “person hours”. So if one person rewound 2 minutes to avoid going out the back door and right into an ambush alone, the Enemy got 2 minutes of potential rewind… if the whole group rewound the last minute of a fight, the Enemy got 7 minutes, 1 minute for each party member. The party also knew every time the Enemy used those minutes that they’d given them.
It really kept the Party worrying because the BBEG almost never used those minutes until towards the end when Beegs blew the whole wad of minutes at once, almost half a day’s worth of time repeating the last ten minutes of a day. The party later discovered Beegs had done so to spend that time with their family at a picnic watching the sunset over and over again with them before leaving to go “finish this and save the world from those time meddling idiots”.
.* Not exactly “peer through time”, but they could redo a combat knowing what the enemy’s numbers could be, how the first moments would play out, etc. It let them turn a few rough fights into cake walks, and completely avoid others (employing diplomacy, avoidance, or just by knowing what the other group wanted and deciding it was fine to not fight over it). And in non-combat usages, they occasionally redid negotiations after figuring out what the best “tact to take” was. They could basically “Groundhog’s Day” themselves to get a moment ‘perfect’ (or as perfect as they were capable anyway).
.† Some vaguely glimpsed (through the ritual’s magic) BBEG that grabbed onto a duplicate ritual device as they were gaining the ability.
Nice move with the sympathetic BBEG. I’m sure it engendered a lot of, “And we were worried about using our powers the whole time? D’oh!”
It caused serious interparty conflict once they found out that the guy who’d been working against them the whole time was trying to stop the world from ending due to “timey-wimey-wibbely-wobbely” shenanigans (and not because he liked the Evil Empire or anything)- while the PCs were using those same shenanigans to try to over-throw the Authoritarian Racist Slaver empire he worked for… it didn’t help that several party members were using “not good” methods to get things done (assassinations, murder, mind-control, all the things the Evil Empire was accused of)…
And yes, once the party realized they’d have had a “slightly” freer hand with their powers (it would have motivated the guy working against them in the background to come to the foreground sooner), half the party was upset they’d held back… the other half the party, upon finding out they were definitely hastening the entire world’s demise*, was upset they’d been talked into performing the ritual to gain those powers at all, and then talked into using them as ‘frequently’ as they did…
.* To be fair, it was a central premise to the game, but they were warned that using the power “caused stress on reality” and that there wouldt be repercussions. Side effects could include accelerated aging, non-casual time-bloops, ground hogs to hate them, temporal rifts, reality fractures, and the complete destruction of the world (which is where they kept all their stuff†).
When they had their final showdown with the Agent acting against them and accused him of hastening the world’s end with his repeating that 10 minutes, he responded “I’m not going to survive this meeting and then you’re going to murder my whole family. I have nothing left to lose…” it actually caused in interparty fight. The “good” guys in the Party (okay, the “not committing as much Evil” guys, they were still murderishly leaning) convinced the Agent of the Evil Empire to switch allegiances and work against the Empire… all they had to do was smuggle his extended family out…
.† One of the Prime “not very Good” guys in the party did eventually establish a home on another Plane, just in case. No the rest of the party was not enthused with his action or his reasoning.
Non-casual time loops wear their work clothes to social time loop events.
right…so in one of my posts before i mentioned that i used to teach 3.5 D&D in a youth center.
i had a few groups with different ages (kids don’t tend play well with fellow kids who are 3+ years apart until they mature enough). and it so happen that in two of my groups i had a couple of brothers playing, it was also obvious they were telling each other how their games went. it’s fine and all i do not use the same game story or challenge with different groups. but they didn’t know it yet, and so for the first game i let both of their groups have similar starting story. meeting in the same named town. getting a job offer by a mysterious stranger who ask them to go to a specific ruin and retrieve a unique item from there etc.
now the setting was similar but while one group was fighting a hoard of goblonoid monsters the other had the undead running about. this took a few sessions as the place was huge. but eventually group A (who was fighting undead) got the glowing mcgoffin and got back to town where they learned the item was a needed key to opening a portal into a closed extra dimension vault.
now onto later in the same week, with the 2nd group (fighting gobins and such) who finally got to find the item. in a different place but not glowing at all. this group were given a magic mouth latter and instructions to talk to it once the item is found, so now that the item found said mouth tell them to drop the item in a specific safe up ahead in the ruin. by the way all this time the brother in this group keep telling everyone that they should keep the item for themselves. so the group decide to keep the item and try to figure out what it does.
going for an expert they are told that what ever it is, it need to recharge in a specific tank to be able to perform (describing the safe here). when asked for how long they get ‘oh a couple of hundreds of years, give or take a decade’.
this time the brothers think about asking for the country calendar’s year. and find out that they are playing 230 years apart…
short story, they go back and drop the item in the safe to get their reward, and group A get to have a charged portal key to find.
Very cool! I’ve always thought that linked campaigns could make for an interesting bit of storytelling tom foolery. This is a great device to pay it off!
My favorite example is a story my dad told, where one of his D&D characters showed up in a Shadowrun game he ran later. Apparently that D&D world was just the past of the Shadowrun world, and that character somehow got time travel magic that let the cyberpunk thugs visit a high fantasy setting for a while.
Noice. Especially that most groups wouldn’t see any long term results from their adventures, but because of the brothers, both groups probably ended up seeing the “how this got there” and then the “and what happened to it later”.
Bonus points if you got pull other types of cross-knowledge stunts with those groups in other sessions.
well among the hings i did was i left doors that the first party broke as they were for the 2nd, and the undead were the remains of the goblinoid.
the stranger who gave them their mission WAS actually a time traveler, who was also operating under the radar, as in his time there was a dedicated ‘time police’ who’s mission was stopping this kind of shenanigans.
he had to device a method to contact the groups with as little time magic as possible, so… he left each group with a ‘blank’ book and gave them instructions to read it once a day. starting from the beginning, and each time mark where it ended and continue reading only from there. they would then write answers only from the middle of it.
point was he made sure to have copies of the books from the past and future. so he would write in the ‘past’ book instructions for the party. and read their answers in the ‘future’ book.
i also let them learn that they might effect the history of the world.
at one point to give them a shove into getting more involved i had a random character in the first group, named ‘Mag’. be mentioned as ‘Queen Mag’ when the 2nd group were checking up the country’s history.
but left the story of how did she became one a mixture of fables and hear-say. as in instead no one is sure what really happened as there are more then a dozen different stories about how she took over the kingdom (or in two stories, crated her own kingdom)
Seeing thought time is good if there is a single time-line. What if there is many conflicting time-lines? Or parallel universes? 🙂
As I recall, our super-heroes wound up spending a good chunk of time in a He-Man style parallel universe. So in answer to your question… He-Man. He-man happens.
Or hell, what if there are multiple precogs/prophets/diviners/whatever, with different goals and the support needed to use their preordained knowledge appropriately?
Worm, despite only having one timeline, has an interesting take on this. Precognitive parahumans* almost never have clear visions of the future; all but the strongest only see probabilities, or get hunches, or something along those lines.
Moreover, as these predictions get closer to other precogs (or non-precognitive parahumans who disrupt precognition—certain power nullifiers, time-screwy guys, the Endbringers, etc), these predictions get fuzzier and fuzzier as interference from those powers disrupts their predictive abilities.
It’s not a focus of the story—the most significant precogs are a supporting character and a greater-scope antagonist—but it’s still handled interestingly when it comes up.
*People with superpowers. Also the working title for the serial before it entered its final form, so it needed to be a decently neologistic term.
QOTD: “What’s the most flavorful version of “peer through time” you’ve seen in a game? And how about the difficulty of glimpsing the future in games featuring unpredictable PC antics? Have you managed to screw up any of your timelines? Whatever your take on fortune telling, tell us all about it down in today’s comments!”
Most flavorful was probably my review of the Cult of Ecstasy’s rules in Mage: the Ascension, “Truths foreseen are not always true”. AKA you see what could be, what’s likely, what should be, or a timeline in which you do nothing, or the like. While peering through time and space limits your perception based on your other abilities. Like, that portal-through-time thing would have absolutely worked… if the mage was VERY skilled in space magic and reasonably skilled in energies (light is an energy by the RAW). And had some mind magic to catch their consciousness back. And then there’s active interference, like thickening the walls of time. And the Storyteller rolling secretly (I think the sorcerer supplement outright calls out the player for thinking they’d get to see how ACCURATE their character’s vision is).
Another form of my favorite regarding high-power magic is of my own GM rules: give up on there being that sort of intrigue. Find something else to challenge them, or change the story from “can they” to “should they, or do their morals and ethics forbid them?”
Probably the BEST AND EASIEST is Augury: https://www.aonprd.com/SpellDisplay.aspx?ItemName=Augury
Costs some resources and time to use, but not a lot. Has a failure chance. Only gives an answer pointed in a specific way (weal/woe/both/unknown or neither). Used it on my Cleric once. Question was some variant of, “If I load up the party with these buffs that read as, ‘immunity to vampires’, and then the sorcerer teleports us into their midst and we blast away, what happens?” Got woe, and realized I hadn’t accounted for something. Turned out that something was them being 5th level casters or higher with Dispel Magic and knowledge of what buffs counter themselves (that they should dispel). We changed plans.
Every time I hear about Mage, I want to play in a game. Every time I look at the book, my brain hurts. 🙁
I mean, as long as D&D is D&D (or Pathfinder, Hackmaster, 13th Age, OSRIC, DCC, etc.), a little murder is just part of the job. There’s no reason to think we won’t see Psychic in a future arc.
…Probably best to stay dead for the next week or two though and hope those contingency spells pay off later.
Heh. Psychic wakes up several days earlier and never goes to the interview.
Another prophecy-related hook I’ve used is– The party’s quest-giver tells them they have a mission that (on paper) NPC X can perform solo, but a divination reveals that for some reason “If he goes alone, he will fail.” The tasks are divided up Mission-Impossible style among the PCs, with NPC X (who could ostensibly do it all themselves) riding shotgun, since there’s no way to know exactly which part of the mission NPC X is destined to screw up.
Not only does everyone at the table have a critical role in the mission, but the players also often spend the evening second-guessing every encounter, wondering “Is this the task he would have failed?”
In one instance, the impending “FAIL” was the final boss-battle. The NPC was almost guaranteed to win initiative and rush to fight the giant monster that presented itself. What was needed was a non-chaotic PC to ask aloud “Do we even know if that thing is hostile?” (It wasn’t.) Had they killed it, the giant corpse would have created an immovable obstacle that prevented the completion of the mission. (As it was, they adopted it and now use it as a guard.)
Precognition is a terrible superpower in interactive media, unless you can separate the part of the plot that players can affect from the part that’s being predicted cleanly enough. The Elder Scrolls series hit on a decent solution—prophecies that say “If X, Y” instead of just “Y”—but that’s hardly a perfect solution—especially in scenarios open-ended enough for players to find a solution Z that should let them X while forestalling Y. And while I have my criticisms of how open-ended D&D and its relatives are in practice (how often have you played an adventure with a viable solution other than “kill the bad person”?), they’re supposed to be all about player freedom.
Retrocognition is better, in that the GM should be able to figure out what already happened with fewer problems. (Unless you didn’t read the adventure ahead of time and assume the mill is six hours outside of town and not six minutes from the inn.) But it’s still something you need to plan your mysteries around.
The ideal, I think, would be for the players to simply not know where or when to aim their retrocognitive power/spell. Figuring out the time and place of the murder, so they can target it with their divination or whatever, is the mystery, in the way Sherlock Holmes might try to figure out what kind of weapon would produce that kind of wound on the victim’s neck.
But this causes additional problems, especially if your party doesn’t have the required ability (because that character died and was replaced, or because their player was out of town that week, or because you’re writing an adventure path and can’t know the composition of every party that ends up playing). So just making magic a nonviable avenue for learning about the murder and instead focusing on clues you know the players will be able to find is an understandably common choice.
Not exactly the same thing, but I ran a campaign years ago that involved a little time travel (in a way). The premise was that each player had two characters, a low level one that was in the “present” and a higher level one that was in the “past”. The campaign was primarily focused on the ones in the present – they had been given an apocalyptic dream. It revealed that the only way to save the world was to find out what happened to a group of legendary heroes from the distant past (ie their other characters). So, the present party adventured for potential clues that then provided the next adventure for the past party to encounter.
Think like a weapon designer: everything has (or at least always expect) a counter, and the offense doesn’t always beat the defense.