What are some interesting time-related powers a character can have without becoming effectively invincible?
The setting allows for the existence of extremely powerful mages and godlike supernatural beings, but I'd rather not have the main character be too powerful from the start.
Create a field of fast-time and slow-time.
How would that work exactly?
My original idea was to allow the character to erase small portions of time in order to avoid life-threatening events, much like king crimson from jojo - with a stamina limit, of course, and no precognition, so using that power would require educated guessing. What do you think?
I'm interested as well.
>See a little less than a second into the future, use that to dodge better and anticipate openings.
>Debuff enemies by making them a little slower, buff allies by making them a little faster.
>Increase or decrease the duration of effects. Within limits, obviously.
Those are all good ideas, thanks. I'm looking for something a bit more powerful, though.
Well, you can scale those up to an extent. Like instead of "ally gets small boost to speed", you can basically be sonic or the flash. Or instead of "enemy gets speed debuff", you could make them so slow they might as well be standing still.
You could have precog-flashes like in Judge Dredd, where a person (a precog) perceives the future before it happens. The extent to which it's useful, reliable, or controllable is up to you. One idea explored in the comic is to have someone who can see several possible futures at once and knows what actions lead to each one.
You could also have something like the hyperbolic time chamber from DBZ, where a person can train for a year, but only a day elapses IRL. That's a decent excuse for even a baseline human to become quite strong.
Accelerating the body's natural recovery could be a way to justify healing powers.
Decay and regeneration, although they verge on reality warping.
A limited range to those buffs/debuffs might be good; basically, step into the area of effect and you can barely move, but the user's weakness is ranged combat.
I'm not really a fan of precog, but here's something with a similar end result (avoiding future events): . What do you think about that?
Accelerating/rewinding time? I guess that giving the user a limit for the amount of time he can affect that way would make it powerful without being broken.
Character can smell into the future.
That's a great power for an animal companion, actually.
I hope for you that its an awakened animal companion because if its not, it has no way to make sense of what it's smelling and it'll just get freaked out.
Personally I am fond of depiction where time-related powers are completely different field, hazardous and maddening. Sort of BBEG-stuff.
But really, you can do lot of minor powers.
Particularly, I really liked the Felt's powers from Homosuck - hold your hot opinions, please.
One moves faster, although his perception isn't altered. One can track your past trail, one your future trail. One can punch you into next week. One can travel back in time with eggclock, one forward in oven.
If it's short term precog, it might still be useful in the case of an impending threat.
>depiction where time-related powers are completely different field, hazardous and maddening
That's what I was going for, the "mysterious" and arcane part at least.
Not sure how possible it is to replicate this result in a tabletop game.
So this basically splits the timeline in two, weakens the target, and if you manage to kill it, you go back to the starting point when you cast the spell, and the target dies immediately?
Yeah. From an outside perspective, it would look like the spell causes instant death if you succeed at killing the target.
That's very powerful. By including a major drawback in case the caster fails to kill the target, it could be interesting. Thanks.
You could have the power to return individual objects to their previous states, so if someone was sitting on their couch an hour ago you can send them back an hour and they'll essentially be teleported to their couch, could also be used for healing/repairing stuff as well (although the person may end up getting teleported around as well as a side effect), you could also essentially 'freeze' someone by constantly looping them through a very small time frame.
Time powers are always broken or lead to unsolvable paradoxes. Stay away at all costs.
Not necessarily as long as you include clearly defined limits or drawbacks