I'm sure that many would advise against doing so at all, but knowing that I will likely try to do so anyway, what are the factors I should consider when creating a time travel adventure? Specifically, what spells might accomplish this feat, what effects might time travel have on memory or spellcasting, and what paradoxes would I have to take steps to avoid (ie characters killing themselves), and what resources might already be out there to help me with this attempt? I am working in a Dungeons and Dragons v3.5 setting, but any other systems with elegant solutions/resources/mechanics that you could point out would be appreciated…
[RPG] How to consider when creating a time travel adventure
gm-techniques
Related Solutions
How To Learn To GM
There are a variety of resources nowadays that can help you accomplish this. There are also many existing questions on this site about GMing that will point you to more content than you can ever consume.
Watch
In your question, you mention wanting to see more examples of real play. There's a number of ways to do so.
Actual Play Resources
- Podcasts capture the entire play session. There's video podcasts too like on Twitch. See Where can I find actual play podcasts for RPGs?
- Session Summaries (aka Actual Plays, Story Hours, Campaign Journals) usually are severely abridged, but leave out a lot of the cruft. See Where can I find transcripts of actual game sessions? and Where to find game session reports?
- Blogs. There's a million blogs about how to GM. Start with the RPG Bloggers Network. Go to the blogrolls of blogs you like to find more like them. Focus in on blogs about your chosen game(s) and play style(s).
- Play by post forums. If you want to watch people actually play in text, there's a million of these too. Many dedicated sites, specific forums on RPG.net, ENWorld, Paizo, etc. In fact, RP-by-post is very popular even when not affiliated with a proper RPG/ruleset.
- Sit in. There are plenty of other people running games, some in public places like your friendly local game store (D&D Encounters, Pathfinder Society) and conventions. See below under "Play" though, if you're going to the effort of being there you need to stop being a wallflower and get on in and play.
Some games also have better advice sections than others - see What role-playing games have good gamemaster advice sections?
Play
In the end though just watching is not the most effective approach to learning. Watching games is less useful experience than actually being in one. Have you considered playing in those games before running them to learn from other GMs? It's reasonably easy to find other gaming groups, you don't have to abandon yours to play in another. Where can I find other RPG players?
Go to RPG conventions, find games at gaming stores, play on forums or G+ (see also Finding online RPG players for a play-by-chat RPG Campaign?) - just get more experience. The GM was often called the "judge" in the old days, and in the legal world you need to spend a lot of time being a lawyer before you make a good judge. You need to spend some time playing to become a good GM. If you can't think how the players will proceed in a given situation, you need more play time.
Read
There are many books on GMing - see What is the single most influential book every GM should read?
Also try watching/reading relevant genre media. "I don't get how to put together a story" should get its first-order correction by consuming some of that genre and looking at the stories.
Learn
A lot of the problem you seem to be experiencing is pure storytelling. Try How do I get better at narrating/storytelling as a GM? and As a GM, how can I create and role-play diverse NPCs better? Read up on the specific aspects of GMing you feel you're not good at, there's plenty here. Try questions tagged with the gm-techniques tag. Feel free and ask questions here as well about specific aspects of GMing.
There are also a large, large number of RPG forums out there in the world, for every game and type of gaming. If you don't understand something someone posts, you can easily reply and ask.
Do
aka How I Learned To GM
We didn't have these newfangled Interwebs when I was a kid. I GMed almost before I ever played. I did play in a very informal game of D&D in a car on the way to Scout camp, no dice, PvP, everyone had artifact weapons. But other than that, I started out as a GM. I bought a sci-fi RPG (Star Frontiers) without knowing anything about it (I had bought and played a little TSR chit game, Star Force, and was looking for other fun stuff from the same company). None of my friends were interested in GMing and I was in a small Texas town that didn't have conventions or whatnot - life was less mobile and connected back then. So I just read the game books and then ran games for my friends. And I kept running them, and learned from my mistakes and corrected. I read comics and science fiction avidly, so characters and plots weren't that hard to devise. Beyond that, I just learned the way you learn to do anything through practice, whether it's a sport, writing, a musical instrument... How-to's and YouTube videos are cute jumpstarters nowadays, but "Do, and learn from doing" has yet to be eclipsed in being the primary way to actually become good at something.
Fear of "making a mistake" is the dumbest and most paralyzing instinct you can have in life. In a video game you're going to die a couple times off the bat; in baseball you're going to swing and miss a lot before you hit; in baking you're gonna burn some cookies. But you learn through those mistakes. It's fine to do a little reading up ahead of time but the only way to become good, really, is get your butt in gear and do it.
First, set up a Conflict Web. Start by setting up your factions that are involved, and why they are competing/conflicting. This is more to give you a set of motivations for any given group, leaders, etc. and allow you to simply improvise based on the group's needs/ambitions.
The Conflict Web is not static, it's a starting point. So you may easily see characters shift alliances or make temporary truces to accomplish goals.
Second, once you situate the PCs into the scenario, look at their goals, and likely problems they will face in terms of Logistics and Politics. This is effectively similar to how Apocalypse World produces "Fronts".
After each session, look at what the PCs attempted, who was affected, whether any NPC groups made major moves and figure out who is going to react and how. You can choose to update either the Conflict Web or the Logistics & Politics list, though I usually find myself only having to do serious updates after 3-6 sessions because it's relatively easy to track what happened with simple notes.
Both of these tools can scale up or down, so you can do intergalactic empire politics or the 28 guys stuck in a prison together, based on whatever fits your campaign.
Best Answer
I have been DMing a Time Travel campaign since quite some time, with characters having the power to travel in time more or less at will (but only as a group), and here is what you should be careful about.
Timeline Alteration
My players are surprisingly responsible and are trying to avoid to change the timeline as much as possible, even when I encourage it. Basically you can allow it, warn them beforehand of the possible consequences, and allow only one in every "era" they are in.
So if they travel to medieval Japan, they might accidentally (or willingly) do something that would shame the image of katanas, and no one would ever dare use a katana again in Japan. If later they accidentally kill the Emperor, I would use the "Well, someone else take his place, and that's who History remembered" trick.
The only kind of alteration you need to be careful about is:
Paradoxes
One way of handling it is the "Time protects itself" trick. Alterations are allowed, but if you do something that would cause a paradox regarding the previous events, Time prevents it. You shoot a bullet at your father before you were born, the bullet disappears. You try to stab him, the knife disappears. You try to strangle him... Well...
It's also a good way of leading the PCs. Sometimes in a fight, they realize that they can't kill their opponents because of Time Self-Preservation, but they don't have any idea of who those opponents are exactly, or why it would cause a paradox if they died. One of the PCs also got hunted by one of his ancestors who was disappointed in him, and tried to murder him repeatedly. That PC was unable to fight back, as it would have caused a paradox. Fun times :)
As said above, you can also use the "Rubber band History" method. They can do changes, but whatever change they make ends up being smoothed over by History. They could kill their grand-father, but their grand-mother actually found someone else, who is who they remembered as their grand-father. Or a character kills himself when he was a baby, only to realize that he was actually a clone from the beginning. You can get more options here, but for a RPG game "Enforced Immutability" and "Rubber Band History" are your best bets.
How?
This is the easiest one: there is no way to do it in RAW. Done. So, invent what you want! A trip to the Astral plane gone wrong, two "Time Stop" spells interacting.. The parameters you have to consider are:
Do you want the Time Travel method to be easily reproductible?
Do you want it to be one way? Two-way (to past and back, or to future and back)? Flexible (from whatever point in time to any other point in time)?
How accurate do you want it to be? Can characters travel two seconds in the past if they want? Or one day? Or are they limited to specific "nexus" in time?
Final Advice
DMing Time Travelling is awesome and very rewarding, but you will have to plan a lot and be very flexible in your scenarios. Take advantage of it and plan relations and links between different characters and places:
...but keep it open and vague, and be ready to have to change it at the very last moment, and to adapt seamlessly: