Hi folks, I'm looking for a way to track time travel as defined in Continuum. Continuum is an amazing game, but it needs a *lot* of work from the players and the GM to make it work. The most challenging and difficult task is the tracking of your character's spans through time. The player is required to fill in a sheet that logs the place/time they were, the place/time they're going to, how long they are spending at the destination time, how much of their finite ability to span through time they have remaining (more on this below) and their age at the destination. Oh, and a notes field per log entry. We've used spreadsheets, txt files... you name it. A very generous coder here has tried to help twice, neither of his attempts have had the functionality we need. Apparently because there's no way to do a data/time calculation in the Roll20 API. It works like this- At character generation, your character has an Age. This Age always increases. It increases with each duration spent at a given location in space/time. Your character also has an attribute called "Span". This is a rating from zero to X, though values above 5 are super rare. The character's Span level is defined by their rank in the society of time travelers. New "spanners" start out with a Span of 1. Those of us who can't Span are called "levellers" and have a Span of zero. Span not only conveys rank, but it also defines the limit a given character can span before resting for a full 24 hours. The amount of span a give character has can be thought of as a finite but renewable pool of duration. At Span 1, a character may span up to a year of time in any combination of seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks or months before needing to rest. You could span down one month, up one second, down 4 seconds, up 6 months without needing to rest. Each of these spans is reducing your available Span from one year to some lower value. Once you have spent all your available Span, you can rest, or you can try to push past your limit, but you'll take real damage. At Span 2, the limit is increased to 10 years before you must rest. Span 3 = 100 years. Span 4 = 1000 years... and so on. The trick is knowing where/when you've been and how much Span you have left. Which is why we need to track this stuff. Ideally there would be a section of a character sheet (or some other handout type thing) that would read the starting age of the character and the Span. It would allow the player to enter their current location in Time, their desired destination in Time and any notes about where they're going and why. The sheet would then calculate the character's current age (updating the sheet) and their remaining Span (again updating the sheet). It would allow for Rests, so one could reset one's Span whenever the opportunity arose. Each new Log entry would appear at the top of the Log, with Subjective Time being the same as scrolling down the log. This log will very quickly get very long. Even now we have players with hundreds of entries due to how amazing being able to span through time at will is as a game mechanic. This has been the downfall of our current attempts to make a Roll20 Span Log. Under the methods we've been using so far, each change to any value in a log entry recalculates the entire log... this quickly grinds the sheet to a halt. Does this make sense?
