One of the imagined purposes of this site is to be useful to other people who want to play and/or GM Nobilis. For that reason I want to put some of the discussion New Dave and I began about Tony Timespawn last night out where people can see it.

As Dave and I discussed, with others chipping in: I'm concerned that I'm having all the cliche problems of handling Power Over Time Itself^TM that one has been hearing about since RPGs were young and pimpled. I've been trying to work out to what extent it's Tony's abilities and to what extent I'm just chickenshit. The old, "let's go back before the story started and change things so we always knew/never had to worry/already dealt with" stuff.

I think the scope of the problem goes beyond just "It makes it too hard for me, the GM, to come up with challenges/plots/what have you." In principle, even if I come up with adventure seeds that are amenable to time travel you still have two big problems:

1) To the extent we can only come up with a limited set of "chronomobility-friendly" adventure types, we end up playing the same scenario over and over.

2) To the extent that every adventure seed is "designed around" one particular Noble's powers, it marginalizes the other player-characters. OR,

3) (There is a rule number three!) There's a big danger that I make adventure seeds chronomobility-manageable by making them time travel-proof, which is unfair to Dave.

Now in no way has Dave abused Tony's abilities. What was interesting about last night's discussion was realizing how often it was other players suggesting time-travel solutions to problems rather than Dave. That at least suggests that the problem of time travel taking over campaign mindshare is a real one, even with nothing but constructive play by the player who has that ability.

In fact, Tony is a carefully-conceived and well-constructed character. In no way would I want Dave to trade him for another. We talked about rejiggering his powers. I wonder if that's really necessary.

All of which is to say that I've got a problem, and it may be interesting to see how we end up dealing with it.