So the problem with time travel in stories

[Aerozord]

Time travel in a narrative has one inherent issue in pretty much any story. Its the anti-ticking clock trope. The ticking clock is almost required in stories because its hard to build suspense or drama when the protagonist can sit on his butt and eat chips for a year to no ill effect. You need a deadline, a reason action must be taken now.

Time travel kind of shoots that idea in the foot because even if you fail, big deal go back in time further. As Marty put it in back to the future "I have a time machine, I have all the time in the world" which ironically he doesn't really put into action since he arrived minutes early instead of hours or days still forcing the ticking clock narrative device. Similarly ideas like parallel time or fixed conditions on what times you can jump are used. Often making little to no sense.

Now why am I writing about this? I have the day off and am bored.

[Shyria Dracnoir]

BvYRqsRZ7vE

[Azisien]

This can be solved by making time travel not costless? Most things have a cost, if time travel were possible I doubt it would be different.

[The Artist Formerly Known as Hawk]

Because it was already mentioned, I present San Dimas Time (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SanDimasTime).

[Loyal]

Easy way to deal with time travel cheese: Time travel requires prohibitively enormous amounts of power or occurs under circumstances that cannot be replicated (including circumstances that may have been erased by the time travel). Marty McFly needed a lightning bolt to return home, for instance.

Schlock Mercenary exists in a setting where matter-antimatter annihilation is used as a power source, so the idea of limited power exists only as matter of "more" or "less" relative to what other parties are using. Despite this, time travel was made possible there only because a particular event had literally changed the shape of the universe. It was not possible to do this a second time, because the wormgate used for the trip was overstressed by the travel and blew up when the trip was done.

[Magus]

Another problem is that you can't create the time machine yourself with the explicit purpose of using it to change something specific in the past. If I may bring up the movie The Time Machine (I know, I know), the reason the protagonist could not fulfill his goal of keeping his fiancee from being killed is he created the time machine with the specific goal in mind of going back and saving her from being killed. If she were saved, he would never create the time machine, thus creating a paradox. As such every attempt to save her would result in an increasingly hilarious set of circumstances where she is killed in increasingly outlandish ways ala Final Destination. The movie only explored a few, such as having her get run over by a carriage instead of being shot by a robber or whatever it was that was the first instance, but presumably if he had kept attempting to keep her safe in various ways she would have been killed in some other fashion.

[Revising Ocelot]

Wibbly wobbly.

[PyrosNine]

He could have probably still saved her by devising a probable series of steps to inform his past self of how time travel works so that his past self could build his own time traveling machine independently of his wife dying- then using his past self's time machine to rescue his wife.

The movie did allow for the changing of an observed possible future, but not the changing of one's personal past, I guess.

Another thing that one has to consider with time travel is the SCALE of time travel. The sheer amount of energy needed may actually directly reflect the size of EVERYTHING. Achron, made my ma boi's at NCSU, has people using time travel to fight aliens and there is a time loop that spans several galaxies.

In such a story, time travel does not only effect the immediate area around you, but apparently time in other galaxies. Thus the cost of time travel is enough energy to literally affect all matter/anti-matter, enough energy equivalent to the size of the universe.

Localized time travel, is interesting in it's ramifications- like if there is a limited range to the time travel- what happens when something escapes that range? Is it possible for someone to be outside the field of affect for time travel, so that they remain in a state of "present" compared to things fastforward or rewound? And thus their personal actions are no longer factored in the "future" of the given fast forward, or that they have a temporal clone standing around in the "rewound" time?

What would it do with the world? If you rewound time in New York, NY, and ONLY NY,NY would it not fly off into space from the perspective of all who lived outside the bounds?

And don't get me started on time loops.

People like to forget that there is clearly an outside world to the loop- only the loop traveler or those in the sphere of the loop are stuck in there, what about all the orphaned escapists who aren't chained to repetitive causality? Some stories go on to show how to them, it's as if the people who got caught in a loop simply ceased to exist, but there is always the possibility of them going out of their way and hopping into the loop in progress, possibly removing the loop as their own appearance and origin are not based in the initial progression of the loop.

Combine the two, with a localized sphere of time travel, and a time loop, and you could have people in a kind of temporal stasis, forced to go about the events of the loop ad nauseum until an outside force external to the loop interacts with them.

[Shyria Dracnoir]

Remember, with time travel, you really only have as long as your natural, healthy, accident free lifespan allows.

[Ramary]

If you want to go crazy trying to piece together the effects of numerous characters time travel shenanigans go look up the Legacy of Kain series. It is super well written and they do time paradoxes in that like FPS heroes shoot guns. Don't worry it all makes sense because destiny.