Geeky SKAturday: Hans Gruber and the Die Hards have a cheery message about the passage of time

Hans Gruber and the Die Hards are an Austin, TX, ska-punk band with an excellent name.

Image from Wikipedia

They've been around for more than a decade, but shamefully...shamefully, I say...I've only recently started to give them the attention they deserve.  They are...at various times, and sometimes all at once...frantic, catchy, and undeniably talented.

Ska-punk has a certain reputation among some people due to a heavy association of the genre with a specific sound and attitude exemplified by poppy SoCal outfits like Reel Big Fish in the '90s.  As I've mentioned before here on the blog, I like RBF quite a bit, and their fast, hooky brand of ska is part of what reeled me in to the genre as a whole (sorry about that one)...but I totally get how it's tough to take them too seriously for too long.  Hans Gruber and the Die Hards have some of that same irreverence, but it's accompanied by a different sort of silliness.  One that doesn't seem like it'll wear thin quite as easily.  I think they are, in a way, exactly what the genre needs.

I guess it's kind of hard to explain what I'm trying to say with that...so I'll just let the song speak.  This is a new recording of a song they first played several years ago, recently released on the EP Reboot, a split with the band Sgt. Scag.  I think it fits the time travel theme of these Geeky SKAturdays as a frank reflection on the inevitable end time brings to us all.  Here's "We're All Gonna Die"...

Interestingly, the Die Hards also have a tune on their 2022 album With A Vengeance that reflects on one's association with time, "Time, I Don't Want It Anymore"...

I don't find that one as catchy as "We're All Gonna Die"...but it definitely competes in the nihilistic flair department...

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Now, I'll talk RPGing for a second, so those of you who were just here for the opener, please feel free to head out.  I won't judge!

For those who want to talk gaming: I'm trying to figure out what sort of effects I want time travel to have on the characters in the game.  It stands to reason that moving through freaking time would have some effects on the travelers, eh?  Long term, short term, physical, mental, emotional...the whole range.

The flip side is that I don't necessarily want something that is absolutely central to the game setting (as the Agents of SKA protect the integrity of history by traveling its byways) to be too dangerous for the characters.  Then too much of the game is just rolling to see if you're hurt or killed by something you have to do.

For now, I'm just starting with something simple (maybe it'll need some additions later on)...

If characters travel five or more years through time in either direction, they must make a saving throw to determine if "timeline lag" impacts their abilities.  The difficulty is equal to 10 plus the log₁₀ of the number of years traveled.  (For game purposes, this can be estimated quickly by rounding the number of years traveled to the nearest power of 10 -- 10, 100, 1000, etc. -- and counting the number of zeroes in the result.  So, for example, 8,000 years would round up to 10,000, which has four zeroes.  Therefore, the difficulty of the saving throw would be 10 + 4 = 14.)

If they fail the saving throw, characters have disadvantage on all attacks, checks, and saving throws for one hour after arriving at their new point in time.

In many cases, time travelers do not get a sense that they are impaired until they begin attempting tasks that actually have a reasonable chance of failure.  Thus, referees may choose to make these saving throws in secret, letting players know the result only when their character makes their first roll.