Second Chance(s)
I’ve always wanted to run a Mutants & Masterminds super named Retcon. His only power is to hit the Groundhog Day button when shit goes south. I still haven’t figured out what his sidekick Metagame does.
As far as using the power of retcon in a real game, I’m not sure I’ve ever pulled it off successfully. The problem is that you’ve got to have player buy-in, and breaking the flow of story (Never mind! None of that happened!) is a surefire way to lose player buy-in.
Case in point, I recently made a bad call in a Pathfinder game. It was a near-TPK, and only one little gnome was left un-petrified. A bunch of evil medusae were closing in, and the heroic gnome was feverishly trying to drag his stone buddies onto the group’s teleporting magic carpet. After a desperate series of potions, alchemical items, and Strength checks, he’d mostly succeeded. However, the party’s petrified cavalier was still sitting atop his petrified mount. Only two of the mount’s feet were on the carpet. When the carpet did its thing, I ruled that the cavalier got left behind.
Now if I’d handled it better, that sequence of events could have made for an interesting scenario. Suffice it to say that the way I described the scene was less than awesome. My players felt as if they’d been put into a no-win situation, robbed of their agency, and killed by GM fiat. That’s not really the point though. Once I realized that my players had crossed into not-having-fun territory, I tried to use the power of retcon to patch things up.
“OK guys. Clearly you’re not satisfied with that call. Let’s talk. How do you think it should have gone?”
We spent the next twenty minutes rattling off options. Maybe there was a teleporter mishap? We could put the cavalier in some random quarter of the dungeon. Or what if we went back and replayed the scene? Why not go full retcon and just say the cavalier got taken along after all? None of that happened though. After much discussion, the group decided to stick with the original call. I’ve said it before, but nobody wants an asterisk next to their character’s name. Even if it was a bad call, there’s something to be said for letting the ruling on the field stand. I just hope the captured-by-evil-snake-ladies cavalier feels the same!
What about you guys? Have you ever used the power of retcon in-game? Did it work for you? Tell us your tales of wibbly wobbly, timey wimey continuity in the comments!
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I’ve only ever used it in one case: when new players aren’t satisfied with how their character is made. It’s rare even in that case because I allow the retraining of most feats and spells on level up.
I guess I do a bit of that too, come to think of it. Usually it’s accompanied by some arbitrary “please have your build locked in by session four” or similar. It takes a while to pick up a new system, and there ought to be some kind of pressure valve for build mistakes, you know?
If only new players understood that there’s no shame in asking the veterans for help.
Death House spoilers below.
I’m DMing Curse of Strahd for my long-time offline group, and started them off with Death House, a classic horror scenario of dealing with a haunted house. It has many spooky details, but also some opportunities for a bit of humor. I’ve messed up one of each so far, but I’ve recovered nicely I think.
My first mistake was a corpse in a box. I misread the room description and described the room as having a corpse in the middle of it. Then they opened the box and I realized, no, it’s supposed to be in the box. I admitted my mistake, then gave the players a few gems for their trouble.
The second mistake was an unmarked tomb. Death House was home to the Durst family, and all the tombs are marked “___ Durst” because it is a family crypt. A player remarked that the tomb should have said “Fred Durst.” I agreed, that was a good opportunity for a bit of humor.
Fortunately, the group nearly TPKed. 4/6 of the PCs were killed, requiring a pretty massive regrouping effort next session. Only one of the surviving two was able to make that session, so it was essentially a brand new group. I said that the two survivors holed up in one of the rooms for a bit until the next group came.
The second time around, I seized those missed opportunities. They asked if the chest was still there; I replied that it was, but it was closed again. One of the new PCs opened it to find the corpse of her mother, one of the previous PCs. Horrified and disgusted, she set the entire room aflame. That’s the sort of response I wanted. I scattered the other corpses around the house; they found their former Cleric ripped in half at the waist and nailed to a wall, while their half-orc monk was found in the kitchen as a half-eaten monk.
And the second time, etched in different writing than the other crypts, was the name “Fred Durst.” The player who suggested it very much appreciated that, plus the new inscription also added a bit of extra spooky. 🙂
Oh, I missed a corpse. A Warforged in the group had tried to befriend an Animated Armor, with mixed results. The second time around, they found the corpse of the Warforged stuffed inside the armor when they lifted the visor.
TPK isn’t failure. It’s just an opportunity to try a new character concept!
I might have to sit in on a Dead House run one time. It sounds like a fun dungeon. Even though my DM swapped it out for original content, I’d be curious to play through one time.
Be prepared to die! 🙂
This one isn’t my story but one I heard from a friend, so I can’t make a guarantee of it’s accuracy. Any mistakes are likely to be due to my memory as well.
Anywho, the group had gotten involved in time-travel shenanigans, with them pursuing the BBEG into the past because he was trying to alter history. The BBEG was assembling an army of prehistoric monsters of something like that, with the intent of conquering the planet before any of those heroes would be born to stop him.
The group had a Wand of Teleport with 2 charges left, and where in need of re-supply and maybe reinforcements, so they decided to split the party and have two members travel halfway around the world to a large city, while the other two stayed to keep an eye on the BBEG and throw some wrenches in his plans. The city was big, home to major temples full of clerics, a wizard-college, and other high level adventurers. Certainly they’d be able to find someone willing to port them back, and maybe even join them. Plus they could warn the city to be on alert for the BBEG and his army trying to invade.
So the two characters with the wand jaunt off, and arrive at the exact geographic location they meant to, to find a small collection of thatch huts beside a muddy river. As they say, Rome wasn’t built in a day and the group had timewarped several millennia into the past, long before the realm’s largest city and major bastion for good was founded. And it wasn’t just the GM trying to screw them either- he show’d them his notes on this sort of thing.
So now the group is split, with no way to get back together or even communicate, and an entire continent in between them. The players had a definite “oh shiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii-” kind of moment.
The dialogue went something like-
Players: Can we make…some sort of roll….to…NOT do that?
GM: …make a Wisdom check.
Players: *roll* …14?
GM: … … …y’know what, good enough.
GM: “You all look around at each other, laughing nervously at the huge mistake you just avoided by not warping to a city ~3000 years in the past and assuming it would be the exact same as in your era. It’s a good thing your party is smart enough to realize that the passage of time can have serious implications for adventuring.”
lol. There’s an “are you sure?” moment if ever there was one.
Too bad though. That’s actually a really cool hook to introduce new PCs. Imagine if everybody gets to roll up a cave man or a sleestak or whatever to join the split group. Maybe a sessions or two of “the adventures of group A” followed by “the adventures of group B,” then the two groups come together for the big boss fight at the end. Fair cop if the GM didn’t want to deal with that mess though.
Normally I dislike major retcons in game, but the kind I’m still not sure how to handle is when things go sideways because someone misremembered rules or an ability. I believe I’ve already mentioned the time I missed a session and a friend took over playing my wizard. Cue fight with bbeg with my wizard getting killed at the onset, stealing a powerful artifact off my corpse, then proceeding to wreck the rest of the party. One hour and a near tpk later, another player remembered and reminded my friend of a contingency I had on a notecard that would have prevented me from getting killed. Our DM ruled that the past hour hadn’t happened and reset to the contingency, but what is a DM to do? You’re right that a reset kills immersion, but trying to fix something like that with a deus ex machina would also be less than ideal. That was probably a worst case scenario of unpreventability, as it wasn’t the DM’s fault or a regular player’s fault for the rule screw up. I am genuinely conflicted on the issue and how to handle it.
When it’s a minor rules error (Wait! It should have been another 1d6 damage!) I’ll default to ignoring it if the initiative has already passed. When it’s major stuff like you mentioned? Oof… I think you’ve got to retcon there. It feels off, but a TPK due to “oopsie” is also pretty badly off. That’s the worst part about these situations. When mistakes were made and the game rolls on anyway, there’s no way to be fully happy about the outcome. For what it’s worth, I think you guys made the best of a bad situation.
As for absentee death, my group had a Session Zero discussion about whether PCs can die when players aren’t present. It just seems like such an awful thing to have happen that we ruled it out as a possibility. That’ll vary by group though.
I think your method is pretty spot on. I generally do something similar, though I tend to put it into big categories – If it is extremely minor, like the 1d6 example, there is until the end of the next person’s turn to catch the mistake. If it is a bit bigger – advantage on an attack, or a forgotten reaction, it’s about two turns.
If it is big (accidentally missing an NPC’s or Player’s turn, an immunity to poison, or something similar), it basically has until the end of the combat to be found out, and I won’t retcon it back, but I will find some way to undo it or otherwise adjust.
General rule of thumb, I don’t move the party back in time if I can in anyway help it, I’ll just move to the past into the present.
In terms of absentee death, my players know that if their characters are part of the fight, they are able to die. I’ll grant, my game is very harsh, and has regular and common brushes with death, made more worrisome by the fact that I make use of Mercer’s resurrection rules.
It’s been a few years since we had the absentee death discussion, but I believe the choice I presented was “your character is at risk but you gain 1/2 XP” or “your character is not at risk but you do not gain XP from missed sessions.” We’ve since adjusted that to “your character is not at risk and you also gain 1/2 XP for missed sessions.”
We’re firmly into homebrew territory here, and I don’t think there’s a perfect answer. You’ll get slightly different feels from different permutations, but at the end of the day I’ve come to believe that “create less stress for the players” is a good guideline.
My friend’s first full campaign.
I got to make a weapon. I made a Platinum Fullblade!
“Heavy” weapons (gold or platinum) increases damage dice by one category and impart a penalty to hit, but in this case a 2d8 became a 4d6… without enhancements… after a few sessions we decided it was a bit too powerful. So I was given another option. We flat out retconned it to a pepperbox rifle. This too wound up being a bit not the best for my character so I wound up going with a +1 Called Flaming Greatsword. This has been more balanced and better overall for me.
We are still cutting our teeth on DMing so we each have the patience with each other that is needed while we learn. We can also suspend disbelief long enough to “fix” something broken too, so that helps. 🙂
Now that you mention it, we did switch systems a couple of times in my group. My Silver Age Sentinels game briefly became a Savage Worlds game before ultimately settling on becoming a Mutants and Masterminds game. We kept the continuity but changed the rules. Huh… I wonder what that must have been like subjectively for the PCs?
“I could have sworn I was able to benchpress a firetruck yesterday. Now I can barely lift a Volvo!”
*Hugs pillow in fetal position while rocking back and forth*
“It’s fine. It’s fine, it’s FINE! We did not break reality. Nope not us. It’s fine it’s fine it’s fine it’s fine…”
The outcome you describe doesn’t sound like a bad call to me, just your players being sore losers. They didn’t ‘win’ so they’re salty and blaming you for the outcome. If they stopped having fun because an encounter went against them, then I feel they’re being poor sports. The drama and tension of the game is that you could lose a battle and your character could suffer the consequences. It’s not as fun to be the one knocked out or petrified because you’re out of the game a that point, unable to act in character. But those are the highs and lows of the game, and a good player should always be mindful to not bring down the game because they have personally suffered some setback.
The cavalier isn’t even dead, he’s just petrified and left behind, a condition that is stable and they can go back for him to fix. Players get a little greedy in wanting every edge case or interpretation to go in their favor, and sometimes it shouldn’t. The job of the GM is to solve the player’s solutions; you are there to throw the wrinkle into their plans that pushes the game forward into new and interesting directions.
I’m not a player so I’m not invested in it working, but it’s a teleporting carpet, right? So it’s a teleport circle woven into a carpet, essentially. It’s not a matter of TOUCHING the carpet to be teleported by it, you have to STAND on it, and if only part of you is on it, it would be totally fair to only have part of you travel with it, which would have been a much worse outcome for the player.
That’s the thing. I can see how it might look like that on paper, but I was playing pretty fast and loose with turn order and mechanics at that point. When death/captivity/serious consequences are on the line, it’s not the time for narrativium. Like I said, the same sequence of events could have made for an interesting scenario, but the way I handled the scene was less than awesome.
Also of note, the “only part of you travels with the carpet” thing occurred to me, but there’s no way I’m giving that power to my players. They’d wind up slicing dragons in half left and right!
Tangentially related, Retcon’s suggested power fills me with DETERMINATION.
Tangentially related, one of my players made butterscotch cinnamon pie for Friendsgiving this year. Was good.
Knowing one day, Cleric might resurrect himself and get the cheese…
Ive actually hosted a Sci-fi game before where *players* got to make retcons 😀 I twisted the trope on its head and actually made it something expected and useable by the player. They were a group of space-time travellers who could learn “The truth”. A primordial language where words and reality were interweaved, spelling someone’s death literally erased them from existence. Someone inspired by things like Skyrim’s dragon language or Destiny’s hive magic.
And thus the player could retcon shit. The catch was that “The Truth” is extremely complex, unforgiving and literal. If you mispoke, you could end up deleting yourself instead or getting some pretty ironical results (respectively to what you tried to do).
One of the players comically called himself a “truther” and tried to basicly focus on learning it.
Of course im simplifying, there was a shit ton of rules, details and nuances to using that power that balanced out how strong it was, things such as lovecraftian level of madness, exhaustion and other difficulties.
But the point of pride was there, i twisted Retcons on its head !
Nice! Link to the rules? I wouldn’t mind adapting a oneshot myself!
I wish i could, that was stuff i homebrewed more than a decade or so ago when i was in highschool and it was convoluted like only a teenager could make it to be. Im pretty sure as a GM you would cringe your teeth off at the absurdity if 15yo me tried to explain the shit to you.
Today’s comic along with a recent post-by-post roleplay i hosted a few months ago reminded me of it.
So in the end, i cant give rules (what little i could remember would only apply to a heavily homebrewed bastardization of 3.5 afterall but i can give you the highlights and hope your GM senses can adapt it for yourself (if the whole thing dosent confuse you first lol)
Okay so here’s the gist of it.
-The truth is analoguous to the fabric of reality made spoken. Every living being understands it when spoken to with it (dosent mean the guy who spoke it will understand whatever retort his interlocutor had to say).
-Speaking The Truth means enforcing your will on the world around you throught it. When you speak, you dont give an opinion or a wish, you state a fact backed up by your conviction in said fact and reality reforms around that. e.g.: if you want to kill someone, you say “You are dead”. Problem is, your conviction in said fact has to be stronger than your target’s will to live/own conviction to stay alive. You cant just stroll around insulting people to death.
-Using The Truth is like negociating a contract with a devil, the slightest, tiniest most insignificant error in how you formulate what you say can cause unwanted side-effect. You have to be as literal and clear as possible. Think of all the times what you said didint perfectly reflect what you meant, those would have all been screwups.
-Learning The Truth is an excruciating process due to the power contained in a single word and since you cant practice aloud, its even worst (thats where the lovecraftian madness can kick in if someone’s mind cant take what theyre learning).
The parallel to Skyrim’s dragon language and Destiny’s sword-logic are pretty obvious but i made up all that in highschool. Not that its a wholle original concept.
Anyway, hope that makes you happy !
Since you cant edit messages and i just remembered it, here’s a good example.
A player had gotten stuck in what he thought might be an illusion but he had nothing to dispel it and he didint knew if he had beated the check for it. So he used The Truth to say “Is this real ?” Thats a question, not a fact, one he wasent sure of to begin with. What happened is that the power unleashed made the illusion his new “real” reality for him. He basicly imprisoned himself and it took the truther i mentionned earlier some pretty big effort to couter it. I think the guy spent the entire lunch break we had to figure out how to perfectly formulate the proper sentence to cancel the imprisonment.
Players with a lawyer’s spirit tend to love that thing.
You ever play Geek Out?
https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/141430/geek-out
I am strongly reminded of it here. That game is the purest distillation I’ve yet encountered of “let’s argue about the meaning of words” gameplay. Stuff like, “No dude. The Terminator totally counts as a cyborg!” It’s a surefire way to find out that you’ve got strong opinions about things.
I’ve had minor retcons occur. But it’s usually in situations where the consequences are something one or more players would REALLY dislike coming from a single player declaring something quickly without any thought in a case where normally they would have actually asked other people’s opinions or other characters reasonably would have had the time to respond before the GM got hasty and declared an outcome.
Basically nothing that took longer than a minute of irl time passing.
I’m having a hard time parsing that sentence. Can I get an example?
Well, i have never retconned, and i probably never will. The Exceptions are minor Stuff, like retraining this or that minor thing, roleplay a few retraining Sessions and there ya go.
As a Player i roll with the Punches however bad or good they may be. Eight Rust Monsters Charge my Fighter because i was so dumb to charge ahead? Well Damn, but that is how it is. I got dominated again? Well there i go. *Drool, drool, rolls Attack on Friends.*
I Died and can’t be ressurected? Brb rolling up a new character preferrrebly one th GM can shoehorn in easily.
If i DM i really want to work with the Players, because there are always options. Since they were all really unhappy, i would have solved the Issue as follows: I would tell him that either next Session (or soon, as soon as i can think something up if we are at the start of the Session, there will be a way to continue)
Then i would tell him that he wakes up in a Maze, in a strange Relam (Some sort of Place iside his own Mind where everything changes). A big Cat then would tell him a Riddle that proviedes a hint, and tell him that there is a way out of here. “Always in motion we stand never still. We are the Reason. We are your Greatests Weakness and your mightiest Power, and if you Master us, you will find your way home.” Of course occaisonally i would Spawn some sort of Monsters form him to Fight. Slowly with enough hints the player will Figure out that this place works via Dream Magic. (He can’t Die, Agression Summons more Monsters, sadness lets it rain. etc.)
Once he realises it’s his feelings, and he makes Peace with himself (read, he calms down enough and understands everything): The Stone suddenly slowly breaks away freeing him from the petrefication.
That isn’t in the Rules? Well in my Campaign it works like that Thank you very much. I don’t retcon, because like you said, most Players don’t like the * at the End of their Legend. But hell I am DM, i can change the entire World, and if i can think this up quick enough the Players will never know that i hadn’t planned it beforhead.
If you can pull this Xanatos Speedchess off, it will be awesome for your Players: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/XanatosSpeedChess
EDIT: Or another funnier option. Cavalier wakes up later naked and Blindfooled. Medusae are all Female right. Well they need someone to make Babies with. Congratulations. While he is waiting for rescue, i would let him try/seducing/diplomacing his way out, or whatever other clever idea he comes up with, to escape. maybe nudge him a bit into one direction.
Yeah… I’m not nudging the naked and blindfolded cavalier. That’s how you get a restraining order.
Err… I didn’t mean it like that, that nudging was actually meant more along the lones of, see if you can Diplomacy your way out, maybe those Medusae want Macguffin xyz and you can get it.
Sorry English isn’t my First Langague, and i play mostly very light hearted funny Games. Depending on the Tone of Game that solution may not be good. And of course ALWAYS Fade to Black.
Sorry if that came of as creepy, wasn’t meant that way.
No worries, man. It was a joke. 🙂
There are definitely narrative ways out of the situation, but if you as a player are feeling railroaded in the first place…. Like I said in another comment, it’s tough to be fully happy about any given solution in this kind of situation.
Phew. Well yeah bad Situations are bad Situations. That Stuff happens, as long as the Players don’t Lynch the DM he can continue.
Haven’t been in a tabletop game that’s lasted long enough for this to come up but I make extensive use of savescumming whenever I play a computer rpg where I can figure out a way to do it
(btw, if anyone knows of a third-party program that can generate restorablesavestates of levels in progress for Wasted or Enter the Gungeon I’d love to know about it because I’m sick of the first level of those games)
It’s weird, but I think that there’s a genre expectation of saving and retrying in CRPGs that just isn’t the same in TRPGs. I wonder why that is?
No I mean like even in roguelikes and stuff, like copying the save directory in Dwarf Fortress
NPC gave the party some unidentifiable potions once with the instructions of „drink this at point X“ we did, nothing happened.
Behind second next door TPK happened.
when the last player passed out we woke up…
That’s actually really clever. “Potion of Save Point” could be a neat device in a high difficulty campaign.