I’m wrong a lot. Like, a lot. It’s a big part of the reason my first campaigns were so incredibly linear, because I couldn’t reconcile being the all-powerful expert running the game with being the guy who thought his rubber pot lid was oven-safe. I thought the DM had to be right all the time, and that included knowing how the rules worked and where the plot was going and whether using this monster was a good idea and so forth. I still kind of feel this way: Law #1 is “The DM is always right”.
But the first corollary is “But not always entirely right”. In this case, that means the DM is right, but not necessarily right now. Tabletop gaming is a storytelling medium that lets you tell stories over time, and that gives you a chance to revise earlier decisions in a way self-contained media can’t. A DM can say anything he or she wants, but also has the power to change their mind later and issue a retcon if that makes the game better.
Retcon is short for “retroactive continuity”. It’s the act of making a change to a story such that an event that already occurred instead occurred differently, and everything else in the story uses that change instead of the original version. Rather than belabor the point with further examples, I’ll just link you to TV Tropes, though I also recommend the full version of the manga page in the trope picture.
In D&D and other tabletop games, retconning is easy: the DM tells the players something happened a certain way, and that’s how it happened. It’s the equivalent of a text box in a comic book that says “From now on Superman was raised in Queens — Ed.” It very obviously breaks the fourth wall, but it doesn’t matter if it’s more heavy-handed than in other media. It’s partially because of the direct relationship between the creator (DM) and consumers (players) that other media doesn’t have, but also because the consumers are themselves creators. A player can say “I’ve decided my character is a blonde”, and everybody just accepts it without several essays of justification and a court order. Movies can’t do that, and if you disagree, please consider researching one James Bond.
The most important part about retconning something in a game isn’t how to do it, but when. Obviously it’s a terrible idea to retcon away a player’s moment of glory or something that ended up being incredibly fun. But a lot of systems also track character resources, and the more resources there are, the harder it is to back up to a time before they were expended. Fate systems may only need you to remember a few stress tracks or fate points, but in D&D you have to remember hit points, cast spells, used powers, consumed items, spent ammunition, and the like, on top of forgetting all the story changes. This is why it’s generally a bad idea to retcon a fight; too much goes into the result to change the result on the fly.* It takes a very specific kind of player or software to remember every action that occurred in a fight and set things back to how they were beforehand. The same may be true of a long skill challenge, or even exploration or interaction encounters. After all, suspense and emotional investment are resources you can spend, just ones you can’t track numerically or roll back.
There’s one exception to this: retconning a TPK. I completely understand if a party decides a particular fight was objectively bad and letting it stand ruins the campaign entirely. I usually feel there are story-based ways to get around it, to let the failure stand and roll into something else, but in some situations that just isn’t possible. Here a retcon still isn’t a good idea, but it may be the best idea among bad ones.
The DMing books I’ve read actually do recommending using a retcon for one specific case: rules questions. There’s an oft-cited example of the player who tries to do something ludicrous and it’s not immediately clear whether the rules allow or even cover it. Consider the player who wants to summon an elephant ten feet above the wizard. A DM may not know whether this is legal, and finding the section in the rules that says “you can’t summon a creature into an environment that can’t support it” can take forever, especially in the days of paper books without search functions. The books recommend the DM make a decision and use it until he has a chance to verify, usually between sessions, then use the correct rules. This is sort of a retcon in that technically things didn’t happen that way and the players are free to invent another reason the wizard suddenly took two hundred damage and became flat, but again, nobody is recommending re-running the fight without that specific action.
My retcons tend to be story-based, and for me the “when” is “whenever the decision I made affects how the game will play out for the worse.” Sometimes it’s small, like when I changed the caliphate in my current campaign to a sultanate. Between sessions one of my players pointed out how strongly caliphates were aligned to a religion, and I didn’t want that, so I changed it. Except to an especially historically, religiously, or etymologically aligned player both words mean basically the same thing, so the context shift wasn’t a problem.
The other big one we did was when the players suffered a planar travel mishap and ended up on Carceri, the plane of prisons. Carceri was the result of a random roll at the end of the session, and as we were packing up I tried to think about what I would do with Carceri next week. The answer was, unfortunately, nothing. There was no fun idea I had related to the campaign plot, and doing a side quest there would derail things just as they were starting to pick up. Instead I told the players on their way out the door that they had actually landed on Utopia, the plane of city. They had allies there, it was relatively non-hostile, and there was any chance something would happen that could lead into this campaign or another one later. By all metrics it was a better landing spot, so that’s what happened. At the next session the players faffed about on Utopia, purchased some perfectly cubic pastries, and went on their way without problem. I didn’t have to scramble for a meaningful plot, the players got to do what they wanted without random interference, and we got everything back on track much faster than we would have if we had adhered to the will of the dice.
The point of both is that they made the game better, one because it helped the plot and the other because it helped our impression of the world. That’s ostensibly the point of the retcon: something wasn’t working, so you fix it. It’s a delicate task to decide what’s worth changing and what isn’t. Most parties might decide changing “caliphate” to “sultanate” isn’t worth learning how to pronounce a second word, or they like the feel of the word better regardless of the religious connotations, or they like the connotations and want to adopt them. They can decide what they want to do with a ninety-second conversation. Bigger changes require more consideration and perhaps table-wide agreement, but the point is that it’s possible. You’re not beholden to your past decisions any more than the players are, and it’s well within your rights to change anything from an NPC’s name to the entire grappling ruleset if it’s affecting how you feel about the game.
I guess my suggestion is the same as always: talk to your players if you’re going to change anything major. There’s a chance any change that enhances your game will hurt theirs and there has to be a balance, if not a third option that makes everybody happy. But for small changes, you’re probably fine. Your players aren’t likely to judge you harshly if an NPC’s race or accent changes. The ability to adjust continuity like that is one of the advantages of this type of media, and it would be a shame to ignore it when it’s needed.
* — This said, I kind of like the idea of a campaign where the battles are intentionally ludicrously hard, where the players have to try them again and again until they succeed. Maybe something like Edge of Tomorrow where the players are stuck in a time loop, or something that mimics a video game where the players take snapshots of their characters at “save points”. But since repeating fights is intentional, those aren’t really retcons, and that’s beyond the scope of this article.
On D&D as a Brand
As I’ve mentioned before, I follow professional wrestling, and today I want to talk Sunday’s WWE event, “Hell in a Cell”. Its namesake is the Hell in a Cell match, which is the big brother of a steel cage match. It’s intended and expected to be vicious, dangerous, and often bloody. They say that anybody who goes into such a match doesn’t come out the same, assuming they come out at all. In storyline, wrestlers try to avoid it to protect their bodies and careers, and it’s saved for only the most important, feud-culminating matches.
Except that around this time every year, several wrestlers suddenly decide the Cell is the only way to resolve their differences. They don’t do it because they’re actually embroiled in important battles, or because they need to brutalize their current adversaries more than normal, or because they need to protect their matches from outside interference. They do it because it’s October. That’s the time of year when the Hell in a Cell event is, so that means it’s time to have Hell in a Cell matches. There’s no other reason besides “that’s what happens in mid-fall”.
I’m pretty convinced this is dumb. Treating the event like this is sacrificing the story for the sake of the medium. It’s like how television shows all come to a head around the end of a season, except TV shows are designed and written specifically to build their arcs for thirteen episodes and resolve them all at once. Wrestling doesn’t work like that; it’s made of several stories, all at different points and often overlapping, and hitting the “this is a blood feud now” button on multiple storylines at once does a disservice to the narrative, the viewers who expect a logical and interesting show, and the event itself by reducing it from a thing of some importance to just a thing that happens around Halloween.
So why the disconnect between what we expect and what we get? Because WWE’s goal isn’t to create a cohesive narrative, it’s something else. They tell viewers their goal is a story with conflicts expressed through specific athletic contests (“sports entertainment”), but that’s not what their goal actually is.
See, when you’re telling a story, your goal is that story. Everything else you use, from the medium and delivery to the characters and settings all the way down to the pacing and language, should be in service of that goal. If you make choices that actively disrupt the story to prop up one of its constituent parts, you’re not telling a story any more. You’re focusing on that element, and the story is just the catalyst to make that element happen.
That’s fine. But if you’re fully aware of your goal yet presenting a different goal to your audience, you’re either a cunning tactician or you’re in for trouble when that audience figures it out. It’s why so many television shows jump the shark when the male and female leads get together; the creator thinks viewers watch for the characters themselves or the snappy dialog or the actual plot, but the viewers are most interested in the will-they-or-won’t-they tension. Viewers think they’re watching the world’s slowest pre-courtship, and when the creator resolves it to focus on something else, that disenfranchises those viewers. The creator (usually) doesn’t actually tell them they’re wrong for liking the wrong thing, but it feels that way.
Regarding gaming, this disconnect between a game’s intention and the players’ knowledge of it is a running theme throughout this blog. If you’re so focused on making monsters powerful that you sacrifice the player experience, you’re not making a role-playing game about characters, you’re making a battle simulator, and you lose players who want something other than numbers. If you’re so focused on building a unique world that you lock players into prescribed roles, you’re not making a game to be played, you’re writing a script to be followed, and you lose players who want to influence the setting. If you’re so focused on making adventures for everybody, anytime that you limit how, when, and what players can do while preventing them from having any say in the overarching story, you’re not making a gaming system, you’re making a video game (and not even a modern video game, but one where you can only “touch”, “take”, “use”, and “lick” certain background objects), and you lose players who want freedom of choice. I feel very strongly that players deserve to know what a game is before they get into it, because suddenly finding out that a game (or TV show, or poem, or business, or person) isn’t and never has been what you thought is incredibly jarring.
I went through something similar recently with Pathfinder, where I finally realized that what I wanted out of Pathfinder wasn’t something the creators wanted to produce. I’m still trying to reconcile that. So you can imagine what I’m thinking now that I see D&D is doing the same thing.
The impetus for this is a smart but jarring article on Gnome Stew that basically argues D&D isn’t a roleplaying game any more, at least not in the way I want it. Part of the fun in a roleplaying game is playing a character I want to play. Based on the evidence, that doesn’t factor into D&D any more. Wizards (and, as the article says, this is probably more a Hasbro thing) is instead pushing D&D as a brand, with video games, online videos, board games, and an upcoming movie. And that brand isn’t based on letting players do or be who they want, it’s about pulling them into a unified, approachable story.
This is a weird place for me. I cut my teeth on 3E, which had various splatbooks with classes, feats, equipment, monsters, and new rules. 3.5E did the same, and so did 4E, and so does Pathfinder. There was a regular stream of new options to expand what I could do as a player and as a DM. In 5E that’s gone, replaced by the DMs Guild, which is somewhere between “third-party publisher” and “my personal Geocities page” in terms of quality. When I heard about the DMs Guild I was excited for what it meant for the hobby and the direction of future publications, but now I see there aren’t any “future publications”. I didn’t expect the SRD to come at the expense of official content, and I’m incredibly disappointed that I may never hold a D&D book in my hands again.
Wizards is still publishing material, of course. But it’s all adventure paths, per the Paizo model. If you want something you can run in your own game, Wizards is not interested in your interest. And it’s all in Forgotten Realms or Ravenloft, so if you prefer another setting or your own, the same applies. None of it is intended to let players do what they want. As with the WWE, it’s intended to bring players into the story Wizards wants them to want.
I’m not going to go so far as to say D&D isn’t a roleplaying game any more. I’m not that alarmist. It still is, but a far more limited one than it has been in previous versions. It’s more a gateway to a shared multimedia franchise. That’s fine from a business perspective, but it’s not what I want. I don’t want a brand, I want a game that gives me enough freedom to tell the stories I want, and the only way I can do that is by giving up on the system as written and making my own version of it.
Again.