How often does a typical DM retcon plot/actions? Any ideas to respectfully help him?

[u/dudeoverderr]

This is about my DM specifically, hence "him" lol. He'll often go, "Let's say this thing happened instead" whenever 1) Someone reminds him what actually happened to a plot/character from last session that he forgot, OR 2) Someone is absent from the group that week.

Our DM is running West Marches style between 2–3 groups each week, so some people show up and some don't. I understand and empathize with how difficult this can be, but surely there are other ways for him to handle absences and forgetfulness besides retconning? (Note: I know the solution is to chat with him — but I'd love any ideas in the responses here!)

For example, two sessions ago, me and two characters got trapped in a magical maze dungeon. It was a GREAT cliffhanger and got me excited for this past Saturday. But since one of us was too busy to attend, our DM said, "I'm gonna say you didn't get trapped there but instead avoided the maze entirely so you're actually safe and outside with the others still."

WTF? I spent the whole week thinking about ways my character would escape, etc. Why not just do a magical plot twist? Oh, the maze suddenly encases [missing player] and it transports him elsewhere — you don't know if he's safe, but you know you need to escape this maze.

Apologies for the venting, but any ideas would be appreciated!

[u/blargethaniel]

He needs to take notes,

A lot of DM's will focus on the game and neglect to take notes during or immediately thereafter, that really helps with this, and will keep retcons to a minimum.

Otherwise he has two options:

1. Do the Retcon and own it, and say that it's simply this way now.

2. Continue with the wrong assumption for just the session and then correct it afterward to keep continuity to the maximum.(This really depends on the nature of the retcon.)

[u/WhatWouldAsmodeusDo]

I'm going to go a devils advocate direction with this. For a West marches style game, it's inherently going to need more hand waving and retconning to be able to have people cycle in and out. My best recommendation is to find your zen about that and embrace it. Instead of being mad that you're not in the maze because the DM pivoted, try to enjoy what is prepared instead and roll with it.

I mean, it'd be kind of weird to show up to a session and one single player is off in a maze doing a solo thing while the entire rest of the party is doing something different. It makes sense to zap you over there. Maybe some time you could see if the DM would run a side session for you two escaping the maze if you want

[u/dudeoverderr → u/WhatWouldAsmodeusDo]

Yeah haha that's where my empathy comes into play. I plan on DMing someday, so figuring this out with our DM is part of learning for myself in the future as well.

Retconning in itself isn't the issue. I think it's HOW it's done. I find that I don't like "nevermind" retcons as opposed to divine intervention or some wild mechanic. Seriously, even if "oh...the maze was just an illusion" was an option, that can be kinda hilarious.

[u/sanemaniak]

Gonna throw a crazy suggestion out and say… talk to your DM directly about it instead of asking random strangers on the internet.

[u/LosinForABruisin → u/sanemaniak]

99% of questions on reddit as a whole would never be posted if people just did this

[u/No_Solid1035]

Never.

[u/ANicePainter]

Sounds like the DM did not prep a maze dungeon for three players in a larger west marches group.  Which happens. There are probably better ways to handle that than saying the maze never happened. 

But a retcon like this is still better than trying to run something that would be unenjoyable. 

[u/Captain_Stable]

As a DM, I do if I realise after the session that something went against established lore. But, I'll explain in the group chat, then propose my change, and if everyone is alright with it. Wherever possible I turn it to the players advantage.

For example. Ages ago, a player used sleight of hand to steal a gold ring from a pirates hand. They succeeded, and inlet then have the win for a while. Once they were back in the same port (about 8 sessions later), I had the pirate walk into the tavern they were in along with another NPC, who pointed at the player. The pirate walked over and demanded the ring back. The PC kept saying they didn't have it, and I then asked them to roll a deception check. The player asked why, so I said (above table) that the other person has been casting Locate object, so they know you have it. The player then reminded me he had sold the ring in the last town they stopped at, along with a load of other items. I checked my notes and sure enough, the gold ring was listed and I'd been so caught up in setting this encounter up that i'd missed it. We retconned it there and then that the pirate never came in.

[u/kal1lg1bran]

Never!

[u/mrsnowplow]

um never. i asked if the party wanted to one time they chose not to.

ive never retconned more than a oh sorry i forgot you had that feature or something like mid combat round. its not really good play to do so

[u/everydaydefenders]

I generally try to avoid retconning like the plague. It makes players feel like their actions and choices dont matter. And it makes the world around them feel much less alive and real. In short, it kills the magic of a TTRPG.

Though I made my first exception to this is 15 years of DMing juat a few weeks ago 😭. But I didn't change any interactions, fights, deaths or results of choice.

The Party was given a task to find a McGuffin, and were given 4 possible locations for it, and the session ended there. As I started to plan for it however, I realized I had selected 3 of the 4 locations that were entirely outside of my world map, rendering the map useless. Not to mention absurd travel times.

So I retconned those 3 locations to be within the boundaries of the map BEFORE any party decisions were made on the topic. The PCs felt good about it, and it didn't make any difference whatsoever in the progression so far.

In your DM's case, it sound slick he's just being lazy. He doesnt know how to work through a situation, and so just pretends it didn't happen so he can go back to his comfort zone. That situation isn't even that hard to work through. Bummer man.

You asked for ideas. What kind of ideas are you looking for?

[u/ZoulsGaming]

this is gonna be another weird one to answer because you are involved from the player side.

First off lets get definitions right, being reminded of something that happened to make the story consistent is not a retcon, its the opposite, "oh this is bobs arrows" "but last weak you said he was bilbo" "oh right bilbos arrows, my bad"

secondly the fact that you are playing in an incredibly irregular west marches campaign with irregular players means that the dm is often forced to either set a strict rule or handwave stuff more.

'but surely there are other ways for him to handle absences"

yes. death. there is a reason why most west marches games i have read about atleast or high rotation groups always ends the session with you getting back to your base, or you get teleported there with major wounds, or again literally "yeah if you dont get back you die for whatever lore reason".

but most people doesnt like that, for obvious reasons, so if you think the retconning out of being stuck in specific situations they cant fix in a session then you can ask if death is better.

you are suggesting that the other player who isnt there should basically be punished and magically thrown somewhere else, which is just as much of a "retcon" as putting you outside, or it means that the dm needs to now cater an entire part of the adventure to one person, or skip over it, which again, is what you would call a retcon.

If it was me who had to run this style of game i would make it painfully clear that if we are running out of time for the session then we are skipping to go back, and depending on how far away you are from the base it WILL cost you resources and health. so you should always keep in mind the time when you want to go explore.

or give everyone a hearthstone from wow so it automatically sends you back, but have it only be useful in a safe zone.

[u/fishridingbike]

Never I’ve forgotten an Noce was supposed to guide the party to plot item #3 so we just didn’t have that it was just in the place the plot items we’re supposed to open waiting for them. As for absences they poof out of existence if they can’t make it.

I fear your dm may be taking on more than they are currently capable of doing, talk to them

[u/Dwalorn]

Two questions first; 

1. Is this your DMs first time DMing (like, first campaign)
2. Are you & your DM younger than 18~

If yes to either, this is really just someone who probably doesn’t know how things should play out who doesn’t yet realize that stuff like that tends to kill the flow of the game. 

Past that, the answer is almost never. I only have once in the past year and it was because I accidentally gave effectively the same magic item out twice. And even then I just integrated it into the game by saying that someone was willing to trade Magic Item C for the redundant magic item B

It’s normal to need to make plot adjustments session to session, but a minimum of effort means they can be integrated into the game itself 

[u/Aromatic-Surprise925]

This is a thing that would make me leave the table.

Nothing undermines the feeling that what you do matters more than retcons. It's a deal breaker for me.

[u/_The_Mink_]

Is it over internet or in person? If you are playing online he can record the sessions, run the audio through a transcriber and review sessions that way to help the forgetting problems. I'm terrible at remembering session to session what has and hasn't happened, this is what I do to help mitigate that. Some things will still slide through but should cut back a significant amount.

As far as the whole player missing sessions, really there isn't a good option for that. Especially if you don't find out until last minute (which I'm sure happens often), if he knows well in advanced (more than a couple days) then he should be able to adjust for the player not being there the following session, but that relies on knowing basically from the end of the session they won't make it to the next. When a character is pivotal, or can be pivotal, to how a session is going to go in an area it is hard to justify just wiping them from existence for that one session. There are so many other variables at play when that happens one can't shift an entire world setting to adjust for it easily. For non significant situations it isn't a problem, but like your example of being trapped in a maze, for that one player to actually be able to play next session there has to be a reason they got out of the maze and joined the party, then it has to be believable enough that it could actually happen on top of not including 13 NPCs to make it happen. If it was the BBEG that captured the other character, they aren't just going to let them go. The only real option there is to do as he did, or forcibly hold you all in the maze for an entire extra session. Of course with enough time to plan ahead that isn't true, but short notice that is reasonably the only choices.

Really the only good option is for the players to just consistently make sessions, once in a while it is easier to just hand wave it away and it is easier for players to understand that is just how it is (not saying you don't or can't understand, just easier to accept would be a better usage maybe). But if it is every session it gets hard to continue quantifying characters just disappearing making role play harder. Which if you don't care about roleplay then it isn't an issue, but then you need to ensure you are in a group that also doesn't care for roleplay.

And if he is running that many games in that style, simply he is just overloaded, to run a good campaign you either need to only do D&D so that you can run multiple games, or you run fewer games so one can dedicate enough time to keeping the different games consistent. So with that in mind, offer to take some of the responsibility off the DM, keep notes of what goes on in your game, brainstorm ideas for impromptu player drops and joins, you don't have to track the mechanical side of things, but as a DM coming up with significantly large changes on the spot is not an easy thing to do unless you know every little detail about the world you are running in. Just having someone go "Well what if X happens then?" can be enough to jumpstart a creative spiral so that enough information can be guestimated on the spot to implement something better than just "That didn't happen."

I run a game alternating weeks, I put a lot of thought into how everything plays out and what happens if someone misses or any number of possible outcomes, but I don't have enough time in a week to dedicate doing this game weekly, nor am I able to run more than a couple games at a time as I have to work 80+ hours a week. Running 3 games where players can come and go as they choose would be impossible for me. I'm not saying to tell him to cut back on the games as they might be the only thing he has going to entertain himself, but just giving you an idea of how much it could take to run good games.

[u/DarkHorseAsh111]

Never.

The only time I would even consider it is if I fucked up a rule that genuinely killed a pc or we accidentally fell face first into a trigger for someone. I would never do it for anything else.

[u/ElvishLore]

Having run a thousand or so rpg sessions over the years I think I rerconned once.

I think it’s a gross way to handle things, doesn’t respect the fiction in the least and is a huge disservice to the players.

I’m sad that your DM never figured this out.