Hi! I’m a new GM and these posts chronicle my learnings and musings on becoming a GM. My hope is that these help motivate or inspire others to join the ranks of GM and serve as a resource in answering the tough questions and assisting in the challenges when first starting out! I use the TinyD6 system and am running a Tiny Wastelands campaign, so these posts will typically revolve around the happenings within the campaign, what I learned, and how I you can learn from my mistakes!
Speaking of mistakesโฆ these will come up sometime in your gaming sessions. Something happened that contradicted something else that already happened. Because it already happened, you have 2 choices: you change what just happened to it’s correct in the eyes of your world’s history, or you can retcon your history to maintain continuity. This post aims at helping you handle this inevitable situation and reassure you that everything will be ok.
Do Over
Retcon stands for retroactive continuity. It’s used to ensure that events that have already happened still make sense. This happened to me in the first session when I incorrectly named a main city in each character’s background. I realized my error and panicked. I took a minute while my players were working on their character backgrounds and thought about my options. This was a luxury I had at the time as all of my players were busy working on their own characters. Should I correct the name? Should I continue using the name and just deal with any changes as the story progresses? The main city’s name should have been Glendale as it resided in a forest oasis amidst a dry desert. Instead, I incorrectly called it Elderglen… oops. I decided to stick with it as a nod to spontaneity and improvisation. I was able to adapt quickly with referring to the new name (I already had to correct them in this post!). The new name felt right. My players had already attached themselves to it. So, I tucked the original name away for another location if necessary. Recycling ideas for the win!
Learning
Also in the first session we were all learning the combat system. Many mistakes were made on remembering status effects, abilities, actions in a turn, what deems advantage, what deems disadvantage… Many mistakes. When someone realized a mistake, it was up to me, the GM, to handle how we fixed it. From a game mechanic perspective, we just rolled the additional advantage die to see if it would have changed the results. For disadvantage, we just left it as it was and I described a source of inspiration that negated what would have caused the disadvantage. If a change in the outcome changed (and it did), it was up to me again to describe how that took affect in the story. Combat is easy to explain away. Extra damage was dealt with the next blow, what seemed to have been a vital blow turned out to be minor, etc. The closer you are to the incident, the easier it is to retcon. I tend to favor the characters in my group as we are all new and I don’t want to punish anyone for learning. It did, however, highlight the amount of information I needed track and I ended up bringing status markers to the next session to keep track of it visually. We also discussed “Theater of the Mind” vs “Miniatures on a Map” strategies for combat. It’s ultimately up to my players to determine how they want to track the story and we discussed, before the session, both of these options. They opted for the “Miniatures on a Map” and I was grateful they did when combat did break out.
We are all still learning the system and I realized quickly that I would need to remain flexible in how I handle the players actions. I try to not railroad them in the story as this is the quickest way for players to lose interest. I also don’t want my players to stop having fun. You, as a GM, have total control on how players’ actions play out and you have the final say on all things in the world you created. You are the most knowledgeable about the world. Just remember, you are not a God in your world, you act as a judge. Judge fairly.