A gm's mistakes...

[garhkal]

Kind of linked to an old thread of mine in which i asked what happens if a player made a mistake (eg forgot someting on his cha sheet that caused him to die)..

What do you when in game you realise something that happened, say last session or even longer, was bad, due to you mistaking a rule/roll/score etc>?>

For note this is not of me, i am bringing this over from Dragonsfoot (an adnd site) where someone asked it.. His example from an ADND perspective was say last week during one of the combats you rolled 3d6 for a critter during a combat and cause of it, 3 of the table died.. BUT they all moved on and you are now into a different situatio, but now you realise you mistook the dice and it should back then have only been say 2d6 or less...

For a starwars example, lets say it was a critter that caused say 5d+2 damage, but you mistook it as saying 6d+2.... or something akin to that.


Do you rewind time? Do you give their new characters a bonus to offset what happened? Do you do something else?? Do you just explain your mistake and go on from there???????
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[vong]

Personally I go by the theory that players make mistakes, and GM's make mistakes. I have had things go both ways. A player forgets he is not wearing his armor, and adds it to his resist roll. I also make mistakes both ways, for and against them. So in the end, it will even out. I will rewind one or two rounds, but not further then that. Mistakes happen, live with it. My players usually are happy with this, keeps the game going good, and they will rarely tell me when I make a mistake in their favor anyway, so why should I rewind to fix a mistake against them
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[Ankhanu]

Yup, people make mistakes sometimes... so be it. GM and players should be mature enough to move on and accept it, and be more careful in the future, or if it's less concequential, retcon it to be what should have happened if everyone agrees. There isn't a hard and fast rule for what should happen, but in general, simply accept and move on is the best rule of thumb.

[Gry Sarth]

Rewinds (or "undos" as we call them) are extremely rare in our games. In fact in over a decade of gaming I can't remember more than two or three times that happened. We would never undo a scene because of a wrong rule or wrong amount of dice, that doesn't really matter. We only hit the undo button when we forgot something from the story which later on made the last scene completely incongruous. And even then it was only the last half hour of play or so, we would never undo something from a past session. Our biggest undo was one time when we overdid it and kept on playing through the night into the morning, way past our mental and physical capabilities at the time. The result was that everyone, Gm and players were making all sorts of stupid decisions, coming up with very weak plans and the whole game was crumbling to pieces. Once we realized nobody had handled anything the right way for a couple of hours we all decided that all that shouldn't have ever happened. We erased that bit of the adventure and did it the right way the next day.
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"He's Gry Sarth, of course he has the stats for them."

[Esoomian]

Generally if I make some sort of mistake that penalizes someone unfairly I'll slip them a couple of character points if it's a big one but if it's just minor I usually trust in the fact that at some point a mistake will be made that balances it out again later (and so far it's worked pretty well)

I don't rewind time unless I really REALLY can't avoid it.
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[ifurin]

i've never had a "bad" (involving character deaths or whatnot) mistake like that before. if i did make like that and not catch it for a while, well, se la vie. it should add to the stories like; remember the time when jo-jo tried to take on that monster on haptesfro? what a waste of a good man. sometimes you get to the point where you cannot take back a roll.

[K21DUBIE]

Mistakes happen, I usual openly admit that I made a mistake, if it got someone killed and give them a choose to make it right. Other then that I never admit it until well after the adventure. Usually mistakes do not affect the game all that much so we just deal with it, and move on.

[Orpheus]

If you want that level of detail then perhaps D&D 3.5 is for you. Mistakes happen so just roll with it and continue playing. If someone gets really upset by it then you probably wouldn't want to socialize with that person.
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"He is a very shallow critic who cannot see an eternal rebel in the heart of a conservative."-G.K. Chesterton

[Jedi Skyler]

I had a GM mistake happen when I was a player in a Shadowrun game. I was running my own Rigger, and our Street Shaman's player decided to go upstairs with his girlfriend, so he handed his character sheet over to me. I'd never played a shaman before and was really looking forward to it cuz I was fairly new to the game, but not these players (this was the group that introduced me to SWD6). Anyway, we kept rolling along.

Our group got attacked (jacked up, rather) by what we found out LATER was an earth elemental. It pulled a major attack on the street shaman (an eight foot tall Egyptian with a one foot tall purple mohawk), surrounding him basically in a cocoon of earth and commenced its constriction attack on him. As I said before I was unfamiliar with playing this kind of character; several times I asked what the heck this was before one of the other players said, "Oh, s@#t, that's an earth elemental!!!" Once THAT little tidbit of VITAL information came out, one of the other players said, "Dude! Use your totem and fight that thing!!!" So I did, with the GM's help, because as I said, I didn't know how to play this kind of character yet.

I made a valiant effort for two rounds against this thing...before it converted me into a grease spot about six or seven feet below the ground. Everyone said, "Man, Eric's gonna be PISSED..." He actually took it rather well, and even the GM said, "I shoulda run that differently. A shaman would have been very likely to recognize the attack; I should have given you a knowledge check on that one; you could have started the totem attacks much sooner."

As I recall, even THAT blunder was not undone. Eric just rolled up a new character and drove on.

[vong]

lol, that does sound interesting.
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[Jedi Skyler]

Woulda been a LOT more interesting if the GM had kept in mind that I didn't know what I was doing as a player, but the character would have. It was kinda the opposite of metagaming...

[vong]

yea. I have had gm's get mad at me for asking for help with a character. "My character SHOULD know this, but i didnt, why am i getting peanilized for it...."
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[Jedi Skyler]

That's why a truly good GM will work that issue BOTH ways: don't let a character know something just because the player does, and don't penalize the character because the player doesn't know something.

Heck, if I were the slicer some of my characters were, I wouldn't NEED to play them in SWD6. Knowhutahmean?

[vong]

yea. that is the fun of roleplaying, you get to play things you dont know about and have fun
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[garhkal]

Very good point, though imo someone who is experienced at gaming but new to this template/system what ever, should have had enough sense to ask would your character have known what to do in that situation.
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