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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lanefan" data-source="post: 9479538" data-attributes="member: 29398">One could fudge it such that the murder took place after Celesta last left her stronghold, sure.  Or - given that this is being driven by a dice roll anyway - one could choose not to fudge and let the dice fall where they may.  IMO the latter is the high road, but in situations like this it can lead to other problems.The solution is to maintain sequentiality.  If there's a spy in the stronghold, that needs to be known by the DM up front such that the spy's actions can be any or all of foreshadowed, telegraphed, tracked, discovered, acted upon, etc. without having to retcon anything.Those writers usually have the rather large advantage of knowing in advance how everything turns out in the end, meaning they can do whatever's necessary to make sure things arrive at that end at the required time (i.e. the last show of the season).Taking this approach to running an RPG would, I suspect, quickly lead to charges of raliroading; and in this case I'd agree.The butterfly effect would suggest otherwise.  I've seen times where trying to retcon what seems like the most trivial of things into the established fiction has had the potential for enough major knock-on effects to the fiction generated since that point to make the retcon impossible.Example:Original fiction has a character building a pub with the party's help; the pub is finished on Auril 2 whereupon the party immediately goes off adventuring.Some time later (6 months in real time, 2 months in game time) the player says "Wait - I meant to hire staff for the pub before we left!"  "OK," says I; "that would have added 2 days to the process, meaning you left on the 4th instead."Trivial change, right?Well, hang on now.  If they left 2 days later that bumps everything they did after that ahead by 2 days, meaning that instead of meeting the King on their return on Auril 23 they now would meet him on the 25th...except he dies on the 24th and this death on that date has already had material effects elsewhere not just for this party but for other characters and parties as well.And suddenly something that initially seemed trivial has become very messy indeed.  And so, having seen this sort of thing before, my-as-DM initial response to the player's attempted retcon would be quite different than what I put in the example. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></blockquote>

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