How consistent is your game world?

[dreaded_beast]

Have you ever found yourself being inconsitent with details in your campaign, whether it be minor or major?

I find myself thinking that when I wing something during a session, and I think it over, I realize that I could have handled it better, so I want to change a detail here and there to better fit what I had in mind, even though the PCs have already encountered it. The pain of after-thought.

I try to tell myself that the PCs probably won't even notice.

 

[Samothdm]

I find myself in that predicament all the time because I haven't codified every single detail of my campaign world. Then, a year or so after I've made a decision, I realize "Oh, I should have done it this way."

I handle it differently depending on how important it is:

1) I'd say 75% of the time I just let it go. I'm the only one that knows the difference, so who cares?
2) Another 20% of the time, I'll actually try to get creative and figure out a way to make the original decision work within my storyline or world design or whatever. I've found this to be pretty rewarding, actually because I've been able to tie together two or three things that seemed completely unrelated when I made the initial decision but now work within a bigger context of the campaign. That's kind of fun.
3) If it's a big deal and I feel it's truly important to the campaign, I'll talk with the players and apply the change moving forward. This is usually done with game mechanics rather than story elements, but I've done it with story elements before and they're usually pretty cool about it.

 

[tetsujin28]

I've never really worried about things like that, overmuch. Then again, I tend to run games in fits and starts, rather than The Campaign That Never Ends.

 

[Wombat]

I try, as GM, to remain fairly consistent with my view of the world. Is it 100% perfect? Nah, but it is close enough to fit for the consistency level of most tv dramas

 

[Stik]

Most of the time, the players will never notice if you change the name of a town or an NPC, unless there was something important about it. They are too focused on staying alive and accomplishing their goals than in how many children the Lord Mayor of Lerxtwood has.

By the same token, however, make sure not to change anything that they will be likely to miss later. If you have mentioned that the Lord Mayor of Lerxt has one infant daughter and five sons, do not have the players invited to the daughter's wedding a month later (unless of course, it is one of those bizarre arranged marriages where infants are wed to establish a connection between families, a situation not unheard of in medieval times).

 

[francisca]

They are too focused on staying alive and accomplishing their goals than in how many children the Lord Mayor of Lerxtwood has.

Heh. Rush fans are easy to spot.

On topic: My homebrew was very consistent as I had spent about a year creating it, making notes on tendencies of major nations and key persona. Using these notes, I was able to make a solid, consistent decision on how a person or group would react to the PC's action. On the other hand, I didn't go absolutely nuts and detail everything. I left my self plenty of leeway.

The other key: Assume everything the PCs do will be unexpected.

Currently, I'm running a Greyhawk campain based out of the 83 boxed set. I'm onlu concerned with the western nations, and will pretty much just wing it.

 

[ThirdWizard]

Generally, my inconsistancies turn into conspiracies.
>_>
<_<
shhhhh....

 

[reason]

...

Well, I'm good at hanging things together post-facto, so I encourage inconsistancies. The trick is in keeping track of what the PCs know because they've seen it, or what they know because they've heard of it or think they know it. Almost anything can be written off to myth, legend, rumor, outright lying and unreliable witnesses - it makes for a much more interesting game, if you ask me.

Reason
Principia Infecta

 

[diaglo]

my world is incontinent. it Runs all over the place.

 

[fusangite]

There may be a lot of perceived flaws or downsides to my peculiar style of world building and running games but the result of many of my peculiar and controversial GMing practices is to make worlds that are as self-consistent as fantasy worlds can get. Because I try to ensure that there is complete systematic harmony among rules, setting and story through a world-building process that conflates all three things, I think I am pretty safe from internal inconsistency rearing its ugly head.