Wraith Form said:
For all my days on this board, I haven't actually DM'ed very much, so I'm in a similar boat as cbomb.
Using the above quote, this raises an entirely different question in my mind, one that came about from personal experience several years ago: what happens when the mistake you make is actually a PLOT mistake, not a "math" mistake (math mistake = CR too high for party, forgetting that party has an average of 3 hit points left and they've just woken a dragon, etc)? What happens when the DM is....basically not very smart/bright/wise compared to his players?
I ran a game where I had a cool idea (I thought) and had a villain steal something. During the game, as I was describing the crime scene, one of my players looked up and said, "That was kind of a dumb way for the thief to steal (__ insert item here __) by climbing up the roof. Why didn't he just walk in the door over here and (blah blah blah)....?"
When I sat there and listened to the player, my jaw dropped & I realized with horror that the player was right, and that I'd created a whole series of clues just because the villain'd "look cool" breaking through a trap door on the roof or whatever. That my carefully constructed plot was demolished in approx. 20 minutes of game time. This wasn't elaborate. This wasn't complex. This was a foolish mistake. Because I was an idiot!
I recovered from this and continued on with the game (barely) by making up an obvious and rather transparent excuse. The players, to their credit, were pretty cool about understanding that the way the crime was committed was less important that who was being stolen from & what was being stolen. In fact, the theft was supposed to lead up to the "real" adventure....
But that's one small example of several adventure ideas that I've come up with where I just simply did not have the foresight or--let's face it--smarts/brains/knowledge/intelligence/common sense to create an effective, logical plot that players didn't find a flaw within.
Any advice? (Yeah, I know--"Don't DM".)
Since I wrote "the above quote", I'll toss in my 2cp.
Plot mistakes happen. Of course it is best to have a well-thought out plot, but few of us are actually the intellectual match for our "evil genius" BBEGs. So how do you deal with it?
Option 1) Just let it drop. If the mistake doesn't sidetrack the campaign and your players aren't having a fit, maybe it's not a big deal. The goal is to have fun, not produce an Oscar winning movie script. Inconsistency will happen. Gloss over it and move on.
Option 2) "Look at the kitty!"... Distract the players from your mistake. This is a cheap tactic, but it sometimes works well. If the PCs are punching holes in your story, get their attention on something else until you have a chance to think of something or the players just plain forget about it. For major gaffes, this is merely a way to buy time while most players will overlook minor plot screwups the minute something starts inflicting damage on them.
"Very interesting conclusions about the theft folks... can you all give me one Spot and one Listen roll each? Just tell me your total roll..."
Option 3) "Yeah, that's the ticket!"... Rewrite your story to accomodate the error. If the crime was committed in a dumber way than it should have been then maybe it wasn't your original NPC robber who commited the crime in the first place. Maybe he got there after the fact and is looking for the sadsack who somehow pulled the heist first. Or maybe this original NPC isn't quite as impressive as you made him out to be... perhaps he's just someone's mook instead of being a major NPC. Or maybe he's actually just not too bright. Rewrite your backstory to accomodate the discrepency in some way. Let the inconsistant detail stand as is but find a way to explain it in time. If the first two options aren't viable, this is probably your best bet. Tweak your backstory and the players will never know.
Option 4) "And now for something completely different!"... If your story is utterly pooched, consider dumping it and moving the campaign in a different direction. This requires the most work. It means dumping your existing campaign material in part or in whole and going on a tangent. Save this for extreme cases when nothing else will save the campaign.
Option 5) "I meant to do that!"... Some DMs consider this "cheating", but one option (particularly valid with really smart NPCs) is to retroactively decide that the NPC did it all intentionally to lead the PCs down a particular path. The mistake becomes an intentional deception, either to make the PCs do something in particular or to lead them to underestimate their foe. Perhaps the nefarious villain is really setting the PCs up for a fall. The aspect of this method that bothers people is the idea of retroactively deciding that the NPC was smart enough to predict the eventual behaviour of the PCs (did you follow that?). In other words, even if the DM can't predict the PCs' behaviour, he assumes that his supersmart villain (e.g. an Int 30 lich) could predict the actions of "these simpletons" and therefore the DM constantly rewrites the lich's actions and goals after the fact to represent this super-intelligence. This differs from rewriting the story, where you might change something in the background to make things make sense -- here the focus is on rewriting in such a way that the NPC miraculously outsmarts the party after they, in truth, outsmarted you. This technique should be used sparingly at best since it denies players a suitable reward for their clever thinking. Occasionally used to further the plot, this can work, but if it is overdone it will feel forced, frustrating and petty. :\
