Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 401838" data-attributes="member: 4937">"If you are in the middle of a combat and the fighter tells you he rolled 14, 12, 9, and 15 points of damage over the course of 4 rounds of combat and the cleric at that point says. "John (the fighter), did you include the +1 damage from the prayer that I cast in the first round?" If John responds no, do you add the 3-4 extra points of damage to the creature the fighter is facing? If not, why not?"This is a prime example of why I don't retcon.   Depending on my trust in John, I might add 4 damage to the creature if that means that it still hasn't dropped, but in my experience neither I nor John can reconstruct what he originally rolled to verify whether he had indeed been failing to take into account the clerics prayer spell.  As a DM, THIS IS NOT MY MISTAKE.  This is John's (though I would try to catch it since I try to be familiar with each players damage bonus).   Adding 4 damage in if it doesn't change the prior events of the combat is no biggy, but if it means that the creature dropped back in round 3 and everything in the past round has to be redone, forget it.  Next time, keep track of your bonuses better players.  Another problem is that John will ALWAYS be tempted at the least to respond 'No'.   Depending on John's character, he might always respond 'No' no matter what he originally did.  I can't check his work at this point, and I'd rather just remove that temptation from him entirely.   Another problem is that Bob the Cleric has just gone OOC.   If I allow this to become common place, players will be strongly tempted to always try to come up with things that other players might have forgotten in order to gain every little advantage that they can.  Even if I concede to only 1 in 10 such requests, you can gaurantee someone will spend most of his time meta-gaming instead of gaming and my combats will be intersperced every few seconds with 'Did you remember to apply...', 'Did you remember that my character has...', 'I forgot to add in the...', and 'I cast magic missile at the darkness', and other silly garbage.And we will never stay IC.Think of the 'never retcon' rule as being alot like the 'Illegal Proceedure' rule in the game of Blood Bowl.  When you are first trying to learn the game, it seems to be the most frustrating and unfair rule immaginable.  However, after you play the game awhile you realize that if the IP penalty wasn't so huge, that players would not only be more lax and less careful than they are (resulting in confusion and arguements), some players would always be trying to cheat, and the result would be ultimately that the game would be less fun than it is.  'No retcons' might sound at first to be completely unreasonable, but I think if you try it you might find out why I use it.</blockquote>

Verification