Truth beyond truth

[subplotkudzu]

For those of you who have ever been a Gamemaster and who are not reading Darths and Droids (David Morgan-Mar & company's screencapture comic of the Star Wars movies), you must start. The last two strips have illuminated truths of the world as seen across the GM screen in a clear and sublime light.
http://www.darthsanddroids.net/episodes/0162.html
http://www.darthsanddroids.net/episodes/0163.html

It would behoove you to read the strip in its entirety as it contains many truths, but these two deserve a special notice.

Comments

[brianrogers.livejournal.com]

You can honestly tell me you have never, ever had the players surprise you by pointing out something from 5 sessions ago that everyone had completely forgotten but that, once remembered, radically alters the scene? You're a better (wo)man than I, Gunga Din.

In the film the pilots are shown a few times between their rescue and now, and their attack run is part of the plot. In Darth & Droids the PCs have forgotten about them completely, have no plans to make an attack on the trade federation ships and probably never even gave a thought to there being warships in the hangar. They only remembered them when the GM mentioned the ships as color in the scene. That, and the screen shots making it look like the pilots had suddenly materialized as soon as the players remembered them just made me laugh out loud. "Oh yeah, the pilots, of course they're with you....}

[drcpunk.livejournal.com]

Ah! Now I understand. Okay, given the explanatory text, I thought it was about the movie. The other strip explicitly referenced the gming angle.

I have certainly had players point out stuff I'd forgotten. Perhaps the most embarrassing example was when mnemex pointed out some abilities of an NPC that I'd toned dwon over the years, genuinely forgetting how stupidly I'd stuck on abilities.

For some reason, I'd decided that the sidhe were sorta-kinda like the unicorns in Piers Anthony's Double Exposure books, which meant that they had to have two extra shapes. Exactly why I came to this conclusion escapes me now. So, one of them, Gary Luther, could turn into an owl. That wasn't so bad, and I think, though I'm not sure, that this was before the astonishing glut of stories with boys turning into owls.

But, for some reason, I decided that he should have a more powerful shape, like, say, a hippogriff. Looking back, I just shake my head and say, "What the heck was I thinking?" I managed to forget the hippogriff bit completely, but mnemex didn't, and he assures me that Gary actually used the hippogriff form onscreen in one long ago episode. My brain sort of guesses where and when that was, but cannot bring itself to examine this too closely.

Whether or not it can be retconned away, he can't do it now. I can justify this by lots of handwaving about how the magical field of the Earth was rearranged at the end of the first Cthulhupunk game, and Gary also got bathed in serpentscience magical rays that took away his Lovecraftian outer god genetic heritage, something one could have a field day analyzing in terms of what this implies about the game world.

Less gross, but equally problematic, I gave him the ability to play magical music and do stuff like put people to sleep. This was a problem because Gary became an ally of the PCs, and, with this power, was a) too danged useful and b) capable of stealing the PCs' thunder, which should be a no-no. mnemex worked the magical music into the write up of the Regina story, but in a good way, implying that Gary's music made travel faster. You know, the musical rule: It takes only as long as the song to get to where you're going.

I think we eventually decided that he traded or sold or gave his magical musical talent away. Sidhe can do that. I don't know if we ever decided who got it. He might have sold it to one of his teachers, although he didn't quite sell all of his talent, explaining why he could use it to be cosmetically helpful in the Regina story, but not actually effective on a large enough scale to make Regina's abilities redundant.

I can probably come up with other examples, but that one is one of the most egregious.

There was also a running joke about how all of us, players and gm alike, forgot about all the NPCs who had attacked the PCs in various locations, usually hotels. The standard procedure at that point was to overpower the NPCs, tie them up and gag them, and then stick them in the closet.

And, when I played in crash_mccormick's D&D 3.5 game, like Varsuvius from Order of the Stick, my PC tended to forget he had a raven familiar.