Tuesday is gaming day here at Frothing-at-the-Mouth.
Game WISH 24 asks:
Do you think that retroactive continuity is a good or bad thing in games? Is it a valuable GM/player tool or a cheat? Are there appropriate places for using it? Inappropriate places? How have you successfully used it or seen it used in a game? How about unsuccessfully?
A bit of digression into jargon arcana: "retcon" is short for retroactive continuity. Historically, the term first referred to the addition of backstory. E.g., Marvel's The Truth reveals previously-unknown details about what was going on before Captain America's origin. It's pretty dumb, but it doesn't actually change anything we already knew.
The term's second, dominant meaning is the changing of backstory. E.g., due to fallout from John Byrne's Superman revamp, the Legion of Super-Heroes continuity underwelt a variety of retcons, such as the change that Supergirl was not and had never been a member and any story that showed her as a member didn't happen that way.
As a consumer of someone else's continuity, I am generally indifferent to retcons of the first kind and I almost always hate retcons of the second kind.
However, in a game, it's a different question. There, no one is a consumer of continuity but a participant in creating it. Changing what happened can make a GM's job a lot easier under a lot of circumstances and it's easier for the change to be acceptable.
IME, retcons of the second kind in gaming are either very short timescale--"Oops, I forgot something, let's run the clock back a minute and here's what happened"--or transparent and behind the scenes. In the latter, the GM is rejiggering the backstory or plot for a better setup and response to what the characters are doing. In most cases, the parts of the backstory and plot that are being changed haven't been reveealed yet. Assuming the GM doesn't actually contradict himself, and because the only reason he's changing it is to make it better, retcons are a pretty useful tool.
Retcons of the first kind happen all the time in games, as the GM develops previously-undeveloped parts of the game world. One of the most successful retcons of the first kind I've dealt with was in the Champions campaign I ran with the Voyagers, when in response to Ginger's character's question, I developed a whole additional thread to the campaign history about a hidden generation of supers taking part in a cold war of superspy v. superspy. Retcons of the first kind conserve GM resources--the GM develops only what he needs when he needs it and leaves the rest to be filled in--and they incorporate player feedback--the GM develops what the players are interested in and bases it on their suggestions.
Ginger calls dealing with players' missing a session "retcons" as well, but I think that's stretching the term beyond its useful range. Now, dealing with players' missing a session is an important part of GMing, but my usual approach is to "virtualize" a character. The missing player's character accompanies the party on their travels from where they were at the end of last session to where they are at the beginning of the next session, but she's not accessible to them. She doesn't take part in fights, she can't cast spells, she doesn't have to make the Balance check or fall into the chasm; she's not there. This is obviously not part of the game, and so adjustments necessary to accomodate characters shifting in and out of virtuality aren't dealt with in game terms, so I don't think of them as retcons.
Posted by Greg at December 10, 2002 12:00 AM