Exchange of Realities

This one comes from a discussion I had with my coworkers this evening, in which we finalized the history of an important place in one of our campaign paths.

One of the biggest problems with this, as we soon found out, is that we already had material written for one adventure that might conflict with, or at least not quite mesh with, the backstory we were discussing. Now, for us this wasn’t a problem; since we haven’t published anything yet, we still had plenty of time to pencil in the changes and make adjustments as necessary. And for an author, it’s just as doable, even until the end of the storyline; one just needs to be thorough in looking for points that need revisions.

But when changing history in games, it’s a lot more difficult. It’s common knowledge that you can’t make sure a history is completely perfect before you turn the players loose on the world; if you do that, odds are you’ll never actually begin. So we have to begin the game with an incomplete history, and fill it in as we go; if we get a good idea, it gets incorporated.

The problem is that the players aren’t you, and while many game groups appear to have the attention span of a goldfish and the short-term memory of a 2-year-old, this is rather selective. If it is at all inconvenient to you for someone to remember that you already used a name for an NPC, or that the history went differently the last time they heard it, or that the woman in the story wore a white veil and not a red one, they’ll remember it, even when they’ve forgotten what their current objective is or what they can do with this information.

But history changes after the story’s begun can be highly useful—it isn’t that uncommon for someone to discover a second explanation for an event that doesn’t fit the original, or add a character who requires a tiny bit of shuffling in the past in order to have proper verisimilitude, nor for that change to be overall beneficial to the story.

So when is it safe to change history?

• When the history hasn’t been contradicted, particularly if it makes previously confusing information make sense. For instance, I led off my first game with the information that the primary antagonist had stolen things in two classes—a certain kind of magical item, and books on demon summoning. Only I realized halfway through the story that everything else I knew about him implied that he wouldn’t need books on demon summoning, and it wasn’t until around the time of his death at the hands of the PCs that I figured out what the books are for. Since I never said anything about his motivation in stealing the things beforehand, I was able to edit that fact in cleanly and make it look like I’d known that all along.
• When the history is from a potentially unreliable source. Books can be changed, oral histories can be misremembered—as long as you’ve got a good explanation of why the first history they heard is wrong, you can get away with a lot of past-fudging.
• When the history contradiction is extremely minor, and could be explained as misremembering, or a biased viewpoint. (Note: what is extremely minor to one group may be pretty major to a different one; assigning one NPC’s name to a different NPC generally does not fall under this category of circumstances.) In this case, it isn’t really false, just misunderstood or misremembered. Use this sparingly.

What about when you can’t?

• When you know beyond a shadow of a doubt that it would directly conflict with events that had already happened, and you can’t explicate that contradiction.
• When there’s a character plan based on the original history or information, and they have no reason to believe it might have veracity issues. There is nothing quite as annoying as having an entire plan rendered moot, or an achievement rendered worthless, because the GM decided another version of the events was more shiny. Exceptions can be made if you can find enough things that occurred beforehand that it fits with to constitute foreshadowing, though it is highly recommended that you avoid this if at all possible; screwing the players over for a plan based on information that changed five minutes ago is a downright jerkish thing to do. (Basically—if they should have been able to see what happens because of the change coming, and things would have been different if they’d seen it coming, don’t do it.)

In sum—don’t reject ideas just because they’re not the original plan, but do know when it’s too late to change a point of history. It’ll save you a lot of irritation down the road.