Meta Gaming Support Blog

Question: Yo Dungeon Monkey!  Our DM has a penchant for making really complicated plots for us, our group tries to keep up with the plots and the complications our DM tosses at us but it is really hard and our DM keeps changing aspects of the plot on us as the game develops.  Some of the changes are retroactive to keep the story intact, which I understand, but others just seem to be wholesale shifts in the plots on the fly.  We’ve called him on it but the DM simply explains that “things are more complicated then they first appear” and then carries on.  Sometimes story-wise it feels like we are playing in a world made of gelatin, any suggestions on how to firm up the game world or our DMs campaign plots?

Answer: Sorry to hear that you are having two problems with your Game Master (GM) that are actually feeding each other in this circumstance, first you have the problem of plots that are highly elastic and keep getting redefined, but you also have the concurrent problem of highly complicated parts to begin with.  These two elements come together in some campaigns to create a storm of instability in plots and in any campaign with an ongoing storyline that sort of instability might hurt game play.  Players, to some degree, enjoy plots that they can understand and that follow a structure in which more and more information is revealed and then eventually you reach a sort of ‘core moment’ in the plot when it all comes together.  Now some games are built on continual intrigue and deeper layers, cyberpunk is a genre that commonly reflects this sort of twisting interlinked plotting, but even in cyberpunk you eventually find elements that are reliable forces you and your fellow players need/get to oppose and feel good about it.

The first, and most obvious solution, is that you and your fellow players need to start keeping notes on the plots as your GM reveals them to you.  Just short notes detailing the clues you uncover as you proceed through the campaign, the notable non-player characters (NPCs) that you bump into, and probably some diagrams to show how those various NPC figures link together.  Now notes will not actually stop your GM from playing around with the plots but they will give you a foundation which you can use to ask the GM what the heck is going on in the campaign world.  The cornerstone of this request for further information is not to confront the GM with your notes held aloft as a bastion against randomness, instead when the GM announces something that conflicts with what has happened in the past simply ask the GM to confirm that is really the case.  Let us say two NPC figures have been friends for several adventures and suddenly they are mortal enemies with no explanation, when the GM reveals this fact to the group point out how in the past these two NPC figures have been friends.  Either the GM will retract the story point or reply with some bit of wit such as “well now they are enemies, I wonder what happened to them.”

Update your notes and then dig into the change if you can, you want to pin down an explanation from the GM as to what has happened, dig into this newly revealed inconsistency until it is smoothed into the general fabric of what has come before in the campaign.  If the GM attempts to hand-wave away the change, do not let him or her off the hook, insist on figuring out why things have changed and insist there be a story reason for it.  The reason for this is not to be a difficult player but instead to make the GM evaluate the impact and meaning of changes like this to the campaign world created, are they part of a larger plot or simply the GM indulging in a novelty that caught his or her fancy at a random moment?  If said changes are part of a larger plot then you should be able, through dint of investigation, to figure out what is going on behind this sudden change to the world in which you have been playing.  Investigation should reveal reasons for the change.

However if all your digging merely turns up commentary about how “this is just something that happened” then you probably have a whim change and harping on its needing to make sense will discourage your GM from such random shifts in the campaign world.  But at the same time do not try to make your GM run a world that is static, a campaign, at its center, is a story and stories require change for them to have meaning.

- Dungeon Monkey

Have a question for the Dungeon Monkey?  Want to seek out some gaming suggestions?  Email Dungeon Monkey at dungeonmonkey@umich.edu and get your answers!