In the heat of play, sometimes a rule or bonus/malus is forgotten by GM or player, and had it been remembered, it would have changed the outcome. You succeeded your roll by 1, but should have had a -2 so it should have failed by 1, or vice versa.

What do you do about this stuff? Do you do a rewind and change things, or does it stand?

My practice when GMing is that once the next dice roll has happened, or the next scene swtiched to, all the old results stand, unless it's a matter of the life or death of a PC. I think it just gets too tedious otherwise, especially if you're using a relatively rules-heavy game.

But if some ruling was mistaken, and the PC suffered but didn't die, should they get some sort of compensation to balance it up? Or if it was mistaken, and the PC gained some boon or slew a villain, should they get some sort of penalty?

What do you lot reckon?

PS: Inspired by this similar thread on rpg.net.

If a rule wasn't important enough to have been remembered once we got to the table, then it didn't need to be there, and sure as shit doesn't warrant stopping the game to fix it, nor is it really worth worrying about.

That's the way I've always treated game rules.  I stick to the basics, and the niggly special rules and details tend to get rather deliberately ignored, because I'm just not liable to remember them anyway.  

This even finds its way into my game design.  I've found myself tossing out rules simply because I realized that they were exactly the sort of thing I'm liable to ignore in play.

Makes it tough to pad out a book to those fat hardback 400 page things that are all the rage these days, but why pay more for something you arent' going to use?  And why spend man hours on rules the players aren't going to use?

If I'm forgetting a rule or using it wrong, I'm usually doing it universally, both in the party's favor and against the party and so it balances out. Once I realize my mistake, I wait until the current scene is over, explain it to everyone, and do it correctly next time, without changing anything that previously happened.

The only caveat is player death. If a player dies as a direct result of a misused rule, I'll retcon the story so that he was merely incapacitated/taken out/wounded and not completely gone.

Fudge happens.  Stopping a game to look up a rule generally sucks all the momentum out of a game, so I try to avoid it when at all possible.  If a spot-rule or a simple mistake cost someone dearly, then I try to rectify the situation in a way that's fair to them and fair to everyone else (and, in a tertiary way, fair to the integrity of the game "world.")

Ultimately it's a game instead of a story or anything like that, so if we absolutely gotta call a do-over, we will.  YMMV.

I'm with you on this one, JimBob; unless a PC is seriously screwed over by the error, I'll let it stand.

(I'm possibly even more lenient than you on this: as well as matters of life and death, I'd also be willing to consider fudging if the error has screwed over the PCs in some permanent manner - caused their headquarters to burn to the ground, made them lose their job, exposed their secret identities to the world, whatever.)

I won't actually retcon per se, though; I'll just massage events so that things get back on track. Someone realises that the supposedly-dead character is still breathing, just, and manages to heal them, the damage to HQ wasn't as bad as it first seemed, the PC is reinstated in their old job, a friendly NPC fabricates "proof" that the PC couldn't possibly be Fantastic Man which convinces the general public, etc.

Yeah, I'm not too keen on redoing things once intervening actions have passed. It's not like if you re-do things, you are re-creating it as it would have happened; players' actions will be affected.

Not to mention, once a battle has passed, the moment is gone. It seems like you that you are just going disrupt the flow of the game. I have another "table rule" that if you can't find a rule in a short time (arbitrarily, 30 seconds), make something up and move the game along, and look up and learn the real rule later so you know better next time. If I'm not willing to sacrifice the flow of the game for some over-inflated sense of rules fidelity in that instance, I don't see why I should rewind battles to correct a rules error.

If a PC suffers as a result, I might make it up to them in other ways (easy ressurection or healing, a hint, etc.) rather than rejigger the flow of events.

We just try to get it right next time, for the most part.

As long as the error didn't result in a play-stopping gaffe, this is where I announce to everyone at the table, "This is how it was supposed to be. We won't be making this mistake again, will we?"

!i!

Shit happens, move on. The big problem is when a PC dies, though: if the mistake is discovered shortly after it was done, you can always do a bit of retconning. If it was discovered, say, after several gaming sessions, then too bad.

Quote from: JongWKShit happens, move on.

That's my take on it. I only get ticked off when the miss application of a rule makes the game less fun.

If it's in the near past it gets retconned. If the fight's over and it's just a matter of someone taking a little more or less damage, it gets retconned. If a PC died because of it, it gets retconned. Other than that we carry on and chalk it up to experience, sometimes with me making up for it later either with more XP, bonuses, or what have you.