Some problems are so serious that they threaten the viability of the entire campaign. All is not lost – here are your choices.

‘earth energy 5’ from freeimages.com / Flavio Takemoto

The Elephant In The Gray Room is a metaphor that I have created to represent Plot Holes.

These are matters of huge significance or importance that everyone is overlooking because they are not immediately obvious, but that once you see one, you can never forget that it’s there.

This is a series about methods of fixing those plot holes so that even when they get noticed, it’s just a spur to your creativity and not a complete calamity.

In the long-awaited final part of the series, I offer four drastic solutions – in sequence of increasing severity – and re-examine solutions from the earlier parts of the series for applicability to this scale of problem. By definition, those are less severe than any of the drastic solutions, so that’s the place to start. Once I dive in, I don’t intend to slow down, and I’ll be presuming that you’ve read the first four parts of the series.

Just in case you haven’t, and want to get caught up, there are links at the bottom of the page, but for convenience:

• The Elephant In The Gray Room, Pt 1 of 5: Introduction (5926 words)
• The Elephant In The Gray Room, Pt 2 of 5: Minor Repairs (1845 words)
• The Elephant In The Gray Room, Pt 3 of 5: Significant Repairs (4307 words)
• The Elephant In The Gray Room, Pt 4 of 5: Major Structural Repairs (2607 words)

Total: 14,665 words

Solutions from Part 2

Minor Repair Technique #1: Ignore the problem

Not everyone reacts to these things with equal intensity or in the same way. If your players seem able to live with it, then it’s you that has the problem. My first preference, on discovering this sort of issue, is always to ignore it until I have a really good plot idea for making it go away.

Minor Repair Technique #2: Acknowledge and ignore

When it comes to more serious problems, this approach is fraught with danger. Assess the situation and choose the previous technique or escalate the situation.

Minor Repair Technique #3: Depth Of Character

Not really a viable choice when the plot hole is this deep.

Minor Repair Technique #4: NPCs are humanoid, too

Ditto, but may have limited applicability. More likely to be re-framed as “The Gods Have Feet Of Clay”. And, usually, very good PR.

Minor Repair Technique #5: Retroactive Explanation

This has limited but undeniable utility in such situations – sometimes. The advice offered in Part 2 regarding this solution holds up, but at this scale of problem, the technique will more often fail the tests described than not.

Minor Repair Technique #6: The Wisdom Of Players

This approach has limited application – when you genuinely can’t think of a solution, and there are no other GMs you can bounce ideas off, getting the players to help you brainstorm a solution is better than nothing. Be prepared to sacrifice sacred cows and commit to following through QUICKLY with anything else that changes as a consequence of their solution – if you need an adventure, even one inserted retroactively, it should be the next adventure you write.

The big problem is that you may have to reveal more to the players than you would like. When that is going to be an issue, your only choices are to fix the problem on your own, or wait until the 13th hour. And the latter is acutely uncomfortable and fraught with danger. When the problem is this large, this is a Hail Mary solution. But it can be better than the more drastic solutions listed below.

Nevertheless, I would not avail myself of this unless I had to.

Solutions from Part 3

Significant Repair Technique #1: A New Plot Device

This is actually just a way of rephrasing the first of the more drastic solutions outlined below – when the problem is this big. But I discussed this, and the constraints involved, extensively in Part 3.

Significant Repair Technique #2: Historical Event Narrative Revisit

Similarly, this is effectively the same as the second drastic solution. Again, the advice offered in Part 3 is fairly foundational.

Significant Repair Technique #3: A Corrective Scene or Encounter

Ah, if only this was likely to be enough. It isn’t.

Solutions from Part 4

The closer we get to matching the scale of the problem, the more relevant the past advice will be.

Major Structural Repair Technique #1: A Corrective Adventure

This can be a lifesaver, it really can – if your logic is air-tight (this time), and you can think of one that actually solves the problem AND is not going to be boring.

I once employed this technique by having an NPC attempt to ‘fix’ the continuity, but end up making the problem worse – so the PCs had to go in and patch the plotline.

On another occasion, the bad guys had everything that could go right, go very right – and it was a good plan to start with. Desperate times call for desperate measures – I had each player play themselves when their characters showed up out of the blue and in need of a solution. They explained that the act of gaming out the adventures every week connected the game-fictional universe to their realty – and they needed the players and GM to create a solution to this problem out of thin air, rewriting and retconning as necessary. But the logic connecting the dots had to be flawless. They ended up completely rewriting one of the PCs to add a hidden, deeper, layer of characterization, backstory, and abilities, introducing a new and powerful NPC, and rewriting events so that they only seemed to benefit the villains at first glance, so that the villains ended up hoisted on their own petards. It took a small dues-ex-machina to initiate the ‘salvation plotline’, but it worked.

Major Structural Repair Technique #2: A New Layer Of Plot

Back in the 1990s, I had a lot of trouble sticking with a plotline. I’d play it through about 2/3 of the way, and just as everything was about to come together for the PCs, I’d get a ‘brilliant idea’ that I couldn’t resist dropping into the middle of the plotline.

And, a lot of the time, those ideas worked. Completely invalidated what I had carefully planned, but made the plotline richer and more complex. Ragnarok started out quite simply – a war to the death amongst the Norse Gods – but the problem then became one of giving the players agency over the situation, and that meant enlarging the scope. And that brought in other pantheons, and Thanos-level opportunists, and invoking deeper mythological layers that created a through-line from Ancient Babylonian myth through the Cthulhu Mythos by way of Melnobone, and dropping the PCs in the middle of it all. There were double-agents and betrayals and simultaneous action on multiple fronts.

Major Structural Repair Technique #3: Radical Character Overhaul/Transformation

And then I rewrote the whole plan to more closely respect the prophesied chain of events from Norse mythology while still keeping events unpredictable, based on the logic that if Loki knew how things were going to turn out, he’d do anything BUT what the prophecy foretold. So I humanized him, and made him one of the good guys, and let dominoes fall to give him completely different motivations to those ascribed in the myth – motivations that trapped him into repeating something very similar to the same sequence of events, despite all his better instincts. I think there were about 10 layers to the final plotline. And almost half of them intersected the campaign in ways that had been improvised on the spot from a pre-planned foundation.

Critical Structural Repair Technique #1: Changing The Campaign

Some GMs have no idea of where a campaign is going to go. They don’t have a grand story arc in mind when they start – and as a result, they have difficulty pulling things to a coherent big finish that resonates with the players and ties up everything in a nice, big, bow.

I’m not like that, and I don’t recommend it for other GMs, either. Planning doesn’t have to be so meticulous that you dot every i and cross every t; you still need room for player agency. But, at the very least, IMO, you need a general trend or direction for events to shape toward. My campaigns ALWAYS have a defined architecture.

This sort of planning can be a great deal of fun, but it’s also a great deal of work. And that means a GM has a great deal invested in the campaign as it stands – so it can be really, really hard to toss those plans in the garbage compactor and start over extrapolating from the status quo.

But, when you have monumentally stuffed up that campaign planning, sometimes the best answer is to toss what you had planned away and start over.

I talked in Part 4, under “A New Layer Of Plot”, about the end of the first Zenith-3 campaign, which faced just this problem – the ‘epic conclusion’ that I had originally planned was going to land like a wet squib, smelling like week-old leftover pasta. It would have brought zero resolution to everything that had been building up – no, that’s not true. It would have produced zero emotionally-satisfying resolutions to everything that had been building up.

So I added 6 months worth of standalone adventures to give me time to completely rewrite what I had planned, and then another 6-12 months building towards a new and more climactic big finish. And it worked like a charm.

When your campaign’s in-game events are steering you away from what you had planned, sometimes you just have to go with the flow, up the ante, and forge a new destiny. In a way, that’s the ultimate expression of the accumulated consequences of player agency. It’s a drastic step, but it’s still something to contemplate – when there’s no better solution.

Critical Structural Repair Technique #2: Changing The Background

All characters exist as a matrix of abilities, personality traits, ambitions, goals, and flaws. They are surrounded by a second matrix of circumstances, opportunities, potentials, possibilities, and pathways. The same character will respond differently to a trigger event depending on the intersection of the two – and every character evolves (sometimes just a little) as a consequence of the outcome of their choices under the circumstances.

When your master plotline suddenly makes no sense, it’s almost always because either a PC or a critical NPC has evolved in an unexpected direction, and what you were going to have them do no longer fits the matrix that defines them.

If the only problem with your plans is that the characters won’t behave in the way you expected, sometimes you have to change the character in question. You can’t do much directly about a PC, but you can revise NPCs to take changes in a PC into account.

The ideal solution is to have the NPCs in question encounter a situation which reshapes their matrix in the desired direction. Repeat until you get where you need to go, then wrap enough unrelated events around these transformations until they are noteworthy but not the obvious focus of attention.

But if that isn’t a viable solution, you can have to get more drastic, and retroactively revise past interactions between character matrix and circumstances – rewriting history, or even the campaign background, as necessary.

Superficially, this sounds easy – just replace one set of paragraphs with another. But there’s a lot more to it than meets the eye – it can be extremely difficult to do in a way that is tolerable to the players, and incredibly difficult to do well.

Dominoes are the problem. The campaign background feeds into every choice, every decision, taken subsequent to the event. That includes NPC decisions (otherwise there would be no point) but also player decisions, and each of those affects both the circumstances and the matrices of each character, which has another ripple effect, and so on. You can’t afford to be ham-fisted about this, but half-measures won’t cut it, either. And on top of all that, you want everything – both past and present – to be viscerally satisfying to all concerned. So, hard to do, and incredibly hard to do well.

Misery loves company, so GMs often turn to the next solution as a way to cut the Gordian knot.

Critical Structural Repair Technique #3: Retroactive Replay

If the chain reaction of events is sufficiently confined, because (for example) a character hasn’t made that many appearances in the campaign, then this can seem to be a viable solution. It’s not that easy, either.

First of all, do you even have copies of the characters as they were at the time? Do the players have past versions of their characters on file? If not, then you’re going to have to guesstimate – and that’s likely to put noses out of joint before gameplay even begins.

Second, events and outcomes are constrained by future character evolution. You can’t contradict any other piece of established canon, and that includes the PCs as they evolve. And that means that you have to restrict player agency – even though that agency was the main reason for heading down this road in the first place.

Third, the normal course of events would cut you some slack – GMs are only human, too, at the end of the day. Not under these circumstances – if you’re going to monkey with the campaigns fundamentals retroactively, AND stomp on player agency in the process, there IS no margin of error that will be tolerated. Get it right – exactly, perfectly, right – and a retcon can be tolerated. Barely. Every consequence, every domino, has to ring true – your surgery has to be precise and definitive.

Fourth, it’s far easier to add something than to take something away. A piece of additional canon can be inserted and to maintain continuity, while it has an effect on the NPC, simply by keeping awareness of it out of the hands of the PCs of the time, a retcon can be achieved seamlessly with respect to the intervening continuity. Removing a piece of Canon can be done if the PCs never knew of it – but can’t be done if they did.

This might seem a simple solution – but in practical terms, it’s anything but.

Critical Structural Repair Technique #4: Universal Reset

Which brings me to the ultimate critical solution: Effectively rebooting the campaign starting from the current status quo with one change. That means letting the players rewrite their characters as a consequence. Everything that anyone (including you) thought they knew is no longer certain. This is the ultimate dangerous solution for all concerned; players will view it as violating an unwritten social contract between them and the GM. ANY other solution is preferable to the ultimate sanction of campaign continuity. But sometimes, there are no alternatives.

Critical Structural Repair Technique #5: The Ultimate Solution

Let’s be really clear about this – these are all drastic solutions, choices to be made only when the alternative is a dead campaign. The best solution to a catastrophic plot hole is not to permit any such to exist in the first place. GMs have to always take the extra time to dot their i’s and cross their t’s. They have to always be aware of their assumptions and the consequences of even the most trivial of decisions. You only get to this point by having stuffed up, disastrously badly. Make every effort to avoid that event, and you will hopefully never need this suite of solutions. THAT is the ultimate solution.