Distorted reflections of a building in tower block windows

When straight lines bend, how can you be certain of anything?
 
Image by 5776588 from Pixabay

Introduction

Last week, Last month, (third time’s the charm): Back in March, I offered a guest article by Franklin Veaux on how memory works, and some of its features and failings. Today, I’m going to follow it up with analysis of how The phenomenon that he describes, which I have named “Fuzzy Plastic Memories,” applies to RPGs and how to fight that.

You should read the first post before continuing (it’s short).

What follows was originally intended to accompany that article, but as the topic list grew, and grew, and grew, it soon became apparent that it would overwhelm that guest post. All told, there are 489 ‘words’ used in headings alone – okay, so 203 of those are formatting, leaving 287. Look at it another way: 68 headings. Assume a minimum of 100 words under each. That’s a 6.8K-word post. [EDIT: In actual fact, this post – about half of the expected total – clocks in at almost 7,500 words].

Lots to do, so let’s get started…

0. The Rabbit Holes

The subjects of perception, cognition, and recall are rabbit holes down which endless time can be dissipated in fascinated reading and viewing. I’m going to do my best to vault over those rabbit holes in this post, knowing in advance that I will have to at least shine a light down some of them along the way. There will be lots of scope for readers to further research topics and perhaps come to different (even materially ‘better’) answers as a result.

This post is intended to be a starting point, not a conclusion.

    0.1 Further reading

    I’ll be aided in these endeavors by the fact that I’ve written articles on this and related subjects in the past. A curated list of relevant articles includes (a lo-o-o-ng list):

    Perception & Illusion:

    Marginally Relevant:

    Cognition & Awareness:

    Recollection:

Whew, that lot should keep interested readers busy for a while!

1. An evolutionary perspective

The human brain, as some of the above articles have pointed out, has evolved to shortcut thinking in any situation where a quick decision has the potential to enhance survivability.

Some of the greatest cognitive illusions and failures exploit or illuminate that shortcut processing.

Humans do have a limited capacity to train some of this short-cutting out – for example, learning to quickly scan the surrounding environment after making a snap decision based on what some potential or actual threat is perceived to be doing.

Here’s what happens with such training:

  • Intensive Task begins
  • Anything not directly related to the Intensive Task is ignored as “junk”
  • Task is completed. Focus remains intensive.
  • Subject takes a metaphoric ‘step back to get an overview.
  • Subject becomes aware of an oddity not previously noted. Like a guy in a gorilla outfit.

Without the training, most people will remain blissfully ignorant of the oddity.

    1.1 Breaking the illusion

    Note that if the Oddity ever actually gets in the way of the Intensive Task, the subject will usually notice it. In The Invisible Gorilla Illusion, the subject is required to count the number of times players in a particularly-colored top pass the ball. This is important – just counting the number of passes doesn’t engage enough mental ‘circuits’ to cause the task to be Intensive in most people.

    So, to avoid breaking the ‘illusion’ i.e. the state of mind of the subject, the basketball players have to know not to pass the ball to another player behind the gorilla-suits back – keep the passes to one side or in front, and most people (as many as nine in ten) will be so busy watching the ball and evaluating what the player who just passed the ball is wearing and updating their count that they won’t notice the gorilla even if he fills half the screen and pauses to wave at the subject.

    The same illusion is possible, but harder to create, with sound – if you are listening to the radio, you can be completely unaware of the sounds of traffic, unless it is so intrusive as to disrupt that listening – but your cognitive circuits have to be engaged in doing something else as well, like writing a blog post!

The evolutionary aspect of these failures of perception / cognition will become especially relevant later in the article, but provide important context for the general discussion.

2. A Caveat

Also, before I get too deeply into specifics, I have to point out that every group will be just a little different, in part because their ‘behavioral responses’ will have been conditioned by past playing experiences.

My players are used to me dropping hints and foreshadowing into campaigns and leaving plot threads dangling for years – or, more accurately, fermenting and developing in the background, while they (and their characters) are distracted with more immediate concerns. They have learned to pay close attention to these little nuggets of information.

This poses some particular challenges due to memory plasticity, as their interpretations and speculations become inseparably entwined with the actual in-game events; they are less likely to remember what actually happened or was said and more likely to remember their theories and interpretations of those events, even when those are incorrect.

All advice offered in this article has to be filtered to match your own groups propensities, and those will (at least in part) be a direct derivation of your own GMing style. The more GMs they have played under, the less dominant any one influence will be. This is the material difference between experienced players and inexperienced ones.

All groups and all individuals are different, and you have to take that into account.

Sidebar anecdote

This can lead to failures especially when it comes to convention gaming. It’s easy to prep a game based on what your usual players / play-testers will do in response to a situation, and then be surprised when the random group of participants make completely different choices.

3. Impact on The Game Table

The cognitive impact of plastic memories can be felt in three (human) different ways, plus (sometimes) one extraordinary one, by four different groups of “people” – and those impacts can be complicated by the relationships between those entities.

The three normal impacts are:

  • Human forgetfulness
  • Gap Back-filling
  • Memory Rewriting
Sidebar: Eyewitness Fragility

From “A Discussion Of Dialogue” (Jan 2023):
It is well known that eyewitness testimony is unreliable.

    First, if people are distracted, they can miss the blindingly obvious, something that I have described a number of times. My go-to illustration for this is the “Invisible Gorilla” (already discussed).

    Second, humans are hardwired mentally to “fill in the blanks”, something that optical illusions are known to exploit. I discussed this in Blind Spots and False Illusions: How much can you really see? in the section, “The Relevance Of Illusion”.

    [Thirdly,] if you put a bunch of eyewitness together, an opinion expressed forcibly enough can actually overwrite witness memories, changing what someone was wearing or what they looked like. It’s called witness contamination. I describe it in The Other Side Of The Camera: Depth in RPGs, in the section ‘The Camera Of Implication: A witness statement’ (it’s early in the post).

    Eyewitness Testimony and Memory Biases, from the NOBA Project, explores the subject in more detail.

    Finally, in the post The Jar Of Jam and The Wounded Monarch: Two Mystery Examples, in the section ‘6. Eyewitnesses & Confusion’, I discuss the unreliability of eyewitness testimony in a more general way, with links to a couple of other specific articles on the subject.

I know I have recommend it to readers before, but I can’t not mention Wikipedia’s page on Eyewitness Testimony, which makes fascinating reading.

They also have an even longer page on Eyewitness Memory which is worth the reader’s time.

The extraordinary impact is felt only by some.

The four groups of entities that can be affected are the GM, the Players, the Player’s Characters, and the GM’s NPCs. I want to look at those four sets in greater detail.

A personal experience

I also described a personal anecdote of relevance:

    At one point, one of the duties required by my employer of the time was to assist in the counting of takings from another of the employer’s businesses, completion of deposit information, and walking the takings (all bundled into individual days’ takings) to the bank. On one occasion, it became clear that others had observed the routine; I got robbed at knife-point. Simply by refusing to let go of the plastic bag containing the bundles, and using them as a shield against the guy with the knife, I was able to save two days’ takings from the long weekend that had just passed.

    Although the weapon clearly held some of my attention, and the struggle some more of it, I can still clearly remember the shirt that the offender was wearing – blue and white horizontal stripes about an inch-and-a-half wide. At the time, I also had a clear memory of the faces of the perpetrator and his knife-wielding compatriot.

    As a result, I was taken to the police station to look at mug books – and that was where the investigation went off the rails, because they did not obtain a full description before this process commenced.

    About half an hour later, after looking at more than 500 mugshots, I could not have picked the criminals our of a lineup if my life depended on it; my memory had been contaminated. The bigger guy was about 6 inches taller than me, and grabbed the bag; the smaller one was about 5’8” and waved the knife around, but that’s all the description that I can give of them.

    3.1 GMs

    GMs can be forgetful – we have a lot on our plates. I’ve described before (in The failure of …urmmmm… Memory) how my memory is good for some things – the campaign, the adventure as a whole, the personalities and abilities of the characters (both PCs and NPCs), and so on – and lousy at other things, like exactly what happened last time and where in the adventure the characters are up to.

    But all these memories can be contaminated by the phenomenon of memory plasticity, in which the actual memories are overwritten by an ‘edited’ or ‘rewritten’ version.

    At times, this can be very useful, when you’ve rewritten an adventure based on PC choices, or to correct some mistake on your part, for example.

    For the rest, we tend to need to put things in writing – not just as an error-correction mechanism, but because writing things down actually makes them easier to remember for most people.

    3.2 Players

    Players can be forgetful, too. Some of them make notes, and those can be invaluable to the GM who has forgotten what happened last time! As a general rule, these notes are only relevant to their PC, but there has been at least one occasion where an absent player had his PC passed back and forth between two other players (when their character wasn’t interacting with the PC) and the GMs (in group scenes), while a third player (best of us at taking notes while still paying attention) documented events from the absent players’ PC’s perspective. As a solution to an unusual situation, it worked fairly well.

    But players are also prone to fall victim to memory plasticity without such memory aides, as I mentioned earlier. One in particular is prone to remembering the way he thinks things are, with subjective theories, assumptions, and interpretations (all spun from incomplete information) taken as gospel.

    His character background in the Zenith-3 campaign came with a number of original villains that the character had encountered in the past, and what had occurred, and what those villains could do, as far as the character understood it. I warned the player that to preserve some level of surprise within the campaign, and to better integrate those villains with my own campaign plans, those encounters would be modified to some extent – but this never seems to fail to catch the player out, at least momentarily. I’m often able to stay true to the spirit of the original events that he described, so it’s not difficult to integrate the revisions into his perception of the campaign – he just has to get used to the idea (again) each and every time.

    3.3 Player Characters

    Characters should have failures of memory, too. The easiest way of handling this is to interpret players failings in this respect as a failing on the part of their PC – but suddenly, this gets complicated when someone points out that their character has a different INT score, or some extraordinary memory ability, or both.

    But, as a general rule of thumb, if I correct a player’s memory, unless there is no way that the character would have forgotten the details, I will tell them that their character remembers it the way they just described it until someone points out the error or events make it obvious.

    I might let them make an INT check to have the nagging feeling that their memory isn’t quite right.

    3.4 NPCs

    While in principle the same technique might work for NPCs, the usual GMing practices of prep for the game subvert it and give the NPCs better memories than they should actually have. This can only be corrected through active and deliberate action by the GM, simulating a memory failure even though he knows better.

    The very best time to employ this technique is when a player has already correctly recalled the events, even if only in general, because it then becomes obvious that the GM has been reminded of them and the ‘failure’ or ‘error’ is deliberate.

    “Wait one,” says [NPC]. “I thought [x] did [y], not [z]…”
    “No, that was {z], not [x].” comes the reply.

    3.5 Philosophical Underpinnings

    I need to explore the question of correcting misremembered facts by a player more fully, because there are some implications that readers might not expect, and they all derive from the philosophical foundations of the campaign itself.

    Specifically, are the PC supposed to be ‘more perfect than normal’ or otherwise exemplary / superhuman? Or do they suffer from the same frailties as everyone else, despite the epic deeds they accomplish?

    From this foundation – assuming that it has been defined for the campaign – an informed decision regarding memory errors or failures can be made.

    If, however, the GM has given this little or no thought, then the answer has to be derived by implication from the game history and the conceptual foundations of the game system – a lot more work and a lot more difficult to do on the fly.

      3.5.1 Pros of Clay Feet

      If the PCs are nothing special, that means that they should expect no special treatment or dispensation from the GM, and no special attention from the game world and its inhabitants. This especially suits low-level campaigns, in which the game mechanics have not amplified abilities to superhuman levels – but this also means that magic items and the power buffs they provide can become overwhelmingly important, to the point of detracting from the PCs wielding them.

      Perhaps equally important, this supports “street-level” campaigns, in which one’s character levels are no pathway to a better social class.

      In terms of the subject of this article, it devalues the significance of memories to some extent, and hence limits the scope of plastic memories to mess with the campaign.

      3.5.2 Cons of Clay Feet

      Some players and GMs like epic sagas and these are served only to a mediocre extent by ‘ordinary people’ campaigns – though I have run one campaign which was explicitly ‘ordinary people caught up in extraordinary times.’ My experience is that this actually makes them harder to write – though that can make them more rewarding if you manage to pull it off.

      But it’s hard to wrestle with cosmic concepts and threats if you aren’t equipped to perceive them, let alone survive them.

      And, if you do run such epic campaigns, nuances and details frequently become critically important – and that can make the campaign more sensitive to plastic memory alteration while also making such effects more likely to occur, a double-whammy that can completely derail campaigns.

      3.5.3 Pros of Superlatives

      Let’s take a moment to consider the other side of the coin – one that is often embedded firmly in game mechanics (any time a GM tells me that they scrap a campaign whenever the PCs hit level ‘X’ is firmly in the ‘feet of clay’ camp, whether they realize it or not).

      Adventures will seek out the PCs because they are exceptional They can be expected to deal with threats that would curl the toes of most inhabitants of the game world.

      As already noted, this can leave campaigns more vulnerable to plastic memory phenomena.

      3.5.4 Cons of Superlatives

      It also implies a responsibility on the part of the characters toward the game world – and their relationship to that responsibility can be defining to a campaign. Are the PCs reluctant heroes, or do they embrace the path to being immortalized?

      There will be expectations raised by this philosophy – the PCs will usually succeed (though it may be at a cost). The players will have those expectations, and their PCs may well have an entirely separate set of expectations.

    I have the feeling that the article went a little astray in the last group of sub-sections, but there were some important points made, so – after contemplating scrapping them – I’ve decided to leave them in.

    3.6 Philosophical Underpinnings (cont):

    If the PCs are ultimately superior to ‘human’ (regardless of race and abilities), does that mean that the GM has an obligation to make NPCs a little more flawed? – just to make it clear that the PCs are exceptional?

    Think about that for a moment.

    Deliberately making the typical NPC more flawed exaggerates the distinction between PCs and NPCs, highlighting it.

    NOT doing so can imply that anyone can achieve such extraordinary feats as the PCs adventures – and that means that some other factor has to account for the success and superiority of the PCs.

    Recognizing and codifying this within the campaign can be very helpful to the GM, translating some of this esoteric philosophical woolgathering into practical outcomes. Did the PCs just get lucky? Was it fate? Was there something they did differently?

    These are exactly the same questions that get asked in the real world when people contemplate individuals of superior success vs the ordinary, run of the mill, employee or businessman.

      3.6.1 An Australian Perspective

      My perspective on all this is uniquely Australian – it can be a combination of a number of factors, but drive and determination are (a) never enough on their own, and (b) absolutely critical to translating any other advantage into achievement. The perception here is therefore that if anyone had the advantages and lucky breaks of the success story, and worked as hard with them, they would be just as successful; the potential for greatness lies in all of us, we just have to find it and tap into it.

      A logical consequence is that no-one is entitled to their success, and while no-one begrudges someone enjoying the fruits of their success, any display of ego or entitlement triggers ‘tall poppy syndrome’, something that I’ve not observed about other cultures (except maybe New Zealand) – though the article below lists some similar social phenomena from elsewhere.

      “Tall Poppy Syndrome” is when a previously-supportive public turns on an individual, begrudging them their success, spreading negative stories about them in preference to positive, actively searching for flaws, and mercilessly punishing those flaws that are inevitably found.

      There is a definite connection to Schadenfreude, taking pleasure from the misfortunes of others, but there is a sense that the victim has “earned” his fate. Tall Poppy Syndrome is not Schadenfreude, it’s more about searching for faults that can trigger Schadenfreude in others when punished.

      3.6.2 The other side of the coin

      Successful people who are humbly grateful for their success, or are perceived as such, in comparison, can get forgiven an awful lot, and enjoy considerable public support even in the wake of scandal.

      Even then, it’s possible to go too far – being accused of being “Un-Australian” is just about the most damning indictment possible, and is sure to trigger intense tall poppy syndrome.

      Of late, there has arisen a second ‘crime against Australian Values’ – elevating one’s religious beliefs above the common welfare. This is perceived as a crime of Entitlement – the person is seen as exalting their own Piety over others, a form of disrespect.

      We’re especially merciless when it comes to politicians and social leaders, in this respect.

      3.6.3 Relevance

      I haven’t actually changed the subject; merely explored a particularly Australian manifestation of it. When someone – no matter how successful – behaves as though they were an ordinary person, plastic memory erases or minimizes mistakes and exposed flaws; they get forgiven and then quickly forgotten.

      In Tall Poppy Syndrome, these faults and flaws are exposed and reiterated and memories get rewritten to make them seem worse than they probably are, and this then drives public reaction to the ‘arrogant’ or ‘entitled’.

      The US has acquired a form of this practice, too, though the Wikipedia article hasn’t mentioned it – the “Karen” Meme, in which a middle-class white American woman is perceived as entitled or excessively demanding beyond the scope of what is considered to be normal behavior and decorum. It’s only when filtered through the concept of Australian Egalitarianism – so that it no longer applies to “entitled white women” – that it becomes true Tall Poppy Syndrome, however. Our “Karens” don’t have to be white, or female – in theory, everyone is treated equally.

      3.6.4 Application to Conspiracy Theorists

      Yes, Australia has these, too. About 4% of the population typically display such beliefs, and are widely ridiculed by the rest of us. Plastic Memory phenomena explain why such mental derangement takes place, and why any organization that reinforces such beliefs acquires cult-like characteristics.

      People are literally rewriting their memories to suppress facts or arguments that contradict their ‘deeply held beliefs’. The intelligent and intellectual are just as susceptible to this as anyone else.

      Most pernicious of all is when this phenomenon becomes allied with the perception that the conspiracy theorist is acting in what he or she perceives to be the ‘for the public good’. This automatically makes anyone who does not subscribe to the belief an enemy of society. This only makes sufferers less liable to lend credence to anything other people might say, making it that much harder to escape the ‘cult’.

      3.6.5 Social Media – The Wedge

      Quite often, Social Media, and the echo chambers that they create, provide the wedge through which such beliefs spread from one individual to another. People are quite capable of seeing an event with their own eyes and rewriting their memories when pressured to do so by a perceived authority figure who simply presents an ‘alternate interpretation’ that resonates with other beliefs. Multiple iterations later and the sufferer can have been convinced that black is white, or up is down. Or that a certain political figure did nothing wrong, and his enemies are simply out to get him.

    3.7 Big Picture, Little Picture

    I sense that we’re starting to drift toward some of the penumbral issues of the phenomenon, so it’s time to focus back on the heart of the subject by looking at how memory plasticity impacts these two different frames of reference.

    Rewriting the little picture is embarrassing and occasionally confusing, but generally has little serious impact. “Why are we doing this, again?” “Wait a minute, I thought Jason stole the Golden Willowtree?”

    But the big picture is about changes to the campaign landscape. Because they are bigger and more fundamental, they are a little more resistant to casual plasticity some of the time, but the impact can be more significant and substantial when memory revisions do take place.

    The real problems occur because players are rarely aware of the whole big picture – not in the same way that the GM usually is. In fact, it’s called “the big picture” because it can’t be revealed all at once – instead, smaller pieces of it are revealed one at a time in different adventures, building up to a larger appreciation of the moving pieces of the campaign setting and its background.

    Complicating this at every turn is the fact that in the best games, the big picture is not some painted backdrop; it evolves as a result of various in-game and out-of-game events.

    These two facts combine to require regular and wholesale revisions to the incomplete understanding of the campaign background, setting, concepts, assumptions, and premise. As should be clear by now, that spells danger.

    What, then, can be done to counter plastic memory? There are two-and-a-half different strategies. Maybe three-and-a-half, since one comes in at least two major variations:

    • Starting On The Same Page
    • Starting On Different Pages
    • Player Vs Character Recollections
    3.8 Starting On The Same Page

    If you can summarize each adventure into a one-sentence statement, and accompany it with a second sentence describing the big-picture relevance, leading off each adventure with a brief recapitulation of “The Story So Far” becomes practical. I frequently and regularly do this in the Zenith-3 campaign and it’s offshoots, do it with less regularity in the Dr Who campaign, and don’t see it done very often in the Adventurer’s Club campaign.

    That’s largely down to a number of factors – the degree of episodicity vs continuity in each campaign (more episodic = less need for a synopsis), and the propensity of the player to taking substantial notes and reviewing them before play, being two of the biggest ones. Deliberate design in terms of the campaign is a third, but it doesn’t apply to any of my current campaigns.

    This ‘executive summary’ then leads into a slightly more substantial summary of the current adventure so far if play of that adventure has already begun, and a more detailed summary again of any developments just prior to ending play last time – since I like to end sessions on a dramatic cliffhanger whenever possible, they always need explicit description to get everyone onto the same page before the action starts. While the Adventurer’s club doesn’t get much in the executive-summary department, it gets full treatment in this respect.

    “Plastic memory” can be impacted in two ways by this. The first is when a player’s recollection is fuzzy or outright wrong – and gets corrected. That’s the desirable one. The other is when the GM’s memory has been clouded (by what he intended to have happen) sufficiently to crowd out what did happen – which is when he gets corrected by the players, to his extreme embarrassment. But if it needs to happen, it is best to get it out of the way right away.

    In extreme and rare cases, this can semi-derail an entire game session – if an adventure has been prepared on false pretenses, it may be completely unplayable after the truth comes out. Usually, a GM can improv his way out of trouble, adapting what he has prepped to the actual in-game circumstances. Embarrassing, but not the end of the world – and generally forgotten by the end of the game session.

    3.9 Starting On Different Pages

    The alternative, of course, is not to synopsize. Real Life doesn’t have Star Wars style rolling introductions – if someone gets a wrong idea into their head, it persists until someone notices and corrects it, or the person gets themselves into trouble by acting on their incorrect understanding of the world.

    I have heard a number of GMs who prefer a ‘hyper-realistic’ approach advocating this principle, over the years. To me, it flounders on the inarguable fact that the players are not their characters, and vice-versa. (The usual comeback is that they are, at least in terms of head-space – and that the alternative hands control of what should be a player-character dynamic over to a die roll. Where the dialogue then breaks down is that I feel that to be preferable to the alternative, while they feel the alternative to be incomparably better. To each their own – but it shows the impact that a GM’s philosophy can have on a campaign).

    There are two variations on this idea in common practice: the first can be summarized by the phrase “let the chips fall where they may”, while the other can be described as “from the mouths of babes”.

      3.9.1 ‘Let The Chips Fall Where They May’

      This is the purest form of the method, and the one actually being advocated by most of the Hyper-realists. It contends that the GM doesn’t, or shouldn’t, care what the misapprehensions of the players (and their characters) are, it’s up to them to keep track of these things and pay attention. In some respects, it’s a very “old-school” playing condition, and I have no doubt that it would be a lot more wide-spread if GMs were infallible.

      As soon as you admit that you’re human and can make mistakes, it becomes encumbent on you to minimize the impact of those errors, and this position becomes more untenable (in my opinion).

      Nevertheless, it’s an approach that has its passionate advocates.

      3.9.2 ‘From The Mouths Of Babes

      This is something of a half-compromise between the two major approaches. You forego the executive summary, but have an NPC who would know the truth correct the PC at the first opportunity – but only in areas where the Player has expressed an inaccurate memory of the past. The better you are at improv, the more seamlessly this can be inserted, and the greater the variety of dialogues that can be used for the purpose.

      “Hey there Doggo – you wanted me to remind you to talk to Whizzle about Karsus and his plans to subvert Halfling Society.” — “Did I? I don’t remember that at all – and I thought we decided that it was a bluff, anyway.” “– That was your theory, but you couldn’t think of a way to prove it.”

      Three lines of improv dialogue, one of them from the player, and the error is corrected before anything disastrous can occur. The presumption is that important errors will be corrected before they cause unintended trouble for the PC – and meeting that expectation can lead to some strange and humorous interjections, just to get the critical dialogue in before the Player commits the PC to a flawed course of action.

      I once had to give a villain a temporary telepathic ability so that he and a PC could have an ‘exchange of views’ (slipping the truth into the conversation sideways as it were). From memory, the exchange went something like this: “Backlash? How did you intercept this communication? These Telepath-gems were supposed to be uncompromisable, they certainly cost me enough.” –“You have no idea of the depth of resources available to us, Protus [a complete bluff]. So, what are you up to these days? Checking up on the status of the White Lace project?” [recapitulates the inaccurate memory]. –You can almost see the evil grin at the other end of the telepathic connection from the tone of ‘voice’ as Protus replies “You’ve been misinformed, and that gives me more hope for the future than you can possible know. Because it costs me nothing but lets me revel in your error for that much longer before I break this connection, I tell you sincerely that I have never heard of this ‘White Lace’ to which you refer. Have an unpleasant day, hahahah…”

      There are obvious advantages – it doesn’t waste time on unnecessary recapitulation, it ‘feels’ more like real life even though it clearly shows that in certain respects, the GM has the player’s back, and such exchanges can be great fun for all concerned.

      It has one major flaw, and two smaller flaws. Getting a correction to a player in time relies on him explaining why his character is taking the actions that the player has announced – that’s a minor but important flaw.

      If the player simply acts on his incorrect memories, it’s too late for correction; that’s the major flaw: it won’t always work.

      And, if the mistake was made long enough ago (but not noticed at the time), a player can have romanticized an entire superstructure of theory and guesswork on top of it, spreading the ‘contaminated logic’ to areas all over the campaign, far too extensive to correct with one dialogue. When that happens, the only solution is to interrupt the game and have a discussion with the player, possibly a lengthy one. And that’s no fun for anyone. The second minor flaw, therefore, is that it’s not a panacea.

    3.10 Player vs Character Recollections

    These questions open another thorny subject: Are a player’s recollections actually those of the character he is portraying? Or are the two separate and distinct?

    I’m not going to let myself get distracted by this rabbit-hole, which could easily run for hundreds of words. Suffice it to say that I don’t have a hard-and-fast rule that I follow; instead, I base decisions on such matters on the roleplaying abilities of the player in question. If I trust them to keep character knowledge and player knowledge separately compartmented, then the answer is no; if I don’t have such confidence, then my assumption is that whatever information I give the player is knowledge that the character will also have, and use that to guide me in what I then tell the player.

    3.11 Ethical Obligations?

    This is also one of those questions that poses the question of what the GM is ‘ethically obligated’ to do under the circumstances. Another rabbit-hole, which will be a little more difficult to circumnavigate.

    A GM has an ethical obligation to the game itself, another to his campaign, a third to his players as a group, a fourth to each individual player, and a fifth to each PC.

    These are rarely articulated because the subject is so vague, I’m not sure that any one perspective or answer is “correct”. It’s the sort of question that GMs can spend hours discussing – maybe it should be a panel discussion at a convention or something! Maybe I’ll post it as a question on Quora…

    For now, let’s leave it at “the GM has a responsibility to fairly care for all these considerations, and to resolve any conflicts that arise between them in the course of play” – even though that’s wishy-washy, indefinite, and inadequately defined, as answers go.

    3.12 Enough Rope?

    Finally, there are GMs out there who believe that part of their job is to give Players enough rope to hang their PCs – or, at the very least, to get them into difficulties, provided that those difficulties are not insuperable. I’ve even advocated this position from time to time in cases where players have made assumptions about what is going on, or made plans predicated on such assumptions without adequately covering alternative possibilities with flexibility.

    Within limits, this policy is completely defensible; when it threatens to derail the whole campaign is where I draw the line. Note that it doesn’t have to actually pose an imminent danger to the campaign; the mere possibility that it could threaten the campaign is enough for me.

4 Fighting Memory Plasticity

As often happens, I’ve already covered some of the content intended for this section. No matter; there are always multiple perspectives that can be canvassed, it just makes the article a little less linear in structure (it was a straight line when I planned it, honest!).

What else can be done to fight memory plasticity? There are six tools available.

    4.1 Aides de Memoire

    I’m lousy at taking notes while refereeing. Actually, I’m even worse than that – I just can’t seem to do it; I’m too busy actually running the game.

    I manage best when I pose specific written questions to myself in advance that I can answer extremely succinctly. “What did the players decide to make priority #1?” “Did the players see through Edvard’s deceptions in time?” – things like that. But they require either opening another document while playing, with a keyboard that’s a little rogue a lot of the time, or having a hardcopy on which I can write answers – which requires a functional printer, or paying for a hardcopy which has to be done in advance. All three approaches are flawed in some respect, I’m not happy with any of them – they are just the best that I’ve got.

    Having players make notes for you is an alternative, but again it’s not a solution that I’m happy with. If they want to take notes for their own reference, and I can use those to jog my own recollections, that’s good enough (and usually, all it takes).

    These are all solutions to the small-picture incarnation of the problem, as it manifests for both players and GM.

    4.2 Executive Summaries

    Executive summaries, as already described, are a GM’s solution to the big picture variety of problem. Presumably, the GM has access to his design notes for both the campaign and the adventure, so he (generally) has the resources that he needs to avoid the problem; what he needs to do is address the player version. There are alternatives, as discussed above. There’s not much more to say about this, so let’s move on.

    4.3 Correcting Errors

    Players can take great delight in correcting a flawed GM’s memory, though the joy is usually fairly transitory. GMs tend to correct players’ inaccurate recollections more dispassionately. The key is to encourage speaking up immediately – even though admitting that your memory may be flawed is somewhat humbling for the GM.

    But this only provides the opportunity for correction of a distorted memory – if you do nothing more, the flawed recollection will have a persistence that overcomes the correction, and it will need to be made again and again. The best answer is to write the correction down, however briefly, on a notepad and ponder that note at greater length immediately after the game session, in particular with reference to any future plans.

    The more work that you have to do to integrate a revised history, the more likely it is that you will reset the flawed memory.

    4.4 Reinforcing critical memories and perceptions

    There are always some facts / past events that you know are going to be more important than others into the future. These are usually characterized as Revelations when they occur in my games, because they disagree with the established narrative flow, hinting that there is something else going on that the players haven’t yet taken into account in their character’s world-views. I always make a point of reminding players of these, one way or another, in the course of an adventure just before they become critically important to the day’s play.

    If a discordant event is not relevant to the day’s play, it simply means that I have more flexibility in how and when I insert the reminder into play – it could be anything from an NPC offering up an obviously half-baked theory about the discontinuity that the player receiving it can obviously and easily contradict to someone mentioning that they still haven’t been able to make sense of it.

    Once, a PC was engaged in doing paperwork – the PCs are required to keep careful logs of their missions (but the players are not, it gets hand-waved) – when some other problem was to be brought to their attention. I casually mentioned that the PC was at the point of recording the discovery of the discordant fact when they were interrupted by a telephone message, which launched into the new problem. Even this brief mention was enough to reinforce the critical memory.

    I look actively for such opportunities; aside from helping to keep failing memories on the straight and narrow, they actively reinforce campaign continuity, making the game world seem more real.

    4.5 Perpetuating Errors

    On very rare occasions, you can get more mileage out of perpetuating errors until the last possible minute. This works when the erroneous impression is not contradicted by any of the evidence readily available to the PCs. In other words, they have evolved a plausible theory that explains all the known facts (but that you hadn’t noticed in your prep).

    The most critical ingredient to the concept of perpetuating errors is the nature and timing of the ultimate 11th-hour correction. If handled incorrectly, this can be seen (by them) as railroading the players by not leaving them enough time to make the preparations and decisions that they think they might have made if the error had been brought to their attention sooner.

    I combat this by trying to always introduce a “back door to the truth” – an opportunity for the players to get a hint that things are not as they appear, well in advance of the critical point, but an opportunity that might be nothing but a time-waster or a red herring. It’s then the player’s choice whether or not to take a chance and pursue it, possibly at some other expense or inconvenience. The ultimate example of this has not yet occurred in any of my campaigns – “There are two critical mysteries and the PCs have to choose in advance which one they will solve early and which one will take them by surprise”.

    Ultimately, I’m never happy with there being only one pathway through an adventure for the PCs to follow. I work hard at ensuring that there’s at least a “Plan B” that will lead to a satisfactory gaming experience.

    4.6 Absorbing Errors

    Sometimes, the contamination is so widespread by the time the GM becomes aware of it that he has no choice but to absorb the error into the campaign, even if it means rewriting or scrapping campaign planning that was considered fundamental to the campaign in the first place.

    In one event, the PCs evolved a completely plausible theory that I liked better than my own planned solution to the puzzle. I immediately accepted their version of events and set up multiple encounters in which various NPCs tried to suggest to the players that my original intention was what they should be worried about. They refused to take the bait, which left them feeling smugly superior – an attitude that I let them enjoy for a while (they earned it!).

    Another time, things were not so pleasant. The first Zenith-3 campaign had as a premise that the PCs were being trained off-dimension so that they had time to become independent. My expectation was that they would then get rotated back into the main team, revitalizing it and letting some of the older NPCs retire / go down fighting. Somehow, the players got it into their heads that before that happened, they would have stints on the worlds served by Zenith-1 and Zenith-2. There was nothing said about this until the 11th hour – but it ultimately meant that in the next phase of the Zenith-3 campaign as originally planned, player expectations would go unfulfilled.

    Ultimately, that’s always a no-no. It’s part of the GM’s job to do whatever is necessary to avoid this. So I yielded, delayed the start of the big finish to the existing campaign by a year, and spent that time putting together a new plan – one that gave the PCs most of what they wanted and used those parts of the old plan that couldn’t be delayed or tossed aside as unexpected complications for the PCs to face.

    In both these cases, I chose to absorb the error into the campaign. I think that both choices worked out to everyone’s satisfaction – but I’m still very cautious in employing this solution because “even the wise cannot see all ends” – it’s always a risk, one to be taken only when not doing so poses a bigger risk.

To Be Continued…

Looking at how much remains, There’s no chance that I’ll get this article finished in time. So, as usual, I’ll break it into two parts – and this is the most convenient point at which to do so. Look for Fuzzy Plastic Memories III – Application in a week or two!

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