When people talk about campaign continuity, they usually adopt one of two positions.

There’s the strict continuity model, in which everything that has ever happened is fixed – but not as permanently as most people think – or there is the loose, episodic continuity in which there is a static condition defined as ‘normal’ to which everything sets, or reset, at the end of each adventure – which is not as segregated as most people think.

In fact, both ‘extremes’ are compromised in terms of the key defining characteristic of each, as I will demonstrate in the course of this article. There is also the third alternative that I personally advocate, plot arcs.

And there is also a fourth, somewhat fuzzier option that may fit your particular campaign needs even better than any of these approaches, and` while I personally am not a huge fan of it, I wouldn’t hesitate to pull it out of the cellar in which I keep it chained – if I thought it the best solution for a particular campaign.

The subject, then, is campaign continuity. Buckle in – it promises to be a bumpy ride.

“Strict” Continuity

It’s remarkably difficult to find a definition of what “strict continuity” actually means anywhere on the internet, at least in RPG terms. I found definitions in other areas: the psychology of dreams, consciousness, television, computer games set in the same universe, and many more besides – but everyone more or less seems to take it for granted when discussing RPGs that people will know what is meant.

So here’s a working definition: “Strict continuity is the trait of inertia of situation.” That means that if you leave a book on the table in an RPG, it will still be there when you come back unless an identifiable someone has moved it in the meantime, an event that can be assumed to have taken place because of the absence of the book. It means that characters don’t change conceptually from one encounter to the next – if Longforlorn walks with a limp due to an old axe wound this week, he will still walk with a limp due to an old axe wound six years from now, and the scar will even be in the same place on his body. It means that time keeps moving even if a PC isn’t there to see events evolve, and that PCs can leave a situation and know that it will have evolved when next they check on the current state of events. It means that any consequences or repercussions of choices will continue to play out, even those made in ignorance or error. It means that whenever the PCs encounter something or someone new, that person must be assumed to have always been there, and if it was logical for the PCs to have learned of their existence at a prior time, some reasonable explanation must be offered for their failure to have done so. And it means that events, once they have taken place, are fixed and immutable (with exceptions); only interpretations, perceptions, contexts, and understanding of those events can change, not the events themselves.

There’s a discussion thread archived at indie-RPGs dot com in which “Valamir” offers:

“If winning a conflict is to have meaning, it must create, at least in the moment, a truth…[which] MUST extend forward [in time/into the future].”

Sydney Freeburg replies, in the same discussion,

Traditional RPGs place a great deal of discretionary power in the hands of the GM. Most importantly, this power operates without resource constraints, in that the GM does not have to “spend” anything to make his (more rarely her) judgments stick: Therefore imposing a GM judgment has zero cost (in game-mechanical terms; quite possibly not in social terms) that impedes the GM’s ability to impose additional judgments in future. Further, this power operates without a resource economy, so that the GM’s use of power in one instance does not transfer power to other people to use in other instances, so the (im)balance of power remains static.

…

Less obviously, both traditional strong-single-GM RPGs and freeform “commie” roleplaying without a GM rely fairly heavily on the participants’ judgment of “what should happen” according to some standard of realism, logic, fidelity to the source material, proper story arc, [or] whatever.

Both these quotes seem to reflect an understanding of strict continuity as “continuity in which events, once they occur or are established as having occurred, are immutable.”

Adding this statement to the definition seems to produce a fairly robust statement of definition:

“Strict Continuity is a metagame trait of an RPG campaign in which the campaign exhibits inertia of situation, i.e. a causative and logical connection between in-game experiences in which events, once they occur or are established as having occurred, are immutable.”

The Retcon Necessity

The quoted discussion comes from a discussion thread entitled “Retcon: Threat or Menace?”. The central theme of the discussion is that a retcon, or change to something that has been established in the past, is a bad thing.

I can’t help but agree that they can be, when the reason is GM laziness or carelessness. The “truth of events” that “Valamir” mentions is imperiled by revisions to in-game events; by altering these events, you are cheating the players of the meaning, significance, and achievement of their hard-won past victories, or of the logical basis upon which their decisions and actions were based, without giving them the opportunity to change those decisions and actions to something that they consider in hindsight to be more correct under the changed circumstances.

Gregory’s point is that because there is no inherent cost or restriction within the game mechanics for the GM doing so, the capacity to retcon is inherently poisonous to the trust between players and GM, and contains an inherent potential for unchecked abuse, either at the hands of the GM directly, or indirectly if he gives in to pressure from some other strong personality at the game table.

All of which is true. Nevertheless, I would contend that Retcons are sometimes necessary, and can be performed fairly if approached in the right way.

Successful Retcons

A successful retcon, in my book, is one in which the players are not cheated of their victory. Said victory may be rendered less complete and total than they thought it was at the time, but they still achieved a victory and enjoyed the rewards that came from it.

That means that there are very limited circumstances in which a retcon is permissible, for example a Retcon to plug holes in logic and explain or justify choices that, in hindsight, make no sense either in external reality or the internal thought processes of a character – fine. I discuss other justifications for retcons in subsequent sections of this article; but I wanted to include one here to establish that they can be justified.

Having established that a retcon is required (for whatever reason), the next step is to determine what needs to be changed. Often, this can be simple, even trivial; the interval of game-time in between the event being amended and the current game-time give plenty of room for dominoes to fall and butterfly wings to have flapped, all you need do is secure the survival of that butterfly. But you must never change anything that a PC did, without the permission of the player, and must never interfere with any situational element upon which they might have based a decision. Whatever changes you make have to be invisible or irrelevant to the PCs that were involved at the time.

That eliminates probably 90-plus % of the possible changes – but it also eliminates 99% of the causes for complaint.

Maintenance of strict continuity requires that the ramifications of the amendment – which are the reason for the amendment in the first place – must be such that they can have had zero perceptible impact on any subsequent in-game event, and would not have been discovered by the PCs prior to this point in time.

This additional requirement is much trickier to achieve, and probably eliminates 99% of the remaining possible changes. It might be that it eliminates all of them – in which case a second retcon might be needed to bring about the net effect that you want to achieve. For example, if the change were to have one of the villain’s henchmen survive a seemingly-fatal (at-the-time) attack by the PCs, and make his escape, it might be necessary to have some third party intervene to rescue and heal the henchmen in some manner not noticeable by the party at the time (who were distracted by taking down the henchman’s boss, after all), and who left a corpse dressed in what appeared to be the henchman’s clothing at the scene in order to fool the PCs. Such a double-retcon – the rescue and the deception – makes the henchman’s survival not only logical, but operates to convince the PCs of the opposite, and in no way robs the event of its truth, or the PCs of their victory.

Of course it would have been better for the GM to have decided that these events were occurring at the time, permitting the characters to act upon the true reality if they had detected it; but, as a retcon to cover for the GM forgetting that the henchman had been killed, or not realizing the necessity to the broader plotline for him to have survived, I would consider this entirely acceptable. It doesn’t disrupt the past events, it simply adds to them.

Finally, in his post-game remarks to the players – and every GM performs social niceties at the end of a game session, it’s human and polite – the GM should come clean and admit to the retcon (if he didn’t do so in-game). The social cost to his air of infallibility provides the “cost” that is required to prevent this being an “easy out” for the GM. We work hard to appear infallible, even when we aren’t, and when we claim otherwise; but all demigods should be willing to accept having feet of clay occasionally. It reduces the divide between players and GM, making it easier for them to bond as people. RPGs are, above all else, a social activity performed for fun – and that’s easier when you are a group of friends sharing a common pastime.

Use these guidelines and procedures to retcon only when you have to and you will have few complaints, save from the most ardent purists. And they are likely to be complaining about something, anyway. These practices make the retcon the servant of continuity, and not its abuser.

‘Mistooks’ Happen

And so to the question of justifications for Retcons. The first is fairly obvious: everybody makes mistakes, it’s the price of being human. These mistakes have to be fixed when noticed – which is usually whenever they become important, and not at the time.

The purpose of this type of retcon is to ensure the “Truth” of the event by correcting circumstances in such a way that they validate the in-game outcome, and hence do not rob the players of the significance of their choices.

History is only as good as the reporter

It’s not always necessary to retcon the event; historical events can only be as accurately reported as the reporter can perceive events. There are all sorts of distorting factors. First, there’s the question of spin by whoever is creating the story that gets reported to the public, and that ultimately forms the foundation of our understanding of an event. Second, there’s the question of bias on the part of the reporter, and editorial bias/manipulation. Third, there’s the willingness by the public to accept the account of events described to them, and how the story plays into or flies in the face of public bias. Fourth, there is the perceived trustworthiness of both source and channel; there are some people who would not believe the sky was blue if the government announced it, simply because of who they perceive the government to be. And fifth, the possibility of outright deception must also be considered. Any interpretation of events is inevitably colored by bias; the best that you can hope is that these biases cancel out to present something close to the true picture.

I came across this story while researching this article. It’s now almost a year old, but still just as relevant. Fake news stories are still being believed and promoted as genuine, and too many people wouldn’t know satire if it walked up and shook hands with them. The situation is not helped by the belief many hold that the mainstream media are themselves distorting the news on behalf of their owners. Even the mainstream media sometimes get taken in by these fake news sites, and they are supposed to be the experts!

Under these conditions, especially when it comes to pivotal world events like wars, its hard to accept any version of history as gospel. Even when you know what happened from a certain point forward, understanding why things turned out that way is often just as important; and changing that doesn’t require any changes to past events.

Ultimately, the accuracy of historical events is inherently limited by the capacities of those documenting the event. Historians aren’t usually present at the event they are documenting, and if they are, it us usually under circumstances which leave the source open to accusations of bias; they are forced to rely on documentary ‘evidence’, and thereby place their trust in the honesty and perceptiveness of the source.

History assumes that the historian is unbiased and omniscient. What a pack of nonsense! Even in strict continuity, the past can need to be reinterpreted as new information comes to light. In the last few years, almost every history of World War II has been rendered out of date, for example, first by the release of documents from the former Soviet Union, and secondly by an economic analysis of the Nazi state.

Example: Stalin, Germany, and Japan

Hitler always had his eye on Russia and was profoundly opposed to communism, as stated in Mein Kampf and illustrated by many of the policies implemented when the Nazi Party came to power. Stalin knew this as well as anybody, and was completely sure that Germany would eventually turn against Russia. Why, then, did the pair become unlikely allies with the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact?

First, it gave both sides what they wanted most at the time – it freed Germany to focus its aggression elsewhere, and it gave Stalin time to militarize and prepare for an anticipated attack by Japan, who had made multiple attempts to obtain the Siberian mineral reserves by force in the past. When Stalin’s intelligence finally established that Japan did not intend to invade the USSR, relations between the two became progressively weaker as Stalin became more assertive. Ultimately, Hitler broke the agreement and invaded; Stalin deployed his forces in such a way as to trade space for time, not in the expectation of winter, but to redeploy the reserves he had built up in the East to the West.

Had Germany faced only the forces that they knew about on the Western Front, the possibility of another sweeping success of the sort achieved elsewhere was very much more certain, and this is one of the primary reasons for the confidence of victory before cold-weather preparations would be necessary. It was those additional forces that delayed victory long enough for Winter to take hold, sealing the failure of the invasion.

Ironically, it was the USSR who Japan looked toward to act as a third party to organize a negotiated settlement of hostilities with the US when their defeat became inevitable, but Stalin opted instead to declare war almost at the last minute, entitling the USSR to a share of the spoils without actually having to do much to earn them, and permitting the US to pursue its doctrine of demanding unconditional surrender.

It’s only when you understand Stalin’s concerns, his intelligence operations to answer those concerns, and what he knew when, that the USSR’s role in the Second World War can be understood, and hence the defeat of Germany. Everything in the history books prior to those intelligence revelations being assimilated was educated guesswork. Those revelations revised the events by revising the context within which the events took place, explaining things that were otherwise fairly inexplicable.

Example: The Nazi Economy

I wrote about this about 9 months ago (has it really been that long already!?) in Shadows In The Darkness – The nature of True Evil.

To quote from that article,

Blair started by raising Nazi behavior during World War II – the concentration camps, the systematic abuse and slaughter of groups that the Nazis disapproved of. Nazis are favorite villains in the Pulp Genre because the things they did were so vile by any reasonable moral code. There is no question that the Nazis were absolutely ruthless in pursuing their agenda, and that the agenda in question was villainous, but was this an example of True Evil?

Until recently, I would have answered yes; but a recent documentary has shed new light on that ruthlessness in my mind. The Nazi regime was spending money that it didn’t have in order to prop up their economy, to such an extent that they ceased publishing their annual balance of trade and budgets. All the Nazi big infrastructure and rearmament projects were funded with money the Nazis didn’t have. Nor could they simply sell debt to other countries in the form of government bonds and the like; no-one wanted to buy them. The Nazis even resorted to secretly buying their own government bonds to give the impression that the economy was in far better shape than was really the case.

In order to keep the regime afloat, to raise enough money to meet the public payroll and fund their ongoing projects, it was absolutely necessary to dispossess a large percentage of the population of their property and valuables, or to raise taxes to disastrous levels. Choosing the first course rather than an act that would have seriously undermined their credibility as managers of the economy, it remained only to select the targets – and these were (of course) chosen on ideological grounds. The mentally ill, homosexuals, criminals, Jews, Eastern Europeans, those of mixed blood – the list of targets goes on. The Concentration Camps enabled these groups to be maintained for a pittance for use as slave labor, saving further costs in the infrastructure and munitions industries.

This resulted in short-term gains, but did not solve the systemic problem; some form of ongoing program of conquest was inevitable, enabling them to loot and pillage other economies in order to keep their own afloat. Some analysts have suggested that when Poland was invaded, Germany might have had only enough money to pay the military for another week! The first thing that the Nazis did when capturing a new town was to go to the local banks and empty them of currency, valuables, and precious metals.

Even this wasn’t enough; as the war dragged on, and especially once the Eastern Front was opened, agriculture was suffering from the lack of manpower, and from the diversion of resources such as fuel into ongoing military operations. Memoranda have been found in which the resources being allocated to the care and feeding of those incarcerated in the camps are repeatedly reduced, and it becomes clear in some of them that a massive reduction in the population being held was necessary to reduce the drain on the economy. There were further benefits, from the Nazi perspective: these measures reduced the number of guards required, freeing up manpower for military action elsewhere, for example on the Russian Front. The “Final Solution”, as horrid and despicable as it was, is thus shown to be an extremist form of economic ruthlessness filtered through and cloaked in ideology.

While they were in power, the Nazis never released economic data to the public. In fact, the national ledgers were top secret, and reports deliberately destroyed by the regime. This perpetuated the myth of the efficiency of the Third Reich, winning them support and approval in the US and elsewhere. It was only when some of the supposedly destroyed records were uncovered in recent years and studied by economists who were able to model the financial state of Germany in the years preceding and during the war that the truth began to emerge.

This in no way justifies or excuses Nazi atrocities; but it does explain where Hitler got the money for his military buildup and continued investment in cutting-edge military projects, something that had always puzzled me, given how bad things became when the Wiemar Republic became one of the first modern state to experience Hyperinflation.

NB: It might seem that the figures quoted in the relevant section of the Wikipedia article are contradictory – the text talks about inflation hitting 3.25 x 10^6 %, with prices doubling every 2 days, while the bullet point summary beneath quotes a peak rate of 29,525% in November, 1923. They aren’t actually contradictory; the 10^6 number refers to an annual inflation rate, while the 29,525% rate is a monthly rate of inflation. If hyperinflation continued at that rate, compounding, for an entire year, the annual inflation rate that results would be 4.388 x10^31 % – so 3.25 x 10^6 % shows how “good” the other months were in comparison to how bad things (mathematically) might have been.

Don’t understand scientific notation, or just find those numbers hard to grasp? Try them the long way:

• 29,525% increase in prices per month
• 3,250,000% increase in prices per year
• 43,880,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000% increase in prices per year

Personally, I don’t think that last number is any easier to understand. So try this, also from the Wikipedia article: A 5 million Mark coin would have been worth US$714.29 in January 1923 and about 1 one-thousandth of a cent by October of that year.

(The scary thing is that this is not the record for hyperinflation. There have been worse economic collapses. And what has happened once can happen again…)

Bottom-line relevance to the retcon

The bottom line is this: bias, incompetence, assumption, incompleteness of facts, and romanticization of a situation by a reporter or historian can contaminate understanding of an event even by those who experienced it so completely that the truth, when eventually revealed or discovered, is tantamount to completely revising the history of the event.

There is a popular aphorism by George Santayana, a Spanish philosopher: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” I prefer my own variation: “Those who do not understand the past are incompetent to shape the future.”

But an RPG is an imperfect simulation of a world, one that is manipulated for entertainment purposes by the GM. If the GM was omniscient and perfectly prescient, he would know exactly what was needful for future plots at the time of an in-game event, and could pull strings appropriately. Since he is not, the best he can do is create dangling plot threads that he can pull on when he needs them; and, when that fails him, his only recourse is to reinvent the past a little. And that’s retconning.

The Erroneous Assumer

The other source of misinterpretation is the incorrect assumption. Assumptions always frame and color the understanding of any event, and you can only properly interpret the reports and analysis of such an event if you know, and can allow for, the assumptions that have been made. This is often difficult, firstly because they usually aren’t put in writing, and secondly, the distant observer can only guess at the level to which these assumptions have influenced the reports of events, and so do not know how much correction is required.

For a start, observers generally assume that what they are seeing is real, and not some calculated deception. That’s what lies at the heart of the Potemkin Village deception – and at the heart of most magic acts!

Another frequent assumption is that if someone has a reason to lie, they probably are lying. Still another is that people are consistent – a habitual liar never tells the truth, and a truthful person never tells a lie. There are assumptions about what is physically possible which often mislead. Wishful thinking is often a factor, and so is the other side of the coin, prejudice of any sort. These days, racial profiling applies assumptions about real or fictitious characteristics to individuals deemed to be of a particular racial profile. Oh, and most people will assume that an expert knows what they are doing!

Some people assume that there were no moon landings simply because it was such a difficult undertaking – while relying on NASA information as the basis of their assessment of the difficulties. And some people assume they understand something when they don’t.

The power – and danger – of assumption is most clearly demonstrated to me by the Monty Hall Problem, which always comes to mind when I think of this subject. In essence: There are three boxes or doors, one of which leads to a prize. After a choice is made between them, one of the other doors is opened to show that it did not contain the prize. If they are then offered the chance to change their mind, most people won’t take it; they will assume that the presenter knows they have chosen correctly and is trying to lead them away from the prize, and they will also assume`that there is no advantage to changing their minds as to which door leads to the prize. For these reasons, few (if any) will switch.

In the newspaper column which made the problem famous, even after the correct solution was revealed, many readers refused to believe switching is beneficial. Approximately 10,000 readers, including nearly 1,000 with PhDs, wrote to the magazine, most of them claiming the answer was wrong. Even when given explanations, simulations, and formal mathematical proofs, many people still do not accept that switching is the best strategy.

It’s easily shown that it is – You originally had a 1 in 3 chance of making the right choice, which means that there is a 2/3 chance that you chose incorrectly. One of those other choices was then eliminated, meaning that all of that 2/3 chance of winning is behind the door that wasn’t originally chosen – so you double your chances of winning by altering your choice. But this is so counter-intuitive that many find it hard to accept. Paul Erd?s, one of the most prolific mathematicians in history, remained unconvinced until he was shown a computer simulation confirming the predicted result.

I first encountered the problem as part of the TV show Numb3rs, and it is the explanation given there that I have described above. Shortly thereafter, I saw episode 177 of Mythbusters, entitled “Pick A Door”, in which the problem – and the prediction that most people would not change their choices – were put to the test and the result confirmed. But I found their explanation harder to follow than the simplicity of the one from Numb3rs, so that’s the one that I remember.

Getting back to the point, then, assumptions can be determined to be incorrect months or years after the event, and doing so completely transforms the context of the event and hence its outcome. Particularly suspect is any statement which can be framed as “the only possible explanation”, or “the simplest explanation” because Occam’s Razor is misinterpreted or misapplied all the time. It’s usually misquoted as “The simplest possible explanation is usually the truth”, and that right away is where people go wrong; it should be, in the modern vernacular, “The simplest possible explanation that accounts for all the known facts is usually the truth – if you know enough of the facts.”

To completely transform a past event, you simply have to replace an assumption with a fact that contradicts it – and (to keep this retcon fair) make sure that the fact could not have become known to the players any sooner.

Strict Continuity is a nonsense

The only possible conclusion from all this is that “strict continuity”, as most people think of it, is nonsense. Strict Continuity is not fixed; it heaves and rolls and comes unglued at the seams, only to be stitched back together again. Nor is the retcon inherently contradictory to strict continuity; used properly, it can be the structural adhesive that holds a strict continuity together.

Where does that leave our definition? Surprisingly healthy. Let’s look at it again: “Strict Continuity is a metagame trait of an RPG campaign in which the campaign exhibits inertia of situation, i.e. a causative and logical connection between in-game experiences in which events, once they occur or are established as having occurred, are immutable.”

None of the retcon methods discussed alter events once they have occurred or are established as having occurred. They transform the understanding of events, they can radically alter the interpretation of events, they can even make the event more complete by providing facts that weren’t known at the time – but the event itself remains unchanged.

“Episodic” Continuity

The other end of the continuity extreme is “episodic”, also known as “simple” or “loose” continuity. Believe it or not, it’s just as hard to find a good definition of this type of continuity, yet – once again – everyone seems to know what is meant by it. TV Tropes divides it into two phenomena – the Reset Button and Status Quo Is God – and points to the flawed assumption of “No Ontological Inertia” that is exhibited by many TV shows that employ this type of continuity. This is the assumption that cause and consequence are somehow connected, and if you undo the cause even after the fact, the effects will vanish. Defeat the villain and whatever damage he has done will be somehow undone.

These are all pieces of the puzzle, but by focusing on them exclusively, one can’t help but form the impression that they are dancing around the definition, or its absence. If you try understanding the root concept of episodic continuity using these as references, you end up not being able to see the forest for the trees – even though you know that it’s there somewhere!

So let’s start with a basic definition as would apply to a TV series, and then modify it for the unique application that is an RPG campaign (TV didn’t invent the concept any more than it invented the serial continuity now referred to as “strict” continuity, but its a format that everyone recognizes): “Episodic Continuity” is a property of any television series in which the status quo is reset at the end of each episode (from time to time, the status quo itself may be redefined without violating such continuity; these redefinitions may or may not take place on-screen as part of a specific episode).” That’s a definition that covers every example that I can think of, from CSI and other police procedurals to M.A.S.H. to The Simpsons. It clearly delineates the differences between such programs and shows like “Lost”, “Marvel’s Agents Of S.H.I.E.L.D.”, and “24”. This even covers some reality TV series, like “Pawn Stars”!

Adapting this definition to an RPG campaign, we get, as a proposed definition:

“Episodic Continuity” is a metagame property of any RPG Campaign in which the status quo is reset at the end of each adventure to a defined benchmark which is subject to periodic redefinition, which may or may not be reflected in specific in-game events.”

That means that aside from the content of that benchmark, nothing can be taken for granted; if a book is placed on a table in the course of an adventure, that book is assumed to have been put back on the shelf (or wherever) by the start of the next adventure. It means that characters don’t change conceptually from one encounter to the next – if Longforlorn walks with a limp due to an old axe wound this week, he will still walk with a limp due to an old axe wound six years from now, and the scar will even be in the same place on his body. It means that time can be assumed to be suspended if a PC isn’t there to see events evolve, and that anything he does witness may or may not become a permanent change in the status quo. PCs can leave a situation – a tavern, say – and know that it will be exactly the same if they go back to it at some future time, unless it has been altered by a “benchmark update” in the meantime. It means that consequences and repercussions of choices will generally not persist beyond the end of an adventure, even if made in ignorance or error. Characters and situations can be invented and inserted as part of any given plotline and removed when the plotline is complete. And it means that events of the past can be completely reinvented (with exceptions) provided that the benchmark is not violated.

Continuity Of Characters

Right away, it can be seen that this model requires PCs to occupy a privileged position within the context of reality. PCs do not reset at the end of an adventure; they continue to exhibit strong continuity insofar as they retain experience points earned, continue to suffer from injuries received, retain any possessions obtained, and so on.

Continuity Of Setting

But the flaws in the strictly episodic approach don’t end there. The game setting continues from episode to episode. PC continuity rubs off on NPCs to some extent; any evolution in an NPCs relationship to a PC tends to ‘stick’ unless this would interfere with the “benchmark status quo”. So an NPC can have an argument with a PC in this adventure and then buy them a drink in the next, provided those actions are consistent with both the benchmark relationship and the in-adventure developments. Any changes that do take place tend to be evolutionary in nature, not revolutionary.

Episodic continuity in a television show is useful because it means shows can be aired in any sequence. Audiences can tune in and know what to expect without valuable screen time consumed with a “previously on” voiceover. Surprisingly, it can be bad for an RPG in it’s most theoretically-pure form for the exact opposite reason: because anything not canon within the series can be altered on a whim, players don’t know what to expect. They have no foundations beneath their characters that they can rely on. (It follows that retcons are far worse in Episodic continuity RPGs than they are in strong-continuity campaigns even though one of the primary justifications given for the episodic approach is to enable changes to take place as necessary to create an entertaining adventure).

Sequels Will Happen

Under strictly episodic continuity, once a villain escapes or is captured, they vanish into the haze and are never heard from again. No adventure can ever reference a past adventure. There is no such thing as a sequel. Which is absolute nonsense.

Reboots are a Big Deal

The only way to achieve true perfect episodicity is to completely reboot the game after every episode, with whatever changes are necessary to accommodate the next adventure’s story. Any contradiction is automatically redacted in favor of the latest form of history. But such reboots are a lot of work, more than most GMs would contemplate.

Why are they so much work? Because the GM can’t take anything for granted, either. Any element of the background can be changed to better accommodate the new adventure; the only thing that’s established is the immediate world around the PCs. Cities can grow – or lose – entire suburbs, if necessary. The only mandate beyond protecting the “benchmark”, and being fair to the players with these retcons, is that the players need to be told everything that they need to know in order to make decisions before any decisions have to be made.

If you change the nature of Dwarves, you need to decide whether or not you also need to change the nature of Elves, and even if not, you may have to reinvent Dwarven society from the ground up. Or, in a more realistic scenario, if the party are to encounter a segment of Dwarven society totally different to any they have met before as part of the adventure, that society needs to be fully rendered by the GM for the adventure and then gets thrown away because it isn’t part of the game “benchmark”.

Episodic Continuity is a nonsense

The only possible conclusion is that Episodic Continuity does not isolate adventures half as much as the definition implies. Every character and most parts of the game setting continue, unchanged, and the very fact that characters can earn experience or improve skills, gains that are not thrown away at the end of the adventure, signifies that “perfect” episodic continuity is totally out of the question. We can’t even come close, really – unlike a television show like the Simpsons.

If truth be told, even in the world of television, there’s no such thing (outside of shows like The Simpsons) in which there is not some element of continuity. True episodic continuity, as a rule of thumb, is like Absolute Zero: a theoretical ideal that can never be reached. Even in the Simpsons there are continuity elements – Sideshow Bob’s stories, for example, show a clear continuity from one to the next. Episodes will sometimes reference past episodes – so the “reset” is not always perfect.

Loose Continuity

What most GMs refer to as “episodic continuity” is nothing of the sort. It is instead a “loose” continuity in which the primary objective is to keep adventures as self-contained as possible. Relationships with a consistent “supporting cast” continue to evolve while remaining essentially unchanged. How does this fit our definition of “episodic” continuity? What are the major differences?

It’s clear that the primary difference is in the “reset” to a “defined benchmark”. We could amend this definition very easy to define “loose continuity”:

“Loose Continuity” is a metagame property of any RPG Campaign in which the status quo is reset at the end of each adventure to an evolving benchmark.”

And, to be honest, that definition fits a number of the TV shows previously classified as “Episodic” – the NCIS franchise comes to mind, for example. The biggest difference is that the benchmark evolves more than is revised – though such revision is possible.

This also opens the door to retcons within the continuity when necessary. Anything that is not directly or indirectly defined or dependent upon that evolving benchmark can be retconned if necessary, again provided that the retcon itself is done in the ‘ethical manner’ described earlier.

Campaign Plot Arcs

There are a couple of benchmark positions midway between the “loose” and “strong” continuity models, and the one that I tend to use most frequently of all of them is the campaign plot arc. There are other names for this – Johnn Four refers to them as “loops” and talks about “Loopy continuity”.

Campaign Plot arcs come in two varieties, depending on how the arcs are linked. The simpler model is to have each group of plot arcs be “episodic” in nature, ie internally self-contained; within that plot arc, strong continuity is observed, but each group of adventures exhibits loose continuity. It’s as though each adventure was comprised of related smaller adventures, with the larger adventures having loose continuity overall, but experiencing “bursts” or “bundles” or “temporary periods” of internal strong continuity.

The diagram below will hopefully make this more clear.

For example, the Adventurer’s Club campaign follows this sort of continuity. We started with the “establish the PCs” plot arc, which segued into the “The FBI Takes Over” plot arc, which has segued into the “Too Old In The Tooth” plot arc, which will leave the PCs as the acknowledged leading troubleshooters in the world. The rest of the campaign then deals with them in that position of prominence, and all the problems that it brings.

The other sort of Plot Arcs are joined in a more “strict continuity” fashion, with subplots crossing from one plot arc to another. This essentially means that the principle that defines the plot arc is something other than plot – it might be one particular problem hanging over the heads of the PCs or one particular theme or tone, or some sort of common element.

The diagrams below will hopefully make that clearer. The first shows the same campaign illustrated with added subplots spanning plot arcs, and the second takes away the internal subplots within each plot arc to just show the inter-arc connections.

More complex continuity structures

Of course, there is no need to actually have each plot arc occur in sequential order. You can have the first adventure of plot arc #2 follow the first adventure of plot arc #1, then go back to plot arc #1, then start plot arc #3… The arcs thus become simply a way of “threading” connected adventures together.

For example, In the Zenith-3 campaign,

• the first phase existed to establish the basics of the game world and some of the relationships that would matter later in the campaign;
• the second phase, which it entered in the past year has made the party aware of a major crisis that is looming, in which allies will become enemies and enemies will become allies.
• In Phase Three they will gain more information about what is coming and why.
• In Phase 4, they will begin encountering fallout from those who hope to take advantage of the situation, and learn still more;
• …and in Phase 5 they will begin to deal directly with some of these wannabe cosmic powers.
• In Phase 6 they will learn the full story of what is to come, and in Phase 7 they can use that information to actively pick sides, recruit allies, and make plans.
• Phase Eight is about preparations for the event, and Phase Nine is the event itself.
• There are then a handful of epilogue phases which bring out the consequences of the event both personal and professional and how it has transformed the campaign universe.

These phases are divided by landmark events that change the relationship the PCs have with the event, gradually shifting them from a position of “there’s nothing we can do, if it happens it happens” to “it is our destiny to be central to this event and it’s up to us what we do with that authority.” The lines between phases are realistically blurred, and not every adventure (especially in the first five or six phases) will be about the event, but slowly it will become the dominant focus of the campaign, which is currently on the personal problems and lives of the PCs.

The phases also contain very different numbers of adventures, becoming shorter each time. Of course, there are also a number of plot twists and turns along the way (at the beginning of the campaign, a status quo was outlined as the starting position for everything to follow; by the end of it, not a single thing should be exactly the way it was except the PCs – and they will have been changed by the experience of being at the heart of these changes. Or it could take a left turn somewhere that I didn’t see coming!)

A fourth solution: the Rolling Retcon

But, now we come to the whole point of this article: A fourth solution that also lies somewhere in between strict and loose continuity.

This idea was inspired by Marvel Comics editorial policy in the 1970s and 80s, which held that “everything has happened in the last 7 years unless specifically dated”. So all the early events, like the Captain America stories from World War II, were fixed by virtue of the connection to a specific historic event, but everything else evolved in date over time. In 1972, Peter Parker was bitten by that notorious spider in 1965; in 1975, the date of the bite had progressed to 1968, and by 1980, the bite took place in 1973. That was how marvel explained that Peter Parker took so many years to complete high school, and was still a university freshman, and other such continuity problems. Of course, if you simply counted the number of times the seasons became wintery, or the number of Christmas references, this theory was quickly shattered, and over time there was a problem with trying to compress more and more into a single period of time.

Having read what I’ve written so far, it can be immediately recognized that this is an attempt to resolve the conflict between strong and episodic continuity. In essence, it is the principle that The strength of continuity is inversely proportional to the interval since the event.

Applying this to an RPG simply means that there is a fixed period of “recent past” which should be altered only with great care, but that things get hazy when looking further back in time. I would suggest that this effect commences one adventure ago.

Fixed Signposts

Of course, not all events are created equal. Some are more pivotal than others, and need to be treated with greater respect. The major events should remain constant within the campaign. But really, how many players whose characters have reached seventh level really care about the details of what happened in the encounter that gave them their third payout of experience?

Meandering Byways

Everything in between these fixed signposts CAN change if necessary. That still doesn’t mean making capricious changes; it does mean that minor corrections, especially when supported by plausible mechanisms, are entirely acceptable.

The Flaws: A house on shifting sand

The rolling redact undermines certainty on the part of the players. In essence, it robs the campaign of a strong foundation and hopes that the structure itself is strong enough to hold together. Every time the GM retcons something, he pulls another nail out of that structure; at some point, the strength will be sufficiently undermined that it will all fall apart. Which is also what will happen with this metaphor if I carry it any further!

The GM can protect his campaign from this problem to some extent by applying the common-sense restrictions already recommended for retconning – don’t do it unless you absolutely have to, don’t mess with the fixed milestones, and employ the “best practice” technique for retconning already provided.

But even with every safeguard in place, this campaign option remains more vulnerable to retconning than either of the extremes because it relies more heavily on the cohesiveness of recent events to hold it together, conceptually.

The Flaws: The Tangled Skien

Most campaigns can be deconstructed in terms of falling dominoes – a does b, which leads c to do d, which leads e to do f, while a is doing g. Think of a flowchart: take away a major domino, and even if you replace it with something that makes sense in the context of the current adventure, it can make a nonsense of something else.

That is the major danger posed by retconning, regardless of continuity model chosen; you change something, and that logically changes a whole string of things that eventually produce the current situation that you want – but, like the infamous butterfly crushed by a time-traveler, there will be all sorts of side-consequences unless the change is carefully contained, and that in turn can affect something that is supposed to remain fixed.

Campaigns Suited To the Rolling Retcon

There’s one particular type of campaign genre that seems especially well-suited to this type of continuity model, and that is a Time Travel campaign. The rolling retcon is a great way to simulate the minor consequences of changing the past.

No Easy Answers

What’s clear is that every campaign continuity structure is an imperfect compromise. Practicality states that most campaigns tend to be closer to having “strict” continuity than theory would necessary admit, but they all require a certain level of flexibility. The more historical content that is fixed, the more pressure there is on the GM to get everything right the first time, something that is impossible to an imperfect human. The only solution is to choose the alternative that best describes the sort of campaign you want to run – and make certain that the players know what to expect.

This was supposed to be a nice, quick article. I wondered why it was taking so long to write, and thought perhaps that the heat of the Australian summer was affecting my ability to write more than I thought. Uploading it revealed the truth – this is an 8000+ word monster, and I didn’t even notice. Oh, well.