{"id":21143,"date":"2017-10-13T00:30:33","date_gmt":"2017-10-12T13:30:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.campaignmastery.com\/blog\/?p=21143"},"modified":"2017-10-09T16:51:16","modified_gmt":"2017-10-09T05:51:16","slug":"elephant-gray-room-4","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.campaignmastery.com\/blog\/elephant-gray-room-4\/","title":{"rendered":"The Elephant In The Gray Room, Pt 4 of 5: Major Structural Repairs"},"content":{"rendered":"
This entry is part 4 of 4 in the series Elephant In The Gray Room<\/a><\/div><\/div><\/div>
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‘chorme’ from freeimages.com \/ Michel Amaro (which was possibly meant to be named ‘chrome’…)<\/p><\/div>\n

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The Elephant In The Gray Room is a metaphor that I have created to represent Plot Holes.<\/p>\n

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

This is a series about methods of fix plot holes so that even when they get noticed, it’s just a spur to your creativity and not a complete calamity.<\/p>\n

Part one<\/strong> introduced the topic and offered a system for determining how critical the problem was, and the concept of matching the severity of the solution to that measure of criticality (you can read it here<\/a> if you need to get up to speed).<\/p>\n

Part two<\/strong><\/a>
\ndealt with minor repairs, the sort of things you can do to handle small problems before they have time to metastasize into something nastier.<\/p>\n

Part three<\/strong><\/a> dealt with more serious repair techniques for plot holes of greater significance to the campaign in the medium term.<\/p>\n

Part four<\/strong> is about to deal with plot holes that lead to substantial structural problems.<\/p>\n

And part five,<\/strong> which will conclude the series, will deal with catastrophic problems and the critical repair techniques needed to correct them. And I hope you never need them – though, if you GM for long enough, the odds are that you will, eventually.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

There are times when you discover that you’ve made a mistake that threatens to derail your whole campaign. This could be an NPC who is too powerful for the PCs, or a PC that is too powerful for the NPCs, or an NPC who is not powerful enough to pose the kind of threat that will drive the campaign forward. It could be that your long-term plotline has collapsed.<\/p>\n

And that’s only about half of the possibilities! But we’re talking here about plot holes, and those are a specific sub-type of structural defect, though a broad one. What the structural problems under this umbrella have in common is that the campaign or some component of it, either as it will be or as it is expected to be, doesn’t work, doesn’t make sense, or conflicts with the campaign’s past or the standards of good GMing. Conflicting elements could be plot, or character, or metaplot, or history, or even exotic elements like prophecies.<\/p>\n

(One GM I know once told me about an in-game prophecy that was supposed to define the plot outcome of events surrounding a key NPC, only for that NPC to be written out of the campaign in the first adventure – leaving the prophetic road-map of the campaign floating around and not really connecting with anything, even though it had been used as a guide to PC generation, i.e. the PCs were given roles to interpret that fulfilled different lines within the prophecy…)<\/p>\n

Solutions from Part 2<\/h3>\n

You should never use an elephant gun when all you need is a fly swatter. It doesn’t happen often that you can fix a major problem with a minor repair, but you should never ignore the possibility.<\/p>\n

The sooner you spot the problem, the more likely it is that the cumulative effects of a sustained smaller corrective mechanism can be used to fix it, simply because the problem has had that much less time to spawn domino consequences. However, the system of classification outlined in part 1 should minimize this possibility; you only get to a classification of “Major Structural Problem” if a smaller solution won’t solve your problem.<\/p>\n

But perhaps the solution is simply inobvious, or a smaller solution can be part<\/em> of solving the bigger problem, and so it is worth the effort to run through the solutions that have been offered thus far in the series to determine what, if any, role they might play in solving it.<\/p>\n