Stop Worrying and Love the Hole
The bloggosphere has united around holes, courtesy of Prismatic Wasteland’s rallying cry.
So let me talk about the most dreaded of holes in fiction…
PLOT HOLES!
And why you really shouldn’t worry about them in your roleplaying games.
In Walter Murch’s seminal book on film editing In the Blink of an Eye he establishes the six criteria of what makes a good cut, in order of importance:
- Emotion
- Story
- Rhythm
- Eye Trace
- Two-Dimensional Plane of Screen
- Three-Dimensional Space
If an editor can’t satisfy all six criteria before making a cut, then they should first consider emotion and work their way down the list.
Screenwriters and editors revise a story tirelessly for months (years, even) to ensure that it holds together in its continuity and logic. They get countless notes and rounds of feedback to plug their plot holes, and yet they still come up.
You don’t have that luxury when you are playing an RPG. The story needs to happen now! You can’t go back and fix the continuity errors. Sorry, my dude, you’re stuck with this shitty script. All your mistakes happened in-camera, and we have no budget for post…
What you can do, and arguably should do, is retcon. Focus on the immediate goals of the table and work to make that awesome. There is no changing what happened in previous sessions, and your campaign should not be chained to decisions made on the fly 10 real-time months ago.
Payoffs for past events are awesome, but they fall flat if they don’t meaningfully tie into what the current goal is, or set up a new hook for players to interact with. If it feels right, it feels right. But you gotta read the room first.
When you run a longer term campaign, lore-drift will happen. You will likely leave some loose ends and never revisit them. Some real life factors may force a plot hole to occur. A new player might drop in and you have to hastily introduce them to the party. It won’t make sense from a story perspective, and that’s ok!
It’s fine to make mistakes with the lore, or forget the occasional plot detail, or even your own character’s backstory if you are caught up in the moment. I often forget whole NPC companions exist in my campaigns, especially if they are just tag-alongs with no relevance to the situation at-hand. Sure, they were once part of a plot, or had some former relevance, but now these details are baggage.
Let the table decide if it’s that important. Your friends will remind you if they care.
You are playing a game that is happening in real time. You want to be consistent, but because you are a human being who is probably just here to have fun, you are going to create the occasional plot hole.
Let it go. Focus on what is next. Drop the dead weight of plots that aren’t going anywhere. Where is this current session going? What has your attention right now? Focus on that.
Consistency is important. But the emotion of the moment takes priority. Always.
And then you can work down that list.