“No, Wait…”

Order of the Stick #1, by Rich Burlew. Upgraded to 3.5e!

There’s an interesting thread at the Giant in the Playground forums that deals, in part, with retracting an in-character action.  (As a side note, if you’re not reading the Order of the Stick comic at GitP, you really should.  There’s a lot of terrific gaming humor there.)

Among the questions the original post poses is the following:

- Do you allow your players to revise an action, if, a second or so later, they remember themselves why they shouldn’t do that?

There is, naturally, quite an array of views on the matter.  Some espouse the “you said it, it’s done” school of thought.  Others allow retractions with few restrictions.  There’s a lot of ground in between.  General opinion seems to fall toward “it depends,” which I realize isn’t terribly dramatic.  But the question of what, exactly, it depends on remains intriguing.

I consider myself to lean toward leniency here, but as I was typing my answer, I realized that I’d worked out more of a system for this sort of thing than I’d realized.  I expected a neat answer, but I came up with a couple of exceptions and clarifications.  The surprise isn’t that this sort of table rule develops over time, but that I hadn’t realized the extent to which it had.  My response to the question:

Immediately afterwards? Sure, as long as no dice have been thrown yet. They can’t take a risky action, fail, and then say “oops, I didn’t mean to do that.” But if they say something, then correct themselves, I’m fine with that.

They also can’t correct themselves after someone else’s turn begins, or (in non-combat situations) undo things that happened half an hour ago. It’s strictly a “second thoughts” thing.

Finally, in a roleplayed conversation, the character says what the player does. You can’t take back words you’ve spoken, you can only try to patch things up. (Out-of-character speech like a question to the GM is obviously exempt.)

In a case where one player wants to stop another, like that bomb situation, I’d allow some form of roll, though it’d probably cost that character his action for the turn. I probably picked that up from HERO’s “abort” mechanic.

That’s actually pretty convoluted, once I looked at it.  It’s not hard — ruling on the matter is no trouble.  It’s just that explaining it — to a new player, say — would take a bit of work.

That bomb situation, incidentally, refers to a conversation referenced in that initial post, which went something like this:

PC 1, inside a building, holding a ticking bomb:  I throw the bomb out the window.

PC 2: Disarm it first!

GM: Too late.  You hear an explosion below.  The casualties are…

Is this unfair on the GM’s part?  Would it be unfair if PC 1 were the one who’d said “No, wait, I disarm it first”?  The example is from a Shadowrun game; assuming it’s fair, would the same ruling be unfair in a D&D game?  A HERO game?  A Call of Cthulhu game?

I don’t think there’s a right answer, but I do think the answers say something about your preferred style of game and your general gaming outlook.

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