House Rule - Memory Recall

 

There comes a time in your campaign that you've given out some important information and it flew past your players, or maybe some time passed between gaming sessions and no one remembers or wrote it down. 

Now as a GM you can basically say, "too bad, next time write shit down" and let your campaign grind to a screeching halt.. players sitting there with a blank stare, looking at you, wondering what to do?

Which sucks, because a campaign that grinds to a stop can cause a game to stop moving forward and maybe even not continue. I've seen it happen where a GM will not give out the info and everyone sits there.

So how can we solve this issue?

WELL as the GM, you can basically just get frustrated and give the players the info, which is an easy out and gets the game moving, but makes you as the GM feel like the time you put into this clue or info was pointless and why bother going forward?

OR you can use a mechanic to help push the story forward.

Its called MEMORY RECALL.

Its something I started using way back in my gaming career as a GM, to help provide the info but not feel like my prep and creative time was wasted.

A highly intelligence character might recall the info, while a player who may forget or just doesn't bother to write shit down.

In Palladium games (or any game for that matter, even D&D), you'd use IQ or something similar in your game (for this as the base. Adding anywhere from +5% to +20% to it and take that number as your percentage to roll under.)

If the player rolls percentile dice and comes up with a number under this MEMORY RECALL number, then you can provide some information to the player in hopes to "jog" their memory.

Does this method work all the time?

No, it doesn't. 

I've played in games, where I've had to use this and even when I gave the info to the player, they still looked at me like I was talking out of my ear.

In which case you as the GM need to make a decision to just give all the info out to move things along or make the players suffer, which is a bad decision in my opinion.

Thoughts?

Did a youtube short about this as well: