I'd like to preface this with a comment that this has nothing to do with any current games I'm running. Just in case anyone would take this badly out of context and think I'm completely fucking up my games.
I only fuck them up partially, thank you very much.
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I'm sure that as a GM that you've made mistakes on occasion. Maybe it was a small little thing, like forgetting a power a monster has that would have changed the battle around or that an NPC is immune to that charm spell that the party mage cast. Then again, perhaps you made a bigger boneheaded mistake and had to seriously retcon and dig your way out of it, like giving out a Ring of Wishes to a low level group without any strings.
What I'm interested in is how you as a GM recover from your mistakes and smooth things over. A small(hopefully) but important part of running a game is correcting such errors. How do you pretty up your blunders?
Ring of Wishes ALWAYS has strings. They're called 'DM interpretation'.
One of the best examples is from and old campaign I was in. Semi-high level. I missed the session, but I heard about it a bit. One of the party members asked 'I wish that all my future wishes turned out as I wanted them to'. *Poof* He's a genie. Unfortunately he wasn't a free one. There was a lamp around. So the party had to waste another wish to undo the last one.
CM
I fall back to my basic strategy for pretty much everything in life:
Make Something Up.
That's the way I tend to GM anyways, so it works well for me.
If THAT fails.... I just tell the players that I was an idiot who didn't think things through and kick it back to a point where it's workable again. Mind, that only works if you catch the problem quickly, though. Otherwise, see option one. 'course, I've been spoiled by players that tend to catch onto problems and are honest about pointing them out. i.e. "Did you know that pistol only had three of them made...period?"
You're made up!
Or not. =)
Dracos
had to say it.