My take on take-backs

This post over at Monsters & Manuals prompted this response:

No Take-Backs?

It itself is a response to this post:

Game-enhancing powers, game-ruining powers, and yet more magic items

In any case, this quote is from Monsters & Manuals:

"Is it ever legitimate for a DM to say to the players: "This power you now have is ruining the game by making everything too easy and I should never have made it possible to have it. Let's say that tomorrow you wake up and it mysteriously no longer works"?"

Yes.

In my games? Of course it is. It's a game. We're playing it to have good times with one another as our paper men do imaginary things to other paper things. Sometimes when we do this, we make decisions over rules and results and powers that have repercussions we don't expect.

Sometimes those are awesome.

Oftentimes, they suck the fun out of something. Or they, retroactively, destroy the canon of the game by making something we've already decided is this way or that not actually valid given this new thing.

In the case of awesome, we keep them. In the case of the others, we talk them out and figure out a better approach that doesn't make the game less fun. Generally we'll let results stand - almost always in my DF game. But we'll go back and revise powers. We'll revise rules when they don't seem to do what we want - like our XP rules or spell learning.

Remember when we changed missile spells to have larger explosion radii and a whole bunch of NPCs got blown up? But then we realized it wasn't really so great. We changed the rules to a different set. We didn't take away the ability but we nerfed it a bit. It needed doing.

Importantly, we do these by consensus whenever possible. Sometimes it's clear to me that it'll screw up the game from my side of the screen, and I'll just go and change it. But if at all possible, I'll do a 'take-back' with the whole group on board. We all want a challenging but fun game. If something we've put in the game makes that less so . . . yeah, we'll change it.