thread: 2005-05-03 : Creating Theme
On 2005-05-03, Neel wrote:
I'm like "yes, yes, yes!", except for the bit where you say you don't get to decide what happens ahead of time. You can make that work, too.
I ran a game called Aquinan Angels, once. In Thomas Aquinas's Summa Theologica, he writes that angels had a different kind of free will than humans. Angels, at the instant of their creation, got a full, comprehensive, and accurate vision of the entire history of the universe, and then they chose whether to accept God or reject Him (ie, fall and become a demon) based on this vision. Once they make their single choice, they will never change their minds, because they can never learn anything they didn't already know when they chose.
So, I wanted to run a game like this. The players made up their angels and demons, and then we spent a session just deciding what would happen in the session of play. That is, we worked out who would go where and what they would do, all ahead of time. Then we played through that, and roleplayed the conversations and gunfights and crises of faith and stuff like that, all knowing how it would turn out. This knowledge was important to have, because we wanted to play angels and demons who knew how everything would turn out before they did it. That way, we could kind of get at the mindset that
The reason this worked was that the plot is not the theme. The action illustrates the theme, and it's up to the players to actually do the work of interpreting the events and deciding what the theme is—and different players can come up with different themes from exactly the same sequence of events.
