thread: 2005-05-03 : Creating Theme
On 2005-05-03, Collin M. Trail wrote:
That was great Vincent, I found this very helpful.
One thing I was happy to see is that you aren't suggesting that anyone come up with theme ahead of time, because in my experience that hasn't worked.
In fact, this essay has provided me with some concepts that are helping me understand the development of my own gaming style. I usually am the one running games for my group. When I first became interested in trying to address weighty human issues in gaming, I tried to do so by either creating a theme or an issue, and putting the characters in situations which addressed these issues. I found that they usually didn't buy into it. I realized that this was because the theme/issue was all in my head, and had been created independently from whatever characters they were playing.
My next stage was to wait until the characters had been designed, try to guess at what their issue was, and create situations addressing that issue. The difficulty with this has been that sometimes I can't identity their issue, or they don't have one, or the issues addressed by the different characters are so diverse that the situation becomes schizophrenic.
Now that I am a little more conscious of what is going on, I can see that I need to communicate with the players about what issues we want to address. I'm a little worried, though, that we will have difficulties finding an issue that will be engaging to all of us. It strikes me that there are at least two ways to build a consensus about any of these issues- either everyone works cooperatively to find something that will be acceptable to all, or some authority decides unilaterally. Now, traditionally the person running the game decides the situation, and players are used to letting authority on that subject be centralized, as long as the situation seems somewhat appealing. But the character and the issues that character is 'about' are traditionally controlled by the player of that character, so I suspect people will be hesitant to give up control in that area. Especially since traditional gaming follows the model of a facist god for the gamemaster, ceding relatively little control to the players, they may want to have full control over the one area they normally are fully in charge of. (I think this is also at the heart of why many people resist rule mechanics which influence the mind and emotions of a character- so much is usually taken away, that no one wants to give up the one thing they still have control over). Any thoughts on this?
It also makes me wonder whether addressing multiple issues is a good or a bad idea. It might increase player buy in, but at the possible cost of fragmenting vision.
You wrote ?I've written about this quite a bit: resolving the immediate conflicts that make this situation unstable transforms this situation into a new one.? Any suggestions on good posts to read to review that? Certainly something I'd like to be solid on.
I found Victor's comment about how this may imply that players need more control of consequences in narrativist play interesting, and would like to discuss this more. That seems to follow, but... being able to decide what the consequences of your conflict are somehow make it seem flat to me. If I can predict all of the consequences when I make my choice, then I'm just choosing the consequences as well... I'm not exactly sure why, but it seems like it would deflate the tension.
Finally, you mention wanting to use dice to create and build tension without harming causality, and say that we have some good ways of doing this. Any resources you could suggest for more information on this subject?
Again, good work, I found this very useful and look forward to discussing it more.
