thread: 2005-05-03 : Creating Theme
On 2005-05-04, Emily Care wrote:
GB Steve wrote:
Most games tend to have implicit notions of what the theme is. You're all freedom fighters against the Empire or knights who must way duty against feelings. These work perfectly well as long as the GM has an explicit understanding of this and pplies his craft to the areas where the system supports the creation of tension.
Exactly. It's dependent on the GM having an understanding of the process that Vincent outlined. It may be that if you already apply this process it seems obvious. But, unfortunately, it is not so to everyone.
Collin's post gives a perfect example of the oh so common progression that GMs go through:
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....
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...
Now, instead of making ever individual game group go through all these lessons, stumbling through in the dark & maybe never getting there, rule sets like the ones Ben described let any group do this simply & easily.
Neel K's post on 20X20 expressed a very similar experience with gaming about "regular situations", except he has found the formula that works for his goals: the one V. outlines above.
best,
Emily
