Making Adventures/Campaigns About Stuff (Themes in Games)

[Umbran]

I don't expect campaigns/adventures to be exactly the same as movies or novels. But does anyone design their scenarios or campaigns around a particular theme?

Sort of.

I'll take my Ashen Stars game as an example - in that game, each character has a Drive, a personal goal or reason to be out doing things. Any time I built a scenario to address one or more of those Drives, I'd have a de-facto theme.

As an example, one PC was of a race that wasn't fully sentient before a corporation did some genetic work on them. From the company's perspective, they were... an intelligence/spy asset to be leased out. The lease was held by another PC, who pointedly ignored the terms of the lease and let the asset-PC do whatever they wanted.

But, the PC still had a goal to not be an owned thing, to be fully seen as a person. So, any time I'd lean into that, I'd have themes of self-determination and autonomy and what "freedom" really means.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

On its surface, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982) was just about some dude who wanted to exact revenge on Captain Kirk for marooning him on a doomed planet. But if that's all the story had to offer it probably wouldn't be so fondly remembered as one of the better Trek movies out there. In Wrath we not only get a good action plot but the movie deals with several different themes including aging,* the self-destructiveness of vengeance, the inevitability of death, self-sacrifice, and friendship. Lord of the Rings isn't just a fun movie about a little man trying to destroy a piece of jewelry, it's got something to say about the environment versus technology, free will, and the corrupting nature of power.

I don't expect campaigns/adventures to be exactly the same as movies or novels. But does anyone design their scenarios or campaigns around a particular theme?

*It's funny that back in 1982 when William Shatner was in his early 50s that aging was one of the themes throughout the movie when compared to more recent movies. Today we've got Patrick Stewart in his early 80s playing Picard, Harrison Ford in his late 60s (and 70s if a new movie is being made) playing Indiana Jones, and I don't hear a lot of jokes revolving around The Rolling Stones being old like I used to 25 years ago.

Yeah, I mean, we have (my couple of longest playing groups) played a lot of THEMATIC games. They were less about something like 'aging', and more about some specific type of situation or genre though, generally. A theme like aging is more likely to come up as either a subplot, a story arc, or simply a short adventure or even encounter.

In one campaign I was running in 4e a few years ago, the players encountered a PC from the earliest days of D&D, which was played by one of the same players. Instead of being a mighty warrior said character was now a rather washed up has-been who held forth in taverns recounting days of yore. All his glory days of piles of treasure and mighty magic items faded away. He wasn't exactly a paragon of wit or wisdom, so he just ended up cast up on some random shore of life with little to show for it all. The current PCs soon learned he was not someone to rely on, all his legends to the contrary, that was then, this is now. Sure, that's a theme all right! But aside a couple more brief crossings of paths it wasn't like it got more than a couple scenes of focus.

One time I ran a Traveller game where the scenario was that the PCs were on a space station. The station was doomed. There was no way off. I guess that was a pretty hard core "what this is about!" Of course it was obviously a one-off.

No reason why you cannot run themed campaigns too, it would just have to be a theme you were all pretty sold on! It might need to fade into the background at times, but maybe that depends on what it was about exactly.

 

[Larnievc]

Crikey. Reading all this makes me feel a bit inadequate as a DM. My games seem to run more like music videos (circa 2002)/ tv ads, instead of literature.

 

[MGibster]

Crikey. Reading all this makes me feel a bit inadequate as a DM. My games seem to run more like music videos (circa 2002)/ tv ads, instead of literature.

Nothing wrong with that.

 

[prabe]

Crikey. Reading all this makes me feel a bit inadequate as a DM. My games seem to run more like music videos (circa 2002)/ tv ads, instead of literature.

Eh. It's probably not worth worrying about. If the people around the table are the sort to want themes in their game, a theme will emerge. It's (probably, usually) not worth trying to force it, especially if there are people around the table who actively don't want a theme (or the same theme as everyone else).

 

[Yora]

That's how normal people run games. This discussion is for pretentious snobs like us.

 

[Professor Murder]

Crikey. Reading all this makes me feel a bit inadequate as a DM. My games seem to run more like music videos (circa 2002)/ tv ads, instead of literature.

It's also worth mentioning that ALL narratives inherently deal with themes. What is more at issue here is intent and outcome.

 

[TheSword]

I think one of the things I like about WFRP is that it’s themes are so clear… class struggle, ideology, order vs chaos, modernization, factionalism, religion and the end times.

It creates a very rich world that doesn’t really feel the same as any other setting… for all that it’s critics claim it is a Tolkien knock off. It actually feels nothing like Tolkien because the themes are so strongly woven into the world.

 

[Aldarc]

I think one of the things I like about WFRP is that it’s themes are so clear… class struggle, ideology, order vs chaos, modernization, factionalism, religion and the end times.

It creates a very rich world that doesn’t really feel the same as any other setting… for all that it’s critics claim it is a Tolkien knock off. It actually feels nothing like Tolkien because the themes are so strongly woven into the world.

WFRP is a bit like if Lord of the Rings had been written by Michael Moorcock and other British New Wave fantasy authors of his time.

 

[Bluenose]

does anyone design their scenarios or campaigns around a particular theme?

Sometimes. Other times one develops in play, or doesn't. Two recent games (one I played in, the other I ran) show the differences. In one, the PCs had a ship, a crew, and were pretty much free to do what they wanted with that and different players fopund different things interesting and played to those things while there wasn't really an overall theme - just a series of short story arcs. In the other, the player's were part of a group that had been attacked and its leadership destroyed, and they were the ones who put themselves forward as leaders because they had ideas of what the right thing to do was eight now. That campaign had a theme from the start based around the desire for survival and also had a few short story arcs but many parts of it related to the overall theme (not all of them did, some were simply little interludes to the main story).