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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5577550" data-attributes="member: 42582">I don't agree that thematic play has to be heavy, because not all themes are heavy. One example - the dwarf PC in my game has the following backstory, which the player wrote up:In Derrik's Dwarfholme, every young dwarf joins the military, but is not considered a non-probationer until s/he kills his/her first goblin. Unfortunately for Derik, in 10 years of service he never even saw a goblin - every time there was an attack on the Dwarfholme, or a retaliatory raid by the dwarf army, he was somewhere else - running errands, cleaning latrines, etc. Eventually, it became too embarassing and Derrik's mother packed him a bundle of supplies and sent him out into the world to make his fortune outside the Dwarfholme. Thus, he found himself drinking in the Hammer and Anvil, a dwarven pub in the old Nerathi city of Kelven.(The instructions to players that generated this backstory were (i) your PC must have some sort of relationship to something s/he values, and (ii) your PC must have a reason to be ready to fight goblins.)In a recent session, after the PC had reached paragon tier and become a Warpriest of Moradin, I wanted to introduce some dwarf NPCs into the ingame situation, for two reasons: (i) to deliver a holy symbol to the Warpriest PC (he didn't have one yet); (ii) to help with the tactical setup of the likely next encounter (hobgoblins and bugbears raiding a village). I decided that the dwarf NPCs would be a dwarf war party retreating from a skirmish with hobgoblins, who had been told by an angel of Moradin that they could get help from a warpriest if they headed south through the hills. And the angel left a holy symbol for them to give to the warpriest as a token of sincerity.When it actually came time to run the dwarf thing, I decided that the leader of the dwarf warparty would be someone who had known Derrik when he was a runner of errands and cleaner of latrines. So he comes to where the PCs are staying, sees Derrik, and asks "Derrik! What are you doing here? And where's the Warpriest?- An angel said that we would find one here." The ensuing skill challenge, in which Derrik and his fellow PCs tried to explain that Derrik was the Warpriest, culminated in Derrik driving his point home by knock all the dwarves flat with a single sweep of his halberd (mechanically, he expended one of his close burst encounter powers and made a successful Intimidate check).The doubting dwarves were then very apologetic, and saw Derrik in a new light. (And Derrik then proceeded to lead the bulk of them into death or serious injury under the feet of a hobgoblin-controlled Behemoth during the village raid - but that's a different episode, although the attitude of Derrik to his dwarven henchmen was certainly coloured by the circumstances in which they met.)This is an example of theme guiding a player in setting up his PC, and guiding me as GM in setting up a situation, and then being played off by both of us (and the other players, though to a lesser extent) in the resolution of the situation. But it's not heavy at all. (As I posted upthread, I think Ron Edwards is wrong to "officially" identify narrativist play with heavy thematic material, and gets it right when he ignores his own "official" characterisation of narrativism when it comes to the classificaiton of particular games - and so classifies Dying Earth as supporting narrative play even though its themes are much more light and ironic - closer to the dwarf example I've just described, for instance.)I'm not sure exactly what is going on in the last of these quoted paragraphs. I don't think anyone here is talking about a player's ability to change the ingame situation purely be metagame stipulation. But I am talking about (i) a GM having regard to a player's metagame interests before setting up the ingame situation, and (ii) having regard to those interests in resolving the ingame situation.The example above of the dwarf encounter shows the sort of thing I have in mind. I beleiev that it also shows that it is not true that all a GM has to go on is the mores and social norms and laws that have been laid down in the game. Even in the real world, there is no predictive social science comparable to physics or chemistry despite the richness of data available, and there is also no general agreement on the mores, social norms and laws that govern various societies. Contemporary anthropologists and historians disagree over the mores, social norms and laws that governed the Aztecs. And even members of the same society often can't agree on the mores, social norms and laws that govern them - hence political, legal and other cultural disputes break out.In an imaginary world the amount of data is far less, and the scope for imaginative projections, retrofittings and ad hoc fudgings is even greater. So the idea that the imaginary mores, social norms and laws must settle the matter is one I reject. Given what had been established, to date, about the situation of dwarves and Warpriests of Moradin in my game, any number of ways of setting up and running a dwarf encounter were possible. I chose the one that I thought would amuse my player, and bring back into play some stuff that had been sitting in the background for the past four or five levels.Likewise when a player decides to play an anti-necromancy PC in a world in which necromancy is widely accepted as permissible. How will the various NPCs react to this fantasy version of John Brown or the Sea Shepherds? The GM has a lot of flexibility, and if s/he wants to run a game that will support the players in generating and engaging with this sort of thematic stuff, then I would encourage him/her to use that flexibility to support, prod and energise the players - not to shut them down by (for example) always having the constabulary arrive, and by never having any of the constabulary be sympathetic, and by having the heavens turn as one on the PC for breaking divine law, etc, etc.</blockquote>

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