What is your Game About?

[Ariosto]

A decade ago, there was a bit of controversy over whether Adam Cadre's "Photopia" was interactive enough to be good interactive fiction. Is this the right medium for what some would argue could just as well have been presented in a more conventional way?

So, you want to have a literary theme in your campaign. Where is the place for it? In the environment! Shape the world with which the players interact; don't try to dictate their responses to it, or prevent their actions from bringing in new themes. What develops in play not only adds richness, but is IMO the great value in an RPG.

 

[Umbran]

If you're not looking for a narrative (if you're more of a sandbox or a dungeon-delve kind of group)

Sorry, false dichotomy. Sandbox does not equal no narrative. Sandbox just means significant chunks of the narrative control goes to the players.

And I can dungeon delving is just one more setting for a narrative, if you want it to be.

 

[Storm Raven]

The theme of the campaign is, in my opinion, the one thing that should never have a stat associated with it. The players should not be motivated by the accumulation of a stat as the metric of a campaign, or even have such an element quantified.

In most cases in which Wick has made a pronouncement about gaming, I have found that he is either wrong, or his opinion is diametrically opposed to my own.

 

[Korgoth]

My game's about avoiding narratives and themes.

joe b.

This, I endorse.

As a Referee, I don't sit down and say "My game is going to be about the dialectical relationship of justice and mercy." Because to make it about that, I would have to force certain issues.

Instead, I look at an adventure as a "scenario". In other words, "You (the PCs) are a given; now here's the situation you're in. What do you do?"

Now, there may be thematic elements insofar as certain series of events could be read in a literary way, and there may be certain motifs mixed in to reinforce that... but I keep it to the subtextual level.

The PCs are not actors in my play... nor am I the promoter of their rock concert. I create a problematic environment and they engage with it as they choose... though those choices could have consequences which limit their future choices.

 

[Cam Banks]

Paranoia, as an example, does not have a "how paranoid are you" stat, yet the game is highly successful in implementing its themes.

Paranoia still counts as a game that gets to its core element and has game stats for it.

In Paranoia everybody has a mutant power and is a member of a secret society. It is treasonous to have mutant powers and be a member of a secret society. The game forces you to act paranoid because you are, right off the bat, a traitor and you've got the proof written right there on your character sheet. Not only is the Computer out to get you, but so are the other player characters, since shoving you to the front of the punishment line keeps them alive a little longer.

Cheers,
Cam

 

[Ariosto]

Paranoia is certainly a brilliant design!

I worry about some vogues in "RPG theory" because their pronouncements seem to encourage over-simplification, to transform game design into entertainment presentation. There's too much emphasis on a beautiful preconception at the expense of the messy but ultimately critical business of actual play. Making play too tidy, too stereotyped, runs a serious risk of removing the qualities that make it most engaging.

One can afford a fair bit of that in a game meant to be played but once; such a design can be reduced even to a mere solvable puzzle. Long-term replay value, though, comes from a rich potential for variation and surprises.

 

[Hussar]

Sorry, false dichotomy. Sandbox does not equal no narrative. Sandbox just means significant chunks of the narrative control goes to the players.

And I can dungeon delving is just one more setting for a narrative, if you want it to be.

Fair enough. But, let's say we're going to do a Sandbox exploration style game. What's it about? Is it about being hopelessly lost, challenged by the elements and frequently failing - in other words a very realistic depiction of exploration? Or, is it more about evocative settings with lots of sensawunda?

That decision is going to drastically impact how you design the campaign.

In the first, you are going to track every ounce of food, every gallon of water. The weather is going to be bad, very often. Disease is going to be a major feature in the campaign. Starvation, descriptions of isolation and perhaps even madness.

So, you pick a system that reflects this. If a given system glosses over tracking food and ammunition like 4e does, then I wouldn't use 4e to do this. It just gets in the way. I also wouldn't use Savage World's for this either, since it doesn't really work well. OTOH, I wouldn't use Basic/Expert D&D for this either. No disease rules to speak of, and very little in the way of mechanical support for the themes of the campaign. 1e or 3e (presuming I'm doing it as a D&D campaign) would be my systems of choice for this.

In the second example though, I'd go the opposite. I don't want to track every arrow and every gallon of water. That's not what the campaign is about. It's Indiana Jones, not Master and Commander or Perry's expedition to the Pole. So, 4e would work better, as would Savage Worlds.

That's my point. By ignoring the theme of a campaign, as Korgoth suggests, you are actually dictating the theme. He insists that he simply presents scenarios, but, those scenarios are driven by his views of what makes a good game. I'm going to presume for a second here that tracking food and water and ammunition would feature heavily, based on his prior posts.

By default, his game would be about survival and not sensawunda simply because of the choices he makes about system.

 

[Thasmodious]

Respectfully, "stat" is short for "statistic". Statistics are quantitative, not qualitative. Thus - numeric. You can have character traits that are non-numeric, but I expect "stat" implies a number to the vast majority of gamers.

And I still say that the theme doesn't have to be linked to a mechanic - numeric or otherwise. The game mechanics have to support the theme in general flavor, but direct theme-related mechanics frequently get in the way of role-playing.

Paranoia, as an example, does not have a "how paranoid are you" stat, yet the game is highly successful in implementing its themes.

I think you are being far too literal in the face of an anecdote that wasn't. Wick is not saying that there should be an entry on the character sheet that reads "Hope:" and then has a box after it to enter a number. What he is saying, imo, is that what the game is about should be represented in the game system (whether designed, selected or house-ruled). If your game is about hope, how does that theme have representation in the system mechanics? For an example of this, think about Fallout 3 (if you've played it). Playing the good side in the game you begin to gain a reputation. As you do, the game system responds - you have people tell you that you bring hope to their lives and are an inspiration, a wasteland radio DJ starts telling of your exploits to bring hope to others, etc. In the game, your actions put you one side or the other, do you bring hope or despair? It's played out in the plot as well, the water reclamation project is the core plot and ultimately a project of hope.

As Cam points out, Paranoia is actually a perfect example of the game system repping the games theme. There is no Paranoia stat, but the mechanics of character design make you both a mutant and a traitor, the very things the Computer is seeking to root out and destroy. You know that if your abilities and affiliations are found out, your party will kill you swiftly and with much glee, and you are looking for the opportunity to do the same. The mechanics of the game create this humorous, entertaining, paranoid conflict.

 

[LostSoul]

Epic Fail.

Wick's exchange here reminds me a lot of the Forge, which also seems to be attempting to reduce game play into a codified set of mechanical operations.

I think Wick knows this.

I made this point recently in [Musha Shugyo] Honor mechanics, in which I talked about how My Life with Master has no "Defiance" score. It doesn't have to. The interactions of all the existing scores, puts "defiance of the Master" into a premium focus during play, as a kind of unnamed score.

Without such "fruitful voids," perhaps envisioned as what you get when you show a person seven of the eight corners of a cube, a rules-set is no fun. It's just a full cube; you can look at it, pick it up, mess with it, and nothing happens except it stays a cube.​

Oh wait, that's Ron Edwards, not Wick.

 

[Celebrim]

But they still have one over-riding theme. LotR, despite all the digressions into horse flanks and ents and poetry, is about destroying evil.

No, it's not.