The Themes of Your Campaign

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by jason taylor

Well it says "main idea or message" not just message. In any case it was copied from wikipedia so I am not taking a position other then the position that it economizes on arguing to go back to the manual before beginning just to make sure it's not just a matter of everyone having a different idea of what a word means.

Okay, well, my campaigns don't have messages. But I think a lot of them do have themes. I've discussed a problem with theme in one of the current ones. Any thoughts?

Bill

[jason taylor]

Originally Posted by whswhs

Okay, well, my campaigns don't have messages. But I think a lot of them do have themes. I've discussed a problem with theme in one of the current ones. Any thoughts?

Bill

honor vs law vs ethics?

This is in fact has been done in various formats and came up in Kidnapped(Alan was honor, David was lawfulness and ethics).

Love vs Honor is a classic but honor isn't usually given a fair enough chance nowadays. Stranger Among Us, and Casablanca are among the rare ones where honor prevails. And B5 Atonement manages to find a satisfactory and believable compromise which I thought impressive.

[Ed the Coastie]

Originally Posted by whswhs

If you'll forgive a repetition, I don't count that as a "theme," but as a "thesis." Anything that can be represented as an assertion, a claim that one thing is true and another false, is a thesis, even if it's a very general one, such as this. A "theme," to me, is a topic about which one might make varied assertions. For example, "the discovery and exploration of the unknown" is a topic (in fact, it's a lot like the topic of one of my recent campaigns, "myths and legends of the seas and seafaring"), and therefore is a suitable theme, whether you have a specific thesis to put forth about it or are just looking at different possibilities.

You have a point, and quite probably an extremely valid one. However, you are also looking at the difference between "theme" and "thesis" from a different perspective than I am. Such a difference is far more important to someone who works with words for a living than it is for a warehouse supervisor, and so is much more apparent to you than it is to me.

Thanks for point out the difference, though; I learned something new (or at least relearned something that I had forgotten), and always appreciate that.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Ed the Coastie

You have a point, and quite probably an extremely valid one. However, you are also looking at the difference between "theme" and "thesis" from a different perspective than I am. Such a difference is far more important to someone who works with words for a living than it is for a warehouse supervisor, and so is much more apparent to you than it is to me.

I can see the point you're making. It's important to me because I've been reading about "theme" literally for decades, and it's both always been hard for me to get a grasp of and hard for me to see how to apply. Once I started thinking of it as "recurrent topic," it made sense!

I could see, in particular, that the theme of a work was the basis for selecting what things to include in it and what things to leave out. So it actually made the idea of "theme" useful to me in running campaigns. As I say, I don't run campaigns to prove things; but in a recent cycle, I had one campaign whose theme was myths, legends, and folkore of the sea (example: a "crossing the line" ceremony where Poseidon shows up in person to initiate sailors on the Pearl Bright Ocean) and one whose theme was superbeings as political actors with powers comparable to those of national governments (example: a mentalist of Russian ancestry who showed up in Georgia to disrupt the military chain of command that was organizing the defense against the Russians). Each topic generated a long series of specific scenarios . . . but left the players free to decide what action to take.

I'm discussing it because I find this way of looking at the idea useful, in other words.

Bill Stoddard

[D10]

The theme in my current campaign is sort of space west runaway.

Like cowboy bebop but instead of being bounty hunters they are transporting a bounty worthy psi to a fringe colony

[ajardoor]

Themes are not exactly the same thing as messages or morals.

A theme could be like "betrayal" or "addiction".

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by ajardoor

Themes are not exactly the same thing as messages or morals.

A theme could be like "betrayal" or "addiction".

Yes, that's just what I've been saying.

Bill Stoddard

[sir_pudding]

I have a lot of trouble with clearly identifying themes in literature as well, I'm sure my games have themes that are emergent, but somebody more perceptive then me would need to find them.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by sir_pudding

I have a lot of trouble with clearly identifying themes in literature as well, I'm sure my games have themes that are emergent, but somebody more perceptive then me would need to find them.

I see games as having a spectrum from theme-setting to theme-seeking. Mine have covered much of the range. I'll try to give some examples later on.

Bill Stoddard

[D10]

Ok, the theme of my campaign then is

Psi-ops