House of Cards GM Log

IMC: Do You Theme?

posted by Ginger at 01:34 PM, October 25, 2004 | Filed under : IMC | Comments and Followups

Arref posts about themes in his Eternal City campaign.

I’ve long said that the theme of House of Cards is “choices have consequences”. I think it’s the key theme of the game. I like a lot of the themes Arref posits for his campaign and can see how many of them are also present in House of Cards (reality is an onion, the value of friendship over isolation, and how long it takes to grow up come to mind in particular). But the idea that choices have consequences is probably the key theme in House of Cards for me.

Individual themes for PCs are in part dictated by actions in play, and in part by the choice of the Virtue, Fault, and Fate cards players chose at the beginning of the came. In some cases, the thematic conflict expressed in the cards seems to have worked itself out early (Brennan comes to mind), even though the Everway system seems to expect a crisis to resolve a character’s Fate. We haven’t had a character go through a huge crisis and resolve it yet. I think that will be a big test of the Amberway model, and one that I want to see play out.

Follow up: the trackback URL for this entry is: http://www.whiterose.org/MT/mt-tb.cgi/4526

2 Comments

Olof
Oct 25, 2004 4:22 PM

In my ftf group those crisis has not came unless I as the GM has forced them. (But the players have not disliked that.)

Personally I think few players dare throw their PC into a total life crisis if they at least have some idea of what the character would turn into afterwards. Or maybe that's just me.

Arref
Oct 25, 2004 6:48 PM

I'm staring at the Virtue, Fault, and Fate cards for Celina and thinking, "what idiot picked these?"

LOL

She is in so much trouble.

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