Addressing theme negatively

[Vaxalon]

As others have implied, there's always 'two sides' so to speak in regard to any theme. Not choosing an option that the system seems to push is a perfectly valid choice on the part of a player. In DitV, for example, it would be perfectly acceptable to refuse to escalate conflicts, even if it meant constantly losing. That choice makes a statement, which is what it's all about.

Are there always two sides?  Can you always address both sides?  ...and still have a game?

Dungeons and Dragons
Kill Puppies for Satan
Call of Cthulhu

Either I don't understand what timfire means here, or I think he's not 100% right.

[Bankuei]

Hi Vax,

It's key to note that "theme" from that thread was referring to Premise as in Narrativism's "Addressing Premise".  So, the whole idea applies only to Narrativist play, nothing else.  So with that in mind- none of the games you've listed are Narrativist facilitating and don't really work as good examples.  

If we ARE talking about Narrativist facilitating type games or Narrativist play in general, then realize there's always a two things going on:

1) Guaranteed player input (no railroading)
2) A focus on Premise (even if Premise isn't defined by the group)

So, let's look at a couple of Nar facilitating games as clear examples:

Dogs in the Vineyard:

You're supposed to stop sinners and "make right" by the community.  Well, what is sin?  What exactly is right?  Though Dogs lays out some ideas of what sinning is about, half the time its a reaction to some other situation or injustice, so is it really a sin?  And there's not really any guidelines as to what is "right", so what really are you going to do?

As you can see, there's definitely more than one side to any quandry you face in this game.  Deciding where the line of right and wrong lies, and what sort of actions will produce right answers, there's no "one way" to do it.

Riddle of Steel

You have 5 Spiritual Attributes going on at one time.  Often enough, you'll be forced to choose between them and show if you value one over another("Conscience over Passion"), or if you value an SA over a person, a person over an SA, how much trouble, danger, and drama you're willing to put up with for an SA.  It's also a statement if you choose not to follow SAs, or abandon them for something else.  

In other words, no matter what the actual SAs are, there's a lot of meaningful choices to be made here, and they tend to produce a lot of premise issues.

Sorcerer

Well, Humanity.  Let's see- you can choose to go for Humanity upping activities, or Humanity dropping ones.  Any time you do either, you are saying X is more/less important than Humanity.   It doesn't really strike you until you apply the specific definition you're using for Humanity against a specific situation, then it becomes real clear:

"Duty is more important than seeing my father on his death bed."
"Duty is less important than honoring my friend in trouble"
"Duty is more important than love"
etc.

You can switch around the more/less than and you still get meaningful statements all around.  Switch Duty with other concepts, such as Compassion, Truth/Honesty, Self Respect, etc.  

Can you see how Narrativist play("Making a meaningful statement on the premise/issue in your own way through play") demands that there has to be the option of more than one side?  If you didn't have the option, it wouldn't be a meaningful statement.

Chris