Re: EDITORIAL: Theme your forces- put in to get out!

Posted by MortiS-the-Lost on Oct 04, 2010; 3:50pm
URL: http://the-lost-and-the-damned.71.s1.nabble.com/EDITORIAL-Theme-your-forces-put-in-to-get-out-tp5595882p5599701.html

Yes Theme and Narrative are a very important part of the hobby which seem to have been lost on all these people I see playing Spacemarine Vs Spacemarine all the time. Every battle should be a story even if it's just one about fighting to the death, other wise -as you said- you might as well be playing with plastic pawns.
Themes come into play at every point of the hobby, from the parts you choose to do your conversions and the colour scheme you choose to paint your minis in, to the terrain on the battle field you play on.
All to often I see people playing games with a wide open table and all the terrain at the edges. Battles don't take place in the middle of nowhere ... they take place where there's something to fight about!

Think about what's going on when you play: why are your High Elves in the Chaos Wastes? What provoked the VASA attack on the Syntha base? What are Moria Goblins doing in Lake Town? How did your Cryxian Pirates get this far into Cygnar? What are the Harbingers of  Horus and Bast fighting over? And why the fuck did your Catachan Jungle Fighters land on an Iceworld?
It's the little explanations for this soft of thing that makes the starting point of a story

In an RPG theme and narrative is just as important, yes the over all plots up to the GM/DM but you need to contribute to the story too, just why dose does your Drow travel with a Half-Orc and a Halfling? If your Rogue is looking for her lost brother; have her ask about him from time to time. Why dose your Barbarian have the nick-name he does? Does your Dwarf keep wandering off on his own for a reason? Did something happen to make your Elf afraid of spiders? And just how crazy is the guy with the sock puppet really?

It's this sort of thing that makes the difference between a hum-dum game where some Dwarfs killed a bunch of Goblins and the battle for Axehead pass where the stout brave Dwarf Warriors of Karaz-a-Karak held off an unending green tide of Goblin raiders from the Mangled Moon Tribe.


PS I'm not complaining about the picture of all the girls in Leia's Slave-girl out fit, but don't you think a few pictures of theme'd armies would have worked better with the article?