What my games are missing

I recently read a article by the author of Dogs in the Vineyard, Vincent Baker, entitled [[http://www.lumpley.com/creatingtheme.html|Creating Theme]].

I really wish I'd been following [[http://www.indie-rpgs.com/|The Forge]] the past couple years. I used to read rec.games.frp.advocacy, which used to be mostly talk about roleplaying theory. The Gamist-Narrativist-Simulationist (GNS) model has its roots there (in the [[http://www.darkshire.net/~jhkim/rpg/theory/threefold/|Threefold Model]]), and when I saw that The Forge has a forum dedicated to discussing it, I thought "all theory, just like rgfa" and took a pass on it. (Besides, I have a lot of trouble keeping up with web forums… I really prefer email lists or Usenet news.)

Unfortunately, I was wrong. Vincent (Remember Vincent? This is a post about Vincent.), among others, has a strong emphasis on "actual play." In fact, he recently commented that he'd been theorizing far too much for the amount of play time he was getting, and it was time to stop theorizing until he got some more play time under his belt.

The folks over at the Forge have been doing a lot of hard thinking about issues that I've struggled with, and about issues that I'd never even considered. I've been too much out of the loop on something I wish I'd paid more attention to. But I still get to benefit from all of their hard work… games like Dogs, in addition to all of the articles they've written on roleplaying.

I need to reread Vincent's "Creating Theme" again, and see how I can apply it to my superhero game, which I'm postponing the restarting of because I can't figure out where to take it. This really gives me some stuff to think about.