Lighten Up!: On Thematic Consistency in Role-playing Games

In another installment of Joystiq’s weekly RPG-focused column Rowan Kaiser writes about thematic consistency in role-playing games, and compares early WRPGs’ oft-crazy settings to today title’s ones. Here’s a snip on two well-loved late nineties classics, Fallout and Planescape: Torment:

One of the great RPGs of the 1990s, Planescape: Torment, made a virtue of thematic inconsistency. Its world was built on the idea that every different kind of fantasy world imaginable was connected at a certain point. It used this wildness to explore philosophy, theology, the nature of memory, the soul, reincarnation. All of these things were fair game because all of them were literally real within that world.

Fallout took an alternate path, keeping the silliness, but doing so by incorporating it within its extremely strong theme and style. The satirical, retro-1950s charm begs for jokes. Some of the humor is darkly ironic, like the intro to Fallout II, with mass murder set to an old pop love song. Some is lighter, like references to famous post-apocalyptic films such as Mad Max. Logically speaking, the jokeyness should get in the way of Fallout’s apocalyptic setting. Instead, it actually helps the game, giving it a certain flair and disrupting what would otherwise be an excessively depressing game.