[Narrativism] Premise and Stance

[C. Edwards]

Hey Vincent,

*Warning: Long, windy post ahead where I try and sort things out for myself.

Indulge me for a sec. I do think that the episode contributed to the creation of theme, but I'm not so sure that you were addressing Premise. At least not in the small part of play that was in that thread.

When you decided to have Acanthus go up on the roof and start tossing rocks you had no idea why he was doing it or to what end. Only after retroactivley connecting his actions to the fairy stuff did you get a theme connection.

Story Now, as I understand it, is just the opposite. You would have Acanthus do whatever in order to address Premise then retroactively connect his actions to maintain plausibility.

Okay, so let's say you started off prioritizing character integrity. The only way for the rock tossing to result in the maintaining of character integrity was for you to ret-con Acanthus' actions in a way that would make sense to you and Meg and Emily.

You didn't start off prioritizing the address of Premise unless we throw in a special "fishing for Premise" qualifier. Wait.. I've been typing and trying to find out what was bothering me about this and I think I just did.

Nathan and I were discussing different sides of Nar play the other day. He was coming from the angle that when you address Premise you want to see a particular outcome or effect. I said that's not necessarily true, you might just want to set up a particular conflict that WILL address Premise but prefer the outcome to be more of a surprise.

Normally I'm inclined to think that there already has to be the potential for addressing Premise (the players at least sense a moral/ethical issue on the horizon) when character actions are determined for Story Now to happen. In this case though, you seem to have said "what can Acanthus do that will be in-character and provide Premise addressing possibilities?" without any idea of what those possibilities were before having Acanthus take action.

Well, I think you were probably in Author stance through the bit of interaction in the play thread. I think you did everything bass ackwards from what I'm used to from my own play, but I do think that you were doing Story Now. With the caveat that you weren't willing to slack on character integrity in order to get there.

The question of "when things became true" is an interesting one. If we say that nothing becomes "true" until it enters the SiS, what does that mean for ret-conning a situation in order to address Premise?

I think that example also comments on the whole "character fitness" idea. It's hard for a character to ever appear "unfit" if you choose your character's actions first then use ret-con techniques to address Premise with those actions.

-Chris

[Marco]

For my part, this discussion touches on my preferred mode of play (I have some issues with the meaning of Force under such constructs but it's not that important).

However: I don't see this as Story Now --and-- This sounds to me like El Dorado (the player has Sim both priorities and Nar priorities at the same time).

I recognize that at some point the situation might mutate so that one or the other would "take precidence" but if this is seen as dysfunction (and it'll always be because of either a human being or the dice--and the dice, I'm not sure "count") then I don't think that small dysfunctional speed-bumps would cause the play to fall into one or the other CA.*

-Marco
* the idea that a player who decides to change address vs. character or character over address is choosing one or another CA doesn't make sense to me if the context is that the player is doing whatever s/he has to to get back into immersed Actor Stance.