No Premise: Dust Devils, The World The Flesh and the Devil

[Bailywolf]

Wah!

Matt, that's exactly what I was looking for in Dust Devils. Take that exact post, clean out all that guff about "Gee, don't know if I have this right, now," and put it straight into the first section of the game. That's IT. No further messin' with it necessary.

I tend to read-in premise where none might be obvious... I've been taking this for granted since the first draft... otherwise, keeping track of Devil is fairly pointless.  The explicit description above was perfect though.  And how the hell about that Clint Eastwood marathon!  Loved that.  

1) Naming Knacks and traits - don't be funny. You don't have a funny Premise, so don't encourage dumb-ass or parodic descriptors. (OK, granted, I really like "crazier than a shithouse rat" for its own sake, but does it really belong with your Premise? I suggest not. It's more a The Good the Bad and the Ugly kind of descriptor.)

I didn't find this bad at all.  Jose Whales himself could easily be described as "Mean as a Rattler and Fast as chained Blue Lightning".  It suits the genera, establishes color and flavor, and keeps the game from being (yet abother) morase of abstract wallowing in personal misery.  Narrative doesn't mean humorless.  And a hearty black sense of humor fits your source material.

"Hell with them boys.  Buzzards gotta eat, same as worms."

2) The reward system. It's all about dealing with one's own Devil, right? So to hell with improving attributes. I mean, if you desperately want to keep that, OK, but it's not a big deal, and I suggest junking it. I suggest that you can spend poker chips to "keep your Devil at bay" in some fashion and perhaps (much more expensively, between sessions) actually alter your Devil.

I vote for keeping some kind of ability-increase system.  It adds a practical layer of incentive I quite like, and which certainly doesn't interfere with any realization of premise.  it also allows the game to be played on a much more shallow "Zapata" level- shoot-em-up yeeeeeeeHaw!  It doesn't always have to be (and in my mind, shouldn't be)so heavy.  Some sessions, I just want to cut loose and have some fun, not worry aobut the moral decay of my character.

As for changing one's Devil...it doesn't exactly fit the source material.

However, changing one's relationship with one's devil certainly does.  Munny is a perfect example.  His devil- Never been good for nuthin but killing- haunts him throughout.  He deals with it differently, but it remains a cold dark center to his character regardless of how he pivots around it.  

So perhaps what the game needs is another axis to describe Devil... you have your Devil and you have it's Hold... some possible examples:

Slave- you are a slave to your Devil.  You can't help but drink or whore or gamble, at every oportunity.  The only way to avoid falling into your Devil's sway is to avoid situations where it rules.

Nemisis- you fight your Devil at ever chance.  You keep it in check with layers of guilt and conscious will.  You avoid falling for it mostof the time, but when you do you fall HARD.

Haunted- your devil is always on your mind, even if just at the edge.  You can never quite forget it, and everyone someone senses it hanging around you like the shade of a dead child.  You see echos of your Devil even in the most unlikely situation.

Denial- you refuse to admit your devil even exists.  You may be a Rightous Man who refuses to admit his lust, or a cold hard desperado with a coward's heart.  It bites you in the ass when you are confronted with undeniable evidence of you failings.

Persecutor- you seek out signs of your own devil in others, and try and eradicate it.  If you are plagued by Drink, you seek it's abolition, if you fear your own weakness, you stomp it out in others.

Mystery- you've cut off your past- and all the pain and shame that came with it.  You are now a Man with No Name- your past a dusty memory, almost- but not quite- forgotten.  You constantly find yourself in circumstances whih seem designed to crack you open and make you face your secrets.

[Ron Edwards]

Sigh ...

Well shit, this thread has gone right off the rails.

Ralph, for what it's worth, I agree with you that one might well inject Premise and be happy. I ask you please to note that I specified very carefully what I am talking about in my first post, up to and including acknowledging that we are talking about my preferred game content, not Universal Laws of Game Design.

I stated (a) that Dust Devils, for instance, might simply say "choose" to the reader and be done, and (b) that I think this does not serve the game well. We differ on that point; we've logged our different views, and I don't see why we have to repeat ourselves endlessly in some kind of clubbing game to see who gives up first. It is OK for us not to agree.

Drew, I don't see why you stated "let's take this [your pitch/premise] idea to a new thread" and then proceeded to address it here. A new thread would be a fine idea; please do that.

Best,
Ron

[Ron Edwards]

Bailywolf hit on something I was chewing over since my "suggestions" post - the alterations to the Devil notion. I agree with him that the "relationship" to the Devil is probably more appropriate than actually changing the Devil itself.

What came to my mind was a "degree" thing - for a given session, your Devil is more or less "on your back" depending on how many poker chips you want to spend for that purpose. How that works is easily handled by the system; the Devil is expressed in how many "cards" it adds/subtracts to a situation. Spending poker chips can "damp it down."

I don't necessarily offer it as the perfect solution, and I like Bailywolf's more nuanced or thematic approach too. My only call is for something of this sort.

As for the humor thing, I suggest that "black humor" is perfectly fine for what Matt is going for, but that "parodic" is to be avoided. Definitely a mileage thing, but it is in Matt's hands, and he needs to decide what the cutoff might be.

Best,
Ron

[Gordon C. Landis]

As has been happening so often at the Forge lately, this ties in directly with what I've been thinking on of late . . . how much/what kind of  Premise needs to be "pre-created" by the designer?  Sorceror has a general Premise that must then be made specific by the particular play group (primarily through defining what Humanity and Demons are) - Ron's "articulated and reinforced".  But the fact is, *some* of the articulation is done by the play group . . . could it be all?  First, to get one thing out of the way, we're talking only about Nar-focused, story-creating Premise here.  When Valamir says:

The game designer MAY wish to simply create an environment where by players can explore a favorite genre. The mechanics may not be directed at a specific Premise, they may be directed at evoking mood and imagery.

He is, of course, correct - but by definition, such a game is NOT Narrativist.  It's Sim Exploration of "genre" (pick your own combination of GNS Explorative elements that mean "genre" to you), as in "what's it like to be in a Western?"  Ron's caution about the wide interpretation of "Western" (and the like) is well-taken, so a good Sim-Premise becomes something like "what's it like to be in a Western, where Western is defined as x, y, z."  But I said this was NOT what we're talking about, so  . . . what we are/I am talking about is more like *this* quote from Valamir:

I stand by my statement that it is perfectly acceptable to design a game, even a narrativist one, and NOT explicitly have a capital-P Premise built into the game design. I and my play group should be perfectly capable of coming up with our own.

Keeping it in strictly Narrativist-focus, I'd restate this claim as "In a Narrativist game, the story Premise (see definition in Ron's essay) must be articulated.  BUT, that articulation can be done by the play group itself."

I want to agree.  The issue though - and it's a big one - springs from the fact that System Matters.  Ron outlines two cases which I'll rephrase as:
1) Premise articulated, and reinforced by the designed mechanics
2) Premise articulated, and the designed mechanics do not interfere
If you design the mechanics without a Premise, how can you know that those mechanics will reinforce, or at the very least not interfere, with the subsequently-determined Premise?

I submit that you CAN'T be sure - it will pretty much always be *possible* for a play group to come up with a Premise that just won't "work" well in your mechanics - but there may well be ways to *minimize* that occurence.  As mentioned above, it seems to me the "reinforcement" mechanics of Sorceror practically require a degree of play group-based articulation of Premise, and it minimizes (greatly) the chance of an "invalid/unworkable" choice by limiting the choices to sub-varieties of one general Premise.  Can we do a similar "minimization of possibly-inavlid/unworkable Premise choice" in a more general way?

I recently came up with a tagline for my own ever-expanding game design project: "A guide to creating your own story-focused roleplaying game".  The bit that's relevant here is where you establish what the game is ABOUT (in the big, thematic Premise-sense), and then the PCs/NPCs have traits that describe who they ARE (as opposed to what they DO) in terms that relate to that Premise.   The group must articulate the Premise, and design characters(PCs) and situations(GM) that are consistent with it.

Only a completed design and the test of time will establish if it really works, but it seems to me *possible* that Valamir's claim is true within a particular GNS variety (Nar, in my case).  Across multiple varieties?  Gack, I guess it *IS* possible for my game design project to expand even FURTHER . . . but I decline.  One has to draw the line somewhere . . . ;-)

Gordon

[Valamir]

I love that Devil Axis, BW.

You can go right through a catalog of western heroes and identify which category applies to their devil.
Robert Mitchum is a Slave to the Devil Drink in El Dorado
The "dandy" character from The Magnificent 7 whose trying hard to Deny that he's lost his edge.
Cosner's Wyatt Earp who's Haunted by Ambition (one could say he was haunted by his lost love, but I think his truly destructive devil was his Ambition).

I'd add one more for "Depair" to cover those who've know their devil has them licked even though they wish it weren't so.  This would be the one to switch into / out of at "rock bottom".

I'd allow this to be changed through play in a manner similiar to rewritting a character when a Kicker is resolved in Sorcerer.  

In many ways the Devil is a Kicker generator, in the sense that the "Kicker" should be one that focuses right in on the Devil and forces the character to confront it.

[Bankuei]

On the quick note, I myself tend to come up with great mechanics but not so great at marrying it to a premise.  Most of the time I've got a setting, or a style I want a mechanic to emulate.  I agree with Ron that "knowing fantasy" is a meaningless phrase.  I doubt when you're talking the Mahabharata and someone else is talking Tolkien that you'll communicate a consensual reality.

Usually with my mechanics I come up with a design goal, and keep paring away until there's just a "generic" system left.  I then have a system, but have to find a way to marry it to a good premise and setting, and have the patience to make it! :P

Chris

[Paul Czege]

Hey Ron,

It is the problem of No Premise.

And http://www.123.net/~czege/WFD.html">The World, the Flesh, and the Devil definitely doesn't have one, any more than The Pool has one. To some extent, it's because the game was partly a creation of necessity. For a few weeks last year Scott Knipe was sending me a new game design every five or six days. And it was driving me crazy to be consistently writing what I didn't like about his designs. It didn't feel like constructive commentary, because I couldn't give him examples of what I did like.

I created The World, the Flesh, and the Devil to have the features I liked better than the ones Scott was using in his designs. It has no target numbers, because as a GM, I hate assigning them. It has no opposed pools, because as a GM, I hate determining the size of the opposing pool. I wanted a game like The Pool, and Zero, where the GM never rolls. I liked how in The Pool, the player's dice were not compared to anything the GM did after being rolled, not a dice pool, not a target number. The interpreting of the dice was fixed and objective. The giving of the one-to-three dice prior to the dice roll had a great tone to it in my mind, eliminating the GM as opponent/obstacle within the game all the way down at the root of the conflict resolution mechanics. Because the number of dice being rolled was established up front, to crib a phrase from Christopher, the outcome was "uncertain, but not random," more completely so than I'd seen in any other game. I wanted something like that.

And at the time, I had just started running a scenario using a combination of Sorcerer-style kickers and the mechanics of The Pool. It turned out to be such an awesome combination that it was on my mind, along with the dice fabrication thing from Sigil, and when I conceived a reworking of those things into what I now recognize is a collapsing of character and situation, and how to integrate the resulting character elements into the conflict resolution system via re-rolls, that rounded out the game mechanics for me.

My suggestion: give examples of Trials. Even more importantly, give an example of what kind of information each player needs to be working from in order to write his or her Trial. I don't care who this information comes from: a player, the GM, everyone chatting, whatever - but it has to be there. What would it include, what would it look like?

These are good suggestions. I've been developing a set of extensions to the game mechanics that are tightly integrated into a setting, and when I read this list I can see you're exactly right that I need to make sure every one of the things on it is included.

If anyone's curious, send me an email. I'm hesitant to post about it until I playtest the rules extensions, and because the setting is still somewhat unrefined, full of non-contributing content, and up in the air. But I'll share a summary by email. And I'd love input.

we are talking about my preferred game content, not Universal Laws of Game Design

A game like Le Mon Mouri or Trollbabe is the whole package, definitely, Premise/Setting/Mechanics, the whole schmeer. But I think there's a place for games like The World, the Flesh, and the Devil, The Pool, Kirt's http://indie-rpgs.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=982">Faster, Better, Cheaper, and Mike's http://wso.williams.edu/~msulliva/campaigns/ag/framework.html">The Framework, none of which have a Premise. When I ran The Pool, it was with the setting from Sun & Storm. There are so many games out there with interesting settings attached to systems I'd never consider using. I would totally buy a book with a dozen Premise-less, but otherwise Narrativist systems like Faster, Better, Cheaper in it, because they're so awesome for when you have a setting idea of your own, or a setting from a published game with ooky mechanics. I personally don't think there are enough games like The World, the Flesh, and the Devil, because they all differ in tone. Could I have used The World, the Flesh, and the Devil with the mercenary scenario I ran using The Pool? Sure, but the tone of the game would have been very different. I'd buy a book of Premise-less, but otherwise Narrativist systems to have choices, so I could find one with an interesting tone for the setting I was wanting to use.

These games that we've created here on The Forge are different than the "clever" resolution mechanics that get worked up on other discussion sites, or games like The Window. They share Authorial power in interesting ways, they're complete games, rather than fragments, and each sets a different tone for a game at the mechanical level. I think the distinction you make about integrated Premise being your preferred game content is important for people to take to heart as perhaps a destination to think about, but not an intimidatingly deterring requirement, because every artist starts somewhere on Scott McCloud's path of "Six Steps," and we probably already subtextually deliver a fairly deterring mandate that it not be at "Surface."

Paul

[Valamir]

A game like <EM>Le Mon Mouri</EM> or <EM>Trollbabe</EM> is the whole package, definitely, Premise/Setting/Mechanics, the whole schmeer. But I think there's a place for games like <EM>The World, the Flesh, and the Devil</EM>, <EM>The Pool</EM>, Kirt's Faster, Better, Cheaper, and Mike's The Framework, none of which have a Premise.

And that is exactly what I was talking about.  Thanks Paul, for phrasing it with examples that work better than my exposition.

The initial post, in the course of inquiring about DD and WFD's Premise came IMO dangerously close to denying that that games without a built in Premise were legitimate Narrativist designs (...referring to them as would-be designs), which is the part I took umbrage about.

[Ron Edwards]

Hello,

This may be very hard for some people to comprehend, but I agree both with Paul and with Blake.

Paul says: hey, good Narrativist design can permit importing Premise.

Blake says: hey, explicit Premise permits fully-integrated mechanics to reinforce it.

I think both games I've discussed on this thread need a dose of Blake's point, as opposed to taking the riskier route of Paul's point.

Ralph, I cannot help how you choose to read my initial post - why you think it's a denouncement of Paul's point (retroactively speaking) is a mystery to me. We've taken this to private messages and I think we need to keep it there.

Best,
Ron