[nameless homebaked] bouncing player feedback off the illuminated crew

[Josh Roby]

I think it's a bit bigger than 'Premise,' but I think you're right in that your players need a guiding light to direct them.  I'd say 'aesthetic principles' but that's treading dangerously close to the CA definition.  They need the guidelines that tell them what sort of game it's supposed to be, what kind of story it's supposed to tell, what kind of challenges and conflicts that the players and the characters will face, and the like.  Otherwise they're just treading water in a vast sea of undefinition.

[Sydney Freedberg]

Pedantic quibbling over definitions -- but, since I appear to be playing Ron Jr. today:

Premise (adapted from Egri)
A generalizable, problematic aspect of human interactions. Early in the process of creating or experiencing a story, a Premise is best understood as a proposition or perhaps an ideological challenge to the world represented by the protagonist's passions. Later in the process, resolving the conflicts of the story transforms Premise into a theme - a judgmental statement about how to act, behave, or believe. In role-playing, "protagonist" typically indicates a character mainly controlled by one person. A defining feature of Story Now.

So not the same as the more ordinary-English-language version of "Premise" Darcy was mentioning, I think. Of course, the tendency of theory to change the meanings of ordinary words is one of the irritating side effects of developing the otherwise useful tools of theory.

[Sydney Freedberg]

Hey, wait, I can do better than tossing definitions around. Remember my Star Wars example a few posts back? Well, those images and rules I suggested are not the capital-P Premise of Star Wars, because what "Story Now!" Premise requires is a provocative question -- something like

Do you take a risk for the people you love or do you do the smart, safe thing?

In the original trilogy, Lucas keeps pushing this question over and over -- and he even escalates, like a good Dogs in the Vineyard gamemaster. (Warning: SPOILERS AHEAD, like any of you hasn't seen the original trilogy). If you're willing to stick your neck out to help your new friend rescue the Princess, what do you do when your friend goes on a suicide mission and your own life depends on being elsewhere to make a pay-off? Or, if you're willing to trust the old man to go off on a crazy adventure, how about trusting him when he's just a voice in your head telling you to shoot blind with everyone's lives at stake? Really? Okay, so if your mentor tells you it's too risky to rescue your friends, which do you choose? Really? Well, there's something you ought to know about your father....

[Darcy Burgess]

I'm a little confused...over the confusion.

doomed to fail: we never established a Premise (the narr. term)

I meant we never established a Premise, in the sense of the Big Model, the Provisional Glossary, et al. (aka, what Sydney said).

So, now that I've re-established what I mentioned in my last post, let's move onwards... :)

Sydney -- YOU BASTICH!  YOU RUINED ST-- who am I kidding?  :)  Really nice example of Premise developing into a strong Theme.  I'd never thought of Star Wars in those terms -- you know, intellectual terms. :)

As far as my game goes, a premise ("Is Greed the source of all evil?" would work for a smuggler game) would have gone a long way to giving the game the kick in the ass it needed to get moving.  AND it would have given the players an automatic context (conceptual in this case) to work off of.  Premise helps define what's important -- and that gives players focus and unspoken guidance.

?

[Larry L.]

Darcy,

Yep. For years I've suffered through so much of this style of play. "Okay, you're in town. What do you want to do?" This simple phrase unfailingly leads to three hours of suck. (Oddly, it's almost always exactly that quantity of time before someone gets fed up and demands a railroad.) Go to the bar. Have pointless interactions with NPCs. Go SHOPPING. It's pretty funny how your example shows how this transcends the fantasy genre.

What's weird is that a lot of gamers have come to expect that this is the right way to run a roleplaying game, because anything else is railroading and disempowering the players. A lot of us got into this hobby in our younger days, when our time wasn't as precious and squeezing an hour or two of genuine enjoyment out of a fourteen-hour marathon session seemed reasonable. Fun being something that "had to" emerge from an unstructured situation.

And, hey, maybe this style of play can still work with a tightly focused Sim agenda. But if this happens under an attempt to focus on Narrative (as was the industry trend in the late-80s early-90s) you get dysfunction.

In particular, the tools that you must understand to get Narr to work are bangs and aggressive scene framing. Remember, Story Now. Cut out all the "You walk to the bar. The city is blah blah blah, and there's some blah blah alleys. On the way, you see a blind man asking for change, do you want to talk to him?" stuff. That's bullshit. They want to go to the bar, you're at the bar now. Get the players in on the scene framing. "Okay, you want to go to the bar? What kind of bar is it? Who's there?" And then you whip out the Bang, and now they're involved in something. They've gotta come up with some creative contribution.

If you can generate these sorts of provacative situations, then you're already addressing a Premise.

I'm still getting the hang of it, but it's cool stuff. Running one session of My Life With Master taught me a hell of a lot about how enjoyable scene framing can be. I'd suggest you run a game of that or maybe Sorcerer for your group so you can all get a feel for the techniques.

[Eero Tuovinen]

Looking good. Just let me remind everybody that a good narrativism-supporting game design is good exactly because it alleviates the need to do critical literary analysis instead of playing. If you play any of Sorcerer, Dust Devils, Fastlane, My Life with Master or Dogs in the Vineyard, just to mention a few possibilities, you'll see that none of those games requires you to explicate a premise. Just follow the rules as they are laid out, and they'll take care of forming a coherent premise. You'll get to see what it is when you play.

As an opposite example, there is With Great Power... In that one you start the game by choosing a Premise, but even then it's a purposefully narrowed Premise with easily polarized values, so it's not that difficult. Even in that game you don't have to consider your own actions in a lit-crit way, judging whether your action properly addresses a Premise. Just play and have fun.

I'm saying this because my wild imagination makes me see people encouraging Premise as a panacea to purposeless play. I can assure you that you can be just as purposeless if you try to hoist the whole litcrit engine that the concept of Premise implies onto unsuspecting victims. Most of the time I find it awkward to start play by discussing what we're going to be MEANING by our IMPORTANT ART. How should I know? I'm just here to have adventure. However, I do have this idea for a character who was embittered and swore off gambling after getting cleaned by the yakuza...