On embedding Premise

[deidzoeb]

Re: player crafted premise.

That's a question I've been avoiding, because it will probably reveal my incomplete understanding of the term "Premise."  A character can be designed with a Premise, but a setting or plot or even the game mechanics can be designed to address a Premise.  Are there games that address both of these?  Would it cause problems to play through multiple Premises like this?

I assume it wouldn't cause a lot of problems.  It would be like plots and subplots in a longer story, where they weave around each other.

Whether it's the player or the designer or GM who creates a Premise, can these be centered on a character more than a setting, or is it more dependent on the setting (and therefore defined by the GM or game designer)?  For example, Romeo and Juliet asks "Does love conquer all?"  You could "attach" this Premise to one character or the other, but how do you play it out if the GM or designer tells Romeo he's stranded on a desert island?  Or worse, can Romeo and Juliet address the same Premise if their families get along fine?  It seems like a setting or situation could undermine a character-centered Premise, so the GM has to be really careful when letting players create their Premise.

Guess I was under the impression that a Premise can be centered on the character, but even then it still depends heavily on the situation that GM or designer creates.

[Mike Holmes]

Diedzoeb (I hope that's not your real name),

This seems like an odd notion to me. The character addresses the premise in the setting and in the situation provided using the mechanics provided. Can there be more than one Premise? I suppose so. Has anyone suggested that? Not that I'm aware. I'm not sure if that would be a good or bad idea. To try to address more than one Premise at a time might detract from both, thouh it is an interesting notion.

The only discussion I've seen (as with Walt's arguments) is what methods that single Premise can be arrived at. Create the Premise via mechanics, create the Premise via CharGen, create the Premise via Situation. Or some combination, or something more subtle as Walt describes. The idea of a player created Premise is simply to narrow the broader Premise presented by the Setting and Mechanics to one suited for the particular character chosen.

In Sorcerer this is done via Kicker. In my Synthesis I have a similar thing called a Personal Struggle (I'm thinking of retitling it simply a Character Premise, though JB likes the dialectic reference). Interestingly, at first I thought it would be neccessary to create a group Premise from the general Premise, and then narrow it further for each character. However, I am reconsidering that interim step at this point. It might serve to unify, but it might also unneccessarily overconstrain.

In any case these methods all presuppose that in the end there will be one narrow Premise for the character that the player will address through play.

Mike

[deidzoeb]

I'm just muddling the conversation with more thoughts about Premise.  I'll start a new thread on this topic later.