Benefits of Undefined Premise

[M. J. Young]

In the thread http://www.indie-rpgs.com/viewtopic.php?t=5250">Premise on a Platter on the GNS Model Discussion forum,

There?s a lot of issues here I?d be interested in discussing, which may each earn their own thread, or going to PM, dependiing on how folks feel...

[*]What are the benefits/drawback/features of explicitly/implicitly/undefined Premise? Is there certain types of play that are supported better by one than another?[/list:u]

[Ellipsis in original]

It didn't seem like I was pursuing a GNS application of this, so I thought this a better forum to address

the benefits...of...undefined Premise?

In this regard, I think I have some experience in this.

In one sense, you can't fail to define the premise of a game; you can decline to define a Narrativist Premise. That is, in Multiverser, there is an essential premise: this is you, and you've been ripped from everything familiar and thrown into a million alien universes, so what will you do now? It is in that sense an exploration of character, and the character is always yourself. What are you willing to become? How do you respond to what is happening around you?

Yet within this greater overriding premise, there will be shorter focused adventures many of which will have some other premise, possibly even a Narrativist Premise.

One of the disadvantages (from a certain point of view) to defining the Premise is that you've rather clearly demarcated an end to the story. There is a reason why narrativist games tend not to be campaign systems: eventually the question raised is answered, and the raison d'etre for the characters has vanished with that. If this Premise is not defined, then it can be created within the context of one setting or adventure, answered within the confines of that limited section, and then the story of the character can continue beyond it.

In that sense, campaign systems are more like serials, a long tradition in fiction and entertainment, whether a series of short stories (Sherlock Holmes) or novels (Conan, Tarzan, the Hardy Boys) or television shows or movies. The character is part of a complete story, but then goes on to become part of another complete story. The Premise may change from one to the next. In Multiverser, the genre may change, the setting may change, over time even the character may change, but the story keeps going.

So it's not just that you can have any Premise you want, it's that you can go from one Premise to another in the same game.

Anyway, that came to mind.

--M. J. Young

[Ron Edwards]

Hi M. J.,

Dag! What you said. (Did you see my reply in the thread you mentioned?)

Best,
Ron

[Bankuei]

Hi M.J.

Thanks for taking some time to discuss this.  

In one sense, you can't fail to define the premise of a game; you can decline to define a Narrativist Premise.

This is essentially what I am also saying.  In my original thread, I was not referring to Narrativist Premise in any fashion but simply in the "what do you do" sense of the word, although Ron may change it from premise(small p) to creative agenda or some other term.  For simplicity's sake, I am now simply referring to it as the creative agenda of a game.

And yes, your agenda as defined in Multiverser is something which is suffcient enough to communicate to a group of people and basically let them know what a game will be about.  

My concept of undefined creative premise games is primarily directed at "universal" games, such as GURPS, CORPS, the Window, Fudge, etc.  These games are usually nothing more than a system or an engine that could be used for a variety of creative agendas, but by themselves are insufficient for play without the group(or the GM, or somebody) defining the creative agenda.  That is, without defining this, you can't just  "play GURPS", or whatever the system is.

So to reiterate and clarify my original question:

What are the features of explicitly stating creative agenda(Donjon, Inspectres, Vampire)?
What are the features of implicitly having creative agenda?(Most Palladium games)?
What are the features of leaving creative agenda in part, or wholly up to the game group(Universalis, GURPS, CORPS, etc.)?

Chris

[clehrich]

[*]What are the features of explicitly stating creative agenda(Donjon, Inspectres, Vampire)?
[*]What are the features of implicitly having creative agenda?(Most Palladium games)?
[*]What are the features of leaving creative agenda in part, or wholly up to the game group(Universalis, GURPS, CORPS, etc.)? [/list:u]

Well, obviously on the first one, the players have to like that agenda.  The advantage is that if they do, it's relatively clear where the game goes from there: they have a plan of action, and follow it.  From a GNS-type perspective, it is important that the mechanics suit the agenda, supporting what's important and downplaying what's not.

As to the third, I think you could have a potential problem in that the players might not have a sense of what to do.  So you'd need to formulate an agenda, as a group; this could be done in-play or out, and my sense with a lot of universal games is that they intend for the GM (or sometimes the group of players at large) to formulate an agenda that suits them, then play it using the system.  The advantage is what MJ describes: you can Transition from agenda to agenda as the campaign goes along.  The other danger here is that you end up with a system that actually promotes a particular agenda, but doesn't realize it (see Mike's Rant on combat systems), at which point you start to drift into version 2.

I can't see the advantage of that second option.  If you've got a built-in agenda, you'll want to structure the mechanics to support it.  As long as you go to that trouble, why hide it?  All you're going to end up with is some players who use the system thinking it doesn't have an agenda, and then find out it does and are disappointed.

This may be very simplistic, but there you are.

[Mike Holmes]

One of the disadvantages (from a certain point of view) to defining the Premise is that you've rather clearly demarcated an end to the story. There is a reason why narrativist games tend not to be campaign systems: eventually the question raised is answered, and the raison d'etre for the characters has vanished with that. If this Premise is not defined, then it can be created within the context of one setting or adventure, answered within the confines of that limited section, and then the story of the character can continue beyond it.

Good point. I think that's why you get the Hero Wars phenomenon that Ron describes. Hero Wars has a sort of loose Narrativist over-premise, that tends to develop into specific Narrativist Premises. Thus, with this sort of system you get play that continues to evolve with new stories sprouting up even before the others are resolved. From which you can see the aptness of Ron's Soap Opera model comparison.

Hero Wars and Mutiverser are similar this way, the first is just a tad more Narrativist in it's mechanics.

Mike

[Ron Edwards]

Hi there,

I think a lot of Narrativist play is a lot more long-term than many might perceive at first glance. An "ending" in terms of theme is not always the end of all the stories one might want to produce about the overall Premise or with these characters. The connection between "clear Narrativist Premise" and "must end story" is real, but it's not as limiting as "one-shot vs. campaign play" - especially since the term campaign only means, at this point, play that lasts for many sessions.

Now, if by "campaign," one means a series of sessions that by definition cannot end internally - i.e. it only ends because people stop playing for out-of-game reasons or Social Contract issues - then yes, I agree. But I suggest that such play doesn't necessarily reflect all creative agendas associated with role-playing.

Best,
Ron

[M. J. Young]

Thanks, Ron, it's always good to know that I'm making sense. I saw your comments on Premise on a Platter tonight (Tuesday), after I started this thread (which was last night, Monday--it appears I was writing this while you were writing that) but before I got back to read your comments here. Good stuff, there, which I tried to summarize in part in response to Jeremy Cole's http://www.indie-rpgs.com/viewtopic.php?t=5268">Narrative Premise--I really felt like what you said in the one thread made a lot of things clear which the other thread needed.

I will have to get use to the term "Creative Agenda", though.

In regard to the length of play in narrativism, I did not at all mean that such games were so short as one-shots or couldn't run into extended play. Not so long ago, John Kim (I think in http://www.indie-rpgs.com/viewtopic.php?t=5113">Confused Over Simulation + example campaign) presented a look at a game which I thought seemed to transition between simulation and narrativism, having been set up as a world in which moral and personal issues would have a high probability of being raised and addressed by the players, who continued to play in a more simulationist fashion within that world between those apparently narrativist vignettes. I can certainly see a game system which raises multiple issues and allows the resolution of these questions to overlap, extending into a campaign. My point primarily was that narrativist games have a tendency to structure themselves around one main story, whereas simulationist games tend to keep going as long as there is more to explore. Obviously, there are simulationist one-shots; there are gamist games that last twenty minutes and others that last twenty years.

I suppose my example would be Alyria. It's coming together very nicely, from what I've seen, and is going to be an excellent game. When you come to play Legends of Alyria, you begin by putting together both a question to explore and characters with whom to explore it, and you might play one night or one hundred nights, but eventually you bring everything to its resolution, at which point there is a feeling of "we now return you to your normal lives" or "and they all lived happily ever after", or some similar end-of-story tagline. At that point, if you want to keep playing Legends of Alyria, you have to start over and create a new conflict, probably also new characters to be involved in this (although in theory you could involve some of the old characters in the new situation). I mean, as a parent of five boys I have certainly seen enough Sesame Street to know that, "Every story has a beginning, middle, and an end." Narrativism does that. Clearly you can create a campaign of overlapping and interlocking stories, but you still have the feeling within play that you are coming to the end of a story, even if you've still got another story going at the same time that continues. Good narrativist campaign play involving many stories about many issues is not impossible; it's just less common--at least, so far.

Focusing back on the main issue,

What are the features of leaving creative agenda in part, or wholly up to the game group(Universalis, GURPS, CORPS, etc.)?

In one sense, you can't fail to define the premise of a game....

or, to use the updated terminology, you can't fail to define the creative agenda of a game. I think this applies to the games mentioned; it's just that the creative agenda is perhaps in a different place than you're expecting.

Is there a creative agenda to Bridge? Certainly there's a premise; if we're using creative agenda to mean (non-narrativist non Egrian) game premise, then yes, there is. There is a slightly different creative agenda to Pinochle, or Canasta, or Rummy, or Casino, or Pit, or Blackjack.

Now, is there a creative agenda to a deck of cards? People buy cards intending to play cards. Sure, sometimes we buy Pinochle cards or a Bridge set or Poker cards, but by and large we buy cards to play cards. I'd say there is such an agenda; it's just a considerably broader agenda. It is expected that when you buy a deck of cards, you will use them to play many of those games mentioned and many others. Maybe you'll only use them to play Bridge, or Poker; or maybe you'll never play Bridge or Poker, but will play Oh Heck, I Doubt It, Go Fish, Kings to Four Corners, and a score of other simple games.

GURPS (to use the one on your list with which I am least unfamiliar) has a creative agenda: to make it possible to role play in a great variety of different worlds. Like a deck of cards, that requires that you bring a lot more to the table than just GURPS; but it is still a creative agenda, and to some degree it achieves that objective.

You could argue that this is not a sufficient creative agenda to begin play; but then, do all games provide a sufficient creative agenda to begin play? Alyria, in one sense, does not: you have to decide the issue and build the characters around it. In a sense, Sorcerer does not: you've got to build relationship maps and get a sense of setting before you can begin. Arguably, these aspects of these games are themselves part of play (in the sense recently discussed in a thread I can't find right now, that setup is part of the enjoyment of the game); but then, arguably part of the play in GURPS is choosing that setting and setting up what's going to be done in it. You could say that GURPS doesn't give enough guidance to create stories from play, but that's not the creative agenda of GURPS--it wants only to provide the tools to explore the possibilities presented by different settings.

I'm not a GURPS fan, and I'm limited in my experience to skimming a couple of core books; but it seems to me that you could develop quite a variety of--well, I don't have a good word for it, but let's say that to some degree you can do more with the game in a campaign sense than you can with a game like Alyria in which you're going to focus on the specifics of this story until it's over. Alyria will prove better at creating stories of moral and personal significance; but then, that's not a flaw of GURPS any more than it's a flaw of Poker to say you can't take any tricks.

--M. J. Young