Implementing Premise

[DaR]

So I found myself with a couple of days of downtime, and decided to actually start working up the fantasy campaign I'd been meaning to for a while.  Aha, I think to myself, I'll use all the nifty tricks I've picked up reading the forums over at the Forge!

Now, up until this point, I realized, I'd always built my campaigns by coming up with a few interesting NPCs, a bunch of exotic or otherwise interesting locations, a couple of nifty events to happen "whenever they fit in", and having a couple of interesting group dynamics.  Throw all the nifty ideas I've had for a few weeks in a box, shake vigorously, and pull them out and glue them together haphazardly until I'm happy with what I got.  If I was really involved, and my players were on the ball and had mentioned what sort of characters they were interested in playing, I might go so far as to come up with a few specific ideas for each character that might help tie them into the game.  But overall, not a very scientific way to go about things.

This time, I decided I was going to try something a little more focused.  I'd have a Premise and use the idea of Kickers from Sorceror, and life would be grand, and the words of my world would pour fully formed from my lips and my players would gasp in awe and have the best game they'd even even thought about.  Yeah.  That's it.

My discovery was that Premise is hard.  It was a little tricky to grasp in the first place, but a couple of reads of the various forum threads on premise here and I think I've got the idea down.  But figuring out how to design my game around having a Premise is not a trivial task, given my previous experiences in building a game.

The obvious first step was coming up with a Premise.  But what makes a good premise?  What can I do that my players won't stare at me in bewilderment, or just yawn, because they find the topic utterly mundane and boring?  Will the premise I choose have enough depth to sustain a game for more than a few sessions?  Is it clear enough that themes will actually develop around it, or will it end up forgotten in the face of "cool places and neat things?"

Then, once I've decided on a premise I think my players will enjoy and that has enough potential to last for the duration of my game, how do I go about working it into the narrative of the game?  Should I try to tie everything to the premise in one way or another, or is it better to make it a background thing, always present, but rarely the direct focus of the game?  Where does premise begin to become theme?

I'd appreciate hearing what people have to think how to go about implementing Premise in a game, both in terms of things to do and things to avoid.

Dan

[james_west]

I think the thing you're missing is that premise is integral to plot; the outcome of the plot, given the premise, is theme.

For instance, in a game I ran about a year back ("The Dignity of Labor") the players had made up characters who were supposed to be heroic in temperament. Their starting situation was as secret police in a thoroughly corrupt totalitarian state. They also had substantial problems, all of which were most easily solved by going with the flow.

For the most part, the characters were able to overcome their difficulties while behaving ethically, which gave me a very nice theme of "It is possible to a moral person in an immoral society."

So my advice is: when designing a premise, think primarily about the sort of ethical challenges the characters are likely to face.

                     - James

[Zak Arntson]

I'd appreciate hearing what people have to think how to go about implementing Premise in a game, both in terms of things to do and things to avoid.

Dan

[jburneko]

Hello,

It sort of depends on which definition of premise you mean.  Are you refering simply to premise or to the Narrativistic term Premise.  I continue to wish we had seperate words for these things.

The lower case premise is simply player motivation.  D&D's basic premise is, "adventurers out for fame and fortune."  Chill's basic premise, "secret society members riding the world of evil."  If you find yourself reading a game going, you know, this is neat but what do I DO with it, then the game is missing lower case premise.  That is, there's nothing that motivates the players into action.

The capital Premise refers largely to moral and ethical questions that the characters are constantly faced with in a given story.  This is largely the 'glue' that holds a Narrativist game together and prevents it from being a bunch of individual role-playing games being run at the same table.  It took me forever to figure out how to apply this and even now I've only worked it out in theory.  I have yet to run a successful game using it.

The main block I had about understanding Premise is quite simply that I was trying too hard.  For example I've been staring at Sorcerer for a long while trying to come up with a really cool Premise.  Of course, it only occurs to me a few days ago that Sorcerer is designed the way Ron Edwards has ALWAYS been suggesting games be designed and that is with a Premise built into it.  The Premise of Sorcerer is spelled out in the fist chapter.  It is simply: How far are we willing to go to get the things we desire?  This is what the mechanics support.

You could run with this basic Premise or you could refine it further.  For example, my current Sorcerer project works around: How far are we willing to go to gain Truth and Knowledge.  This is the first thing that leapt to mind when reading sorcerer because it reminded me so much of Academics.  Perhaps because it was written by an Acadmic.

I thought back to my days at college and suddenly it seemed so easy to turn academics into Sorcerers.  Mathematicians in particular.  So many Mathematics Professors would wall themselves up in their offices on a perfectly sunny Saturday afternoon despite having children whom I'm sure would love to go to the park.  This just screamed Sacrifice and Humanity loss to me.  How many grad students have been driven to suicide because their advisors wouldn't return their phone calls?  And so on.  Yeah, Academics scream sorcerer to me.  (No offense, Ron).

So when it comes to designing an actual scenario we're looking at just these kinds of situation.  From the Premise alone, I have a setting: a University Town.  I also have several morally abiguous situations: Academic Dishonesty, Plagerism.  Even cabals of professors meeting in basement buildings.  My college had a history of Professor's going insane and burning down buildings.  

When it comes to character creation I plan to make it clear that the Premise revolves around the Academic's thirst for knowledge and of course that should inspire players to design academic centric characters.  Anything from student to professor should be acceptable.

And this is what a Premise should do.  If the Premise doesn't inspire things about setting, situation and character then most likely you're thinking down the wrong lines.  Either you're trying too hard and coming up with something too narrow or you're coming up with things that don't interest or inspire you.

One example for me would be love.  Applied to Sorcerer the Premise would be: How far are we willing to go to aquire Love?  This really doesn't do anything for me.  It feels unfocused and too broad to me.  This may not be true for you but it's true for me.  Therefore I won't be constructing a love centric Sorcerer game any time soon.

My final bit of advice might be to get the players involved.  I could do all this planning based around Academics and then discover that my players really could care less for the subject of Truth and Knoweldge.  This puts all the players in the same boat that I'm in when I try to think about Love as a Premise and that's not a good thing.  So you can always ask around about what kinds of ethical dilemas interest your players.

Hope this helps.

Jesse

[Ron Edwards]

DaR,

I suggest that you do not struggle over something that you might already be doing just fine.

Think back over your previous, non-jargon preparation. When you "baked" the elements you were interested in together, did you end up generating, for play, situations in which the PLAYERS had to come to moral decisions, about what their characters would do? If so, you were using Premise already.

Premise is just a question - anything that humans face, and can understand when they see someone else face it, that doesn't instantly produce an easy answer. Anything that generates PASSION in the acting character.

That's it! If you have an evil lord oppressing the peasants yet demanding they respect him as their lord, and the hero is a character who must choose between the social order and upholding justice, well, you have Premise already - no need to suffer over articulating it.

The danger is simply having Situation without Premise, in which case you either get an endless string of assigned "stuff to do," or an endless string of threats.

Best,
Ron

[DaR]

Thanks for everyone's replies.

I think Jesse got closest to answering the question I was really asking (which was probably not what I ended up actually asking).  My biggest concern was how to go about taking a Premise (in the Narrative sense) and either apply it to a plot outline, or build a plot around the idea.  His suggestions for how to do this with Academia were fantastic.

Ron suggested I might be doing this already, without realizing it.  Going back again, I can see vague glimmers of it struggling to get out, but not in any organized or deliberate fashion.  One of my more recent D&D campagins feature a clan of faux-Scottish Goblins that ended up helping the PCs despite the traditional bad blood between humans and goblins.  I mostly did it to be "different" and "cool", but it did end up being a decent primitive attempt at employing the Premise of overcoming racial prejudice.

Again, thanks to all

DaR

[hardcoremoose]

DaR,

Jesse hinted at this, and for others I think this may be a good piece of advice.

Tell the players what the Premise is.

It seems simple, maybe even obviously so, but many people struggle over this issue.  If you're going to co-create a story - whether that be a novel, a screenplay, or a game session - the authors all need to be on the same page.  Now many players - maybe even most of them - can intuit the basic idea behind a game, but why risk it?  

Like Jesse said, if you're up front about the Premise right from the start, even before characters are created, then you have already cleared your first hurdle.  Once the players sit down at the table, with all the fine print made clear to them, they have essentially signed a contract which reads "I have chosen to play this game.  Not some other game about something else, but this game which is about [Premise]."  If they have agreed to that, and if they abide by their agreement, then they will create appropriate characters that will facilitate the exploration of said Premise, and from that will arise a Theme.

The exploration part, of course, is your story.  

Take care,
Scott

P.S. Zak, why add Fate chips to D&D when you can play WYRD? It does exactly what you described, only better.

(yes, that was a shameless plug of my own)

[ This Message was edited by: hardcoremoose on 2001-09-07 22:51 ]

[james_west]

On 2001-09-07 22:37, hardcoremoose wrote:
Tell the players what the Premise is.

I heartily agree, having done it the other way and failed miserably because people made up the "wrong" characters.

       - James

[contracycle]

Is it implicit that such a premised game, with an explicit statement offered to the players, is intended as a one-shot?
One of the concerns I have with this conception of the use of premise is: what do you do for an encore?  Say you set up a premise, you discuss it with your players, they construct characters aligned with the premise - must these characters then be binned after the resolution of this specific story?

Plausible, but of limited appeal I suspect.  More commonly, with the serial structure, we present and resolve multiple premises in sequence, I think.  Thgus part of the question about premise is not, it appears to me, answered by saying that charactesr should be designed with premise as a conscious influence - AFTER the initial design, how does one coordinate a new premise with characters which may have been aligned with a different, prior premise?

[Uncle Dark]

On 2001-09-12 06:05, contracycle wrote:
Is it implicit that such a premised game, with an explicit statement offered to the players, is intended as a one-shot?
One of the concerns I have with this conception of the use of premise is: what do you do for an encore?  Say you set up a premise, you discuss it with your players, they construct characters aligned with the premise - must these characters then be binned after the resolution of this specific story?

Not nescesarily....

It would be possible to base a game around a Premise, and then base subsequent games around variations on or subsets of that premise.

For example, a Premise might be, "How should wrong-doers be handled?"  Games could then be built around sub- or related Premises like "How do we handle the wrongfully convicted?" or "When, if ever, is revenge apropriate?"

Also, just as real people are multi-faceted, could we not see subsequent games with different Premises as ways of exploring different sides of the same characters?

Lon

[Ron Edwards]

Lon is correct. A Premise is a player-relevant ethical issue, to be addressed and developed into Theme in any meaningful, interesting, fun, creative way via role-playing. (All this is in a Narrativist context, of course.)

Some folks seem to be under the misapprehension that Premise is a highly-constraining, rock-solid, track-laying kind of straitjacket for every detail of character design and play. It is not.

Best,
Ron

[Mike Holmes]

I'd like to question the idea that has popped up that premises must contain moral or ethical principles. For example is the following a suitable premise?

"What will we find out there?"

It works in film and literature. Isn't the idea that the premise be compelling? Characters could easily be written to plug into this premise. As easily as a moral or ethics based premise I'd say. So, is there something about premise that makes it necessary to have these components?

Mike

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Mike,

It may be that our respective understandings of the terms differ, but my take is that if "what we find" is to be interesting, that it must be the sort of thing that provokes moral response (on the part of the viewer/reader, if we're talking about film/lit).

This can be very basic: if the monster comes to eat the hero, it's a MORAL act as well as merely subjectively, personally practical, to avoid it - or that's how we see it, anyway, as audience members. More complex and highly nuanced situations emerge very rapidly, even from very simple threats or crises; consider these:
- zombies are attacking us - but REALLY, the issue is how a group of diverse individuals reacts to isolation and crisis; do they fragment due to internal conflict or unify against the threat?
- a shark is eating people on our beach - but REALLY, the issue is that some people want to soft-pedal the issue because it's bad publicity.

So again, using a VERY broad "moral/ethical" brush - in the sense that we take sides as audience/authors, and also that the sides are at least understandable - I do think that it's what makes a conflict into a Premise. The difference between the two is rooted in our applying JUDGMENT to the situation.

Best,
Ron

[Mike Holmes]

On 2001-09-12 18:35, Ron Edwards wrote:
Hi Mike,

It may be that our respective understandings of the terms differ, but my take is that if "what we find" is to be interesting, that it must be the sort of thing that provokes moral response (on the part of the viewer/reader, if we're talking about film/lit).

This can be very basic: if the monster comes to eat the hero, it's a MORAL act as well as merely subjectively, personally practical, to avoid it - or that's how we see it, anyway, as audience members. More complex and highly nuanced situations emerge very rapidly, even from very simple threats or crises; consider these:
- zombies are attacking us - but REALLY, the issue is how a group of diverse individuals reacts to isolation and crisis; do they fragment due to internal conflict or unify against the threat?
- a shark is eating people on our beach - but REALLY, the issue is that some people want to soft-pedal the issue because it's bad publicity.

I can see what you are saying, but then the stated premise doesn't need to have moral terminology in it, just have potentially moral implications. Do I have that right, or no? A slight difference, but potentially important for people to understand I think.

So again, using a VERY broad "moral/ethical" brush - in the sense that we take sides as audience/authors, and also that the sides are at least understandable - I do think that it's what makes a conflict into a Premise. The difference between the two is rooted in our applying JUDGMENT to the situation.

But that situation could itself not contain moral language. Or do I have it wrong? See the question is whether the statement of premise should include the character's presumptive realm of moral/ethical response, or should it be itself neutral so as to allow a wider range of response.

For example, if I say that the premise is "How do we deal with suicide/euthanasia knowing that the world is about to end via a comet crahing into the planet?" that is much more limiting and specific than if the premise is just "The world is ending via a comet crashing into the planet." The first is laden with ethical, moral and judgemental terminology and limits the realm of the response, while the second has no such language, and might alow a wider range of play to ensue.

Or, OTOH, is it your argument that the first example guarantees that the game will have an intensely focused premise, while the players may miss having any focus in the second due to the lack of such language?

Or have I in typical fashion overanalyzed this?  :smile:

Mike Holmes

[Mike Holmes]

- zombies are attacking us - but REALLY, the issue is how a group of diverse individuals reacts to isolation and crisis; do they fragment due to internal conflict or unify against the threat?
- a shark is eating people on our beach - but REALLY, the issue is that some people want to soft-pedal the issue because it's bad publicity.

A quick comment on "Why Mike is often a simulationist", a continuing series trying to explain the motives of the garden variety Simulationist to those who don't seem to understand.

In these quoted examples, I'd be more interested in how we deal with how each crisis plays out than the moral subtext. I can see my character now trying to find a front-end loader to deal with all the zombies. Cool....When watching Jaws I just want them to quit talking and get to the damn shark.  :smile:

I always thought that Dawn of the Dead was the best of the trillogy because I just loved the idea of running around in an abandoned mall (while my friend Ben would be there by my side commenting on how Romero was making such an incisive comment about how consumerism is comparable with zombieism; blah, blah, blah, yeah, whatever, check out that zombie that just got the top of it's head cut off by the helicopter blades!)

:smile:

To be technical I am often moved as much or more by the situation as by any premise I encounter.

Mike