Premise Revisited - Educate Me

[Calithena]

I get stance, and the actor/author stance distinction has been one of the most fertile ideas I've gotten for thinking about my gaming in a long, long time.

I think I more or less get gamism, simulationism, and narrativism, depending on how they're construed. I get the simple distinction that there are different things people look for in their gaming and I agree that these are three of the big ones.

But I'm just flat-out lost on Premise. Relatively ignorant of GNS, I spotted a conversation on rpg.net a month or two ago where the notion of Premise was being flouted. Ron took the time to explain it to me (thank you again for being cool), and enough of it took that I could see that Ron was talking about something, but I guess I still don't get it.

I was not joking, for instance, when I offered "How far will I go to loot this dungeon of every last copper piece" as a premise. This is a basic moral conflict of dungeoneering - the DM offers carrots, hoping that the players will overextend and, effectively, commit suicide. The players want to get as much as they can, but don't want to die. Will the PC be like the Jamaican mouse who dies inside the coconut because he eats all of it and then can't crawl out through the hole he dug? Will reason triumph, or will greed? How do you know when to say when? What will you risk for power?

Now, you might say this isn't multidimensional enough to support a narrative. Well, often it isn't, I suppose, but there are SOME good dungeon stories.

Or is that the point? There's a kind of basic story that evolves in some dungeon adventures - greed vs. prudence being the example here - and when that happens, a Premise enters. But that Premise isn't at the center of the play, and if it's just the dungeon, its presence is optional?

Maybe. I think though that the conflict between the player and the DM in D&D, which this notion of the Gamble gets at, maybe goes deeper than this. The temptation of greater power and riches is a carrot the DM offers in order to get players to risk themselves; it's essential to the Gamble. But just because it introduces these elements in play, it also seems to introduce a basic sort of narrative element, though not necessarily a very deep one, and one that's coincidental.

But it's still there, so I don't see how the Premise can be constitutive of Narrativist play.

Apologies if this is way off base. I come seeking enlightenment...

[Ian Charvill]

Can you imagine in typical D&D play a player sacrificing there character to express the theme "greed kills"*.  I think if things like this were going on - the premise being elevated to a greater level on importance than the step on up - then you might be looking at D&D gone gamist (someone posted a fair bit in actual play about narrativist D&D).

The presence or possibility of premise isn't as important is GNS as player engagement with it.

* or, 'heroism is more important that survival', or whatever.  What's important is no more levelling up, no more magical weapons, no more monsters to slay instead the satisfaction of a (certain kind of) story well told.

[Calithena]

It has ever happened that a traditional D&D player will let his or her character go down in flames to a 'good death', a heroic one at least. It's true that dying to express themes outside of heroism is usually accidental, but not universally so. There is this fatalism about having to die sooner or later, at least in games where the DM is doing his job (at least I think this - otherwise what's really being Gambled?) and killing PCs infrequently, and the good death secures bragging rights.* Of course, what makes for a good death seems like it's at least in part driven by the story.

This is something again though that I understand better in terms of stances. If the player is in Author stance, as opposed to solely the GM, then the player considers what makes the best story, and a good player may well bring a character's career to an end through death or other means in this context. If the player is in Actor stance, then the player considers 'what their character would really do', trying to scrye out their motives by considering them as a person, and this can lead to death sometimes too.

I guess I get that stories have premises, and so in a narrativist game, the premise will be at the center of play. Ian writes that "The presence or possibility of premise isn't as important is GNS as player engagement with it." In this case, maybe my confusion is just that I'm demanding too absolute a character for Premise - it's not the bare fact of its existence - for example, when we play narrativist, surely the quality of our tale is something which we stake before our peers. Rather, it's just that Premise is connected to story, and so if you have a Narrativist situation, the Premise will be front and center.

What confuses me is that (1) it's very hard in any form of role-playing to avoid SOME kind of story being present, and (2) somewhere I got the idea (which now seems to me to be the real source of my error) that Premise is always present in Narrativist play and never present in any other kind of play. If this is false, then there's no problem, except maybe with the over-pointed formulations of GNS I first encountered on rpg.net.


*Anecdote for illustration and mostly entertainment purposes - as when my friend's Penguin Illusionist/Thief used a Ventriloquism spell to project the word "Hastur" into one of those voice-projection devices from Dune when some pirates had us kidnapped and things were looking grim - he knew full well that he was committing suicide, and taking the whole rest of our party, played over several years, along with him - not to mention a major city and five miles of coastline in our friend and DM's (who's now out of gaming, but you can see his amazing web comics at www.e-sheep.com) world. That game is gone almost twenty years now, and half the players in it don't even game any more, but the penguin's player still gets bragging rights when we reconvene.

It occurs to me that the player of the penguin in question is a game designer now himself, and that I might as well plug his site here: www.curiousgames.net. Phantasy Realm he describes as 'a boardgame pushed as far as one can go in the direction of a role-playing game', and Role Playing Game (originally printed art-free on blue paper) is the product of the group of players in question.

[Calithena]

Or a shorter response: I do in fact think that in one central, very traditional modality of D&D play, which most D&D rulesets have supported to one degree or another, the GM, acting in Author stance, is trying to get the PCs to bite off more than they can chew and thereby to commit effective suicide, in order to express themes like 'greed kills' or 'idiocy kills' (the DM sitting around chortling about his stupid players), while the PCs, whose players are moving back and forth between Pawn and Actor stance, are trying to live in order to show what they can get away with, or how powerful they are, or how tough they are, etc.

[Ian Charvill]

There are people far more qualified to comment on narrativism than me but...

Think of premise as the opportunity required for narrativist play to happen at all.  No premise, no narritivist play.   However, premise alone will not guarantee narrativist play.  For narrativist play to occur, it's not enough for some kind of abstract possibility to be floating around.  The players at the table have to grab hold of the opportunity, to produce a theme or some other kind of spin on the original premise.

If the game is set up in such a way that your characters will die, making the most of the choice doesn't really represent narrativism.  The choice could be used as easily to generate colour as theme.

As to the GM playing Narrativist while the players play Gamist.  It's possible, but a rife with the potential for dysfunction.  The risk of (character) death might be good meat for step-on-up but the GM setting out to manipulate the players might represent a breach of social contract.

[Calithena]

I'm imagining that they're all playing Gamist - the problem is, how do you characterize Gamism in a Premise-free way. I mean, if the game is just a bunch of set-piece battles, it seems like it's not an RPG any more. But the links between set-piece battles are links of treasure acquisition and power-gaining. One standard way of understanding the 'conflict' between player and DM in D&D, which Hackmaster emphasizes and gloriously celebrates, is that the DM wants the players to keep going past their limits, while the players want to go just far enough to max their gain relative to effort expended. This is a tension that keeps people involved with play. Now granted, many (though not all) of the narratives this produces are dull, and the Goal of play is still to have battles and get power and stuff, so it's very much Gamist play; but it seems like there's still something like a Premise operational.

[Ron Edwards]

Hello,

Sean, you wrote,

I offered "How far will I go to loot this dungeon of every last copper piece" as a premise. This is a basic moral conflict of dungeoneering - the DM offers carrots, hoping that the players will overextend and, effectively, commit suicide. The players want to get as much as they can, but don't want to die. Will the PC be like the Jamaican mouse who dies inside the coconut because he eats all of it and then can't crawl out through the hole he dug? Will reason triumph, or will greed? How do you know when to say when? What will you risk for power?

The key is the word "moral." I see nothing moral, ethical, values-based, or anything at all similar in your example.

For people who have a hard time with the word "moral" or similar in the first place, feel free to substitute "disturbing," "problematic in terms of what a person should do," "right vs. wrong," or anything else. Please see the thread in which Aiden (taalyn) has a very difficult time separating his personal response to the terms to what I'm talking about - but we get there. In that thread, I wrote,

Think of Premise as an unstable, intriguing, values-charged issue which a fictional situation has invoked. At this point, the situation is not resolved. The emotional attention is focused and ready. Upon resolution, wham-bo, a Theme gets constructed on the spot. Its content relies wholly on (a) the nature and circumstances of the resolution, which must involve character decisions; and (b) the actual values of the real person constructing the Theme.

Narrativist play absolutely relies upon establishing such a Premise and upon hitting those decision/resolution points during play. That is why its tagline is Story Now, just as the one for Gamism is Step On Up and the one for Simulationism is The Right to Dream. However, I must emphasize the "Now," rather the "Story." That's the key element.

Sean, in the D&D example you initially provided (and I stress this example, for reasons I'll explain in a minute), no real person is questioning what the character is doing, or what he or she is expected to do by other characters in the game-world. You've presented a tactical challenge (die/gain), not a Premise.

I submit that such questioning is central to anything at all that engages an audience in "story" terms. Even in the lamest soap opera, even in the most bog-standard action movie. When is it all right for a law-abiding fellow to be a ruthless killer? See the movies Straw Dogs and Hard to Kill; they will tell you when. Their answers are different, their presentations are different, their contexts are different, their moralities are different, and their logic-bases are different.

Now, in your final post, you change things a little - you now bring in the possibility of some Premise-stuff going on in addition to, or underlying the tactical stuff. That's fine. My claim is that we can watch that group over time and see, by observing their social reinforcements and emotional interactions with one another (I'm talking about the people), which of the two priorities is given primary attention over the other.

Best,
Ron

[greyorm]

Sean,

Don't conflate Premise with Story. All games produce Story, in retrospect. The idea of Narrativism is Story NOW, not Story Later, with the focus upon Premise (be that a spoken Premise or an unspoken one) being played to...that is, the decisions have real, actual meaning RIGHT NOW in Story terms, rather than afterwards ("Oh look what a cool story we made" vs "Oh look what a cool story we're making").

Now, in your example, the player choosing to sacrifice his character for a really meaningful ending to that character's existence...that's an instance of Narrativism in play, though it would not make the whole game Narrativist.

EDIT: Damn, cross-posted with Ron. Morality was the next thing I was going to touch on regarding Premise, but I still have some thoughts regarding that might be interesting in regards to engagement and meaning of game elements to players.

More later, or I'm going to be late.

(BTW, I'm the guy Ian mentions who posted all about his Narrativist 3E game in Actual Play...I don't have enough time before leaving for work to look up the threads, but you should be able to find them with the Forge's Search function, and the newer ones have links back to the olders ones writ in them.)

[Valamir]

To back up a step, one needs to alter the normal dictionary definition of "Premise".

"a proposition on which an argument is based", or translated to game terms "the set up which establishes the purpose for playing".

All games have such a set up, and at one point we used the word premise to refer to the GNS elements of the game.  We've since switched to Creative Agenda for this use, because this use of "premise" was getting confusing with the Big P version of Premise Ron's talking about above.

So discard the typical answer you might give based on the dictionary definition to the question "whats the premise".  ALL games have one of those.

The Premise Ron's talking about, is specifically what makes a premise a Narrativist Premise.

The answer is really "Situation of moral ambiguity with consequences that the player, through the actions of their character, must choose between"

That moral ambiguity is the key.  If there's obviously a right answer it isn't a good narrativist premise.  Importantly "right and wrong" here must mean morally right or wrong.  Not simply correct or incorrect, live or die, profit or don't, succeed or fail.

Choosing to risk ones life to get more gold isn't a moral choice, its a simple matter of weighing pros and cons.  Choosing to risk (or sacrifice) someone ELSES life to get more gold...now that's something to work with.

[Calithena]

Okay, I have some RL work to do here, so I can't make a detailed reply to this now. It seems to me that one thing that needs to be going on to make a Premise in this sense is that the characters themselves need to be conflicted somehow; D&D characters need not be conflicted. It seems to me though that there is some question whether this is true; it depends on Identification with the character. The conflict that comes from Identification (which might be based on Actor stance, but might also just be based on having Gambled and won with that character several times in the past) is wanting to preserve the character vs. wanting to win again.

It's not totally clear to me yet that this is amoral.  Greed is a vice, and Prudence a virtue, according to some. And the reason that the Dying Earth RPG keeps coming up as a contrastive in my thought is that there the characters are even more short-term goal-oriented, and even less moral, than D&D characters: the difference is that there's an explicit attention to Style and in some cases Story which D&D obviously doesn't emphasize. I'm not sure there's a proper Premise in Dying Earth play, and yet it seems to me to be highly narrativist in character.

But anyway, maybe some other people can pile on me and show me the error of my ways in the meantime. I'll try to get back to this tonight.
Thanks for both of your time and I will consider what you say in more detail when I have leisure at a later hour.

[Ron Edwards]

Hello,

The conflict that you are talking about can arise in several ways through play; remember that part of Narrativist play is establishing the Situation in question, not just receiving it fully-formed. Most of the discussions on the HeroQuest forum demonstrate that people have processed this point to varying degrees.

Character-centric conflict is indeed straightforward. You can find it explicitly built into Sorcerer and Zero. In games/play of this sort, the setting tends to "grow" into and around the characters' conflicts through play itself. Climactic moments tend to lead to changes in the characters' actual concepts. That's why the back-story and Kickers (in Sorcerer) should have a dynamic interaction through the first few sessions of play - the localized Premise doesn't really grow into a usable shape until that happens.

Setting-centric conflict is very similar, just reversed. You can find it explicitly built into Castle Falkenstein and HeroQuest. The setting, essentially, is unstable and bound to change; there are too many compromises and explosive blind-spots built into the existing power structure. The characters may start quite sketchy ("I'm a Hungarian duellist!") but tend to become extremely committed to a personal take on the situations they encounter - and to visit that personal take upon the setting, changing it.

Starting out with Situation-centric conflict is both easier and trickier - because it doesn't need that "growth" period through play, but it also locks in the concepts much tighter. You can find it in Prince Valiant, The Dying Earth, InSpectres, and My Life with Master.

The Dying Earth is an interesting case that deserves discussion of its own. But just as one doesn't dive directly into (e.g.) disturbance edge-effect dynamics when discussing basic ecology, I think I'd like to be sure that the bog-standard Gamist and Narrativist definitions and applications are all set for you first. What matters at this point is that you see that your "characters must experience conflict" is (a) correct and (b) potentially brought about in several different ways.

Best,
Ron

[Tim C Koppang]

Holy shit Ron,

Breakthrough.  All of the uncertainties about Nar Premise that I knew the "proper" answer to, but was unsure of the "why," just went click click.  Everything just fell into place.

Finally.

That's it.  Just thought I'd let you know.

Regards.

[Ron Edwards]

Makes me happy.

Best,
Ron

[Mike Holmes]

It's not totally clear to me yet that this is amoral. Greed is a vice, and Prudence a virtue, according to some.

It's that character internal conflict that you're talking about that's key. That is, if you pose the question "Is it better to be prudent or go for the gold?" in D&D, the answer is "It's best to prudently go for the gold." That is, the system only rewards one thing, winning. It doesn't matter if the character got to the gold by being prudent or by being bold, it only matters that they get there. If they don't get the gold, they've failed.

That's the point of how system supports play. In a Narrativist game, no answer is given to the question, so the characters are free to go with any decision that they like. It's making that decision freely that's Narrativism. If the decision is already made for you, then one of two things happen. You either go along with the decision, or you go against the decision, and the system punishes you.

D&D supports playing in a "tactically sound" way, whatever that happens to be. Sorcerer, OTOH, doesn't support any decision in particular, instead putting all decisions in the context of the moral question, "What would you do for power?". Note how it mostly does this by having rewards only available for making important decisions. Not for making them in any specific way.

Helping?

Mike

[Calithena]

My problem here is that I'm thinking about something too hard, or too inflexibly, or both.


I think what's hanging me up is the strict implication (existence of premise => narrativist play). I don't think that's valid.


Premises can arise anywhere. Here's a radical example. 19th century chess - the chess of Anderssen and Blackburne, as well as Morphy, though his technique was better - is often called Romantic. The games are these (usually) flawed little tactical masterpieces, involving huge sacrifice of material ending in mate. The theme is mind over matter, the triumph of reason over brute force, the accomplishing of much with little means. The games are morality plays, of a certain kind.


Now, if you go looking for this kind of play today, even at the local master level, you will get flat-out squashed unless you are really really good. You have to pick your spots; play good chess first, take the complications when they're there on the board. But still, people love sacrificial games; and part of the reason is that they have this paradoxical character - a kind of narrative. And some of the really great players - Kasparov, Fischer, Tal come to mind - of modern times are able to generate this kind of play when the board permits it, and that's one reason that these masters are so beloved of chess enthusiasts. They create chess with Meaning.


Chess isn't even gamist - it's just a game. But it still has narratives of different kinds. And with the game in front of us, we have a narrative, which has themes, and maybe even sometimes a kind of Premise.

-----------------

But okay, so I'm done with that straw man. Maybe it's not (existence of premise => narrativist play); it's (players explicitly have premise in mind => narrativist play), or maybe (narrativists play => players explicitly have premise in mind). But this doesn't seem true to me either, unless you interpret Premise so broadly as to include things like character conception and psychology (Sim concerns that seem necessary at certain points in narrativist play - or at least sometimes they do, except during those great moments when you ARE your character, whatever the hell those caps mean, because we're still us throughout), the immediate situation, and so forth.

I do understand here that the point of "Story Now!" as a slogan would be to say: whenever you slow down, think about the story first and that Sim-type reflection on your character's psychology only within the context of that, if at all (DERPG is a good case again where that 'if at all' is pretty important, since all DE characters are in a way the same except for the pure-hearted rubes). And good Nar system design will serve this kind of reflection. But I need to work on trying to understand whether Story Now is always Premise Now, because that doesn't seem obvious to me.

In particular, some writers and poets plan too much. Sometimes you know you're in a story and know where it has to go next but don't know where it's going to wind up, let alone what the hell it's all about. But explicitness about Premise would seem to require that you do.

I'd like to apologize to all of you for continuing with my own reflections rather than responding to your points - the feedback is really great, and I will get to those responses as soon as I can. Interpret this if you like as me getting to the point where I can understand those responses. Thanks for your time.