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In light of some recent threads about narrativism in an undisclosed location, I'd like some accounts of nar play and addressing of premise. How specific was your Premise before the start of play? Were you thinking, "man, I'm gonna sit me down and play me some narrativism tonight" or did it just sorta end up that you played that way?

Here's my thinkin': People read about nar, and they see mention of this Egri guy, and moral this and ethics that, and they go, "whoa, I don't do that. That sounds weird."

So I think some accounts of play that weren't "Sorcerer turned up to 11" would be useful. What did you do? How much planning actually went into "I'm gonna set down and play me some narrativism tonight?"

Thanks in advance.

Okay, since I sort of started the thread that initiated this post, I might as well give the first example. What it ends up being defined as I don't really care, but here goes the example.

A Fantasy campaign. The character is basically a farmer who finds out his father is the last of an ancient order dedicated to hunting down sorcerers as they believe a sorcerous child is destined to save the world in a future cataclysm. He has the love of his life, a girl he grew up with.

The crux is events happened to send them on divergent paths. The PC set of on a path to realise his destiny and set up this order, while the NPC ended up becoming an assassin. The last time they met they battled and the NPC fell off a roof believed dead. Think Batman and Catwoman – lovers but enemies due to different philosophies.

Premise: Can the character find love with the NPC?

I use the word Can because that's how I phrased, and it since it sort of relates to the other thread I've kept it intact.

In game, the choices made by the character involved conflicts with his path (along with the others) to save the world, against finding some sort of relationship with the NPC. The two never matched, he always had to sacrifice one to save the other.

While the characters had all these adventures to save the world, the whole basis of the character was to see how this would turn out. Would he find redemption for the NPC? Would he sacrifice his destiny for her? Would he sacrifice her for his destiny?

In the final scenes of the campaign, we battled to save the world, but for me that was not the story, the story was how the relationship between the PC and NPC would end.

This is obviously paraphrased, but I believe it covers the bases. I'll let others decide what it means in GNS:

I probably need to add...

This was my first game after being out of the hobby for about three years (I think) and being the dreaded armchair theorist. I was posting to the Forge, reading Sorcerer - getting the whole narrativist thing in my head as I understood it (I have to say, it was less defined back then I think - less stuff was flying around).

None of the other players thought this way. If they thought in terms of the above - they never said. So the game was not intentionally narrativist, it was intentionally nothing really, as no  one but me new the terms.

How did it turn out in actually play? Hard to say, I'd say it was certainly not totally sim, but I'm loath to call it narrativist as I cannot see into the heads of the other players.

I know their are certainly all about character, developing them meaningfully with important decisions, etc, that's all I know.

Hi Ian,

"All about character" doesn't tell us anything, but "developing them meaningfully with important decisions" has a certain ring to it. But what I'm interested in is not what's in those other players' heads, invisible to all and and quite likely to themselves, but rather what they did in terms of appreciating your and one another's "meaningful decisions."

People appreciate one another, socially - and by that I mean actual behaviors among them, whatever they might be. Did that happen, in regard to those decisions you're talking about?

There's a difference between a person's appreciating my character's accent and my depiction of his contemporary prejudice in a 1920s Call of Cthulhu game, and his appreciation of the moment when my character decides to defy the Master at last (successfully or not) in a My Life with Master game, with or without an accent.

They're both "all about the character" - what matters, or rather, all we have to go on, is how that other person expresses his appreciation to me.

Best,
Ron

Okay, the first thing we have to understand is there is going to be some communication barrier here as I'm not defining everything in Forge terms, indeed, that's sort of the point of the post (and it was in the one that's being alluded to). I used to understand the Forge material better, but things have moved on way too far (in terms of the density of the theory and the terminology – or so it seems).

Taking that into account, let's try and move on a bit. I believe there was appreciation of each other's 'meaningful and important decisions'.

Everyone was interested in one of the characters goals to lead his people (though I admit this one involved little consequences and hard choices – it was more the doing it that was interesting).

We were all invested and interested in the meaningful decisions surrounding one character staying with the good guys or joining the sorcerous legions of the bad guys. He existed in the balance and had to choose.

The final battle in the game was about different things for different characters: for one it was living up to leading his people in the great battle, for another it was whether he battled for good or evil, for mine it was whether he could redeem the NPC and be happy with her. So the battle, while scene framed, excitingly edited and excellent to experience, was not overly the story being told (as far as I was concerned).

We were all as interested in each of these arcs and their ups and downs as we were our own.

I'd say it was never about accurately portraying the cultures or doing the correct accents. If such a player existed in the game I think we'd find him boring and slightly silly. The playing of the character is not so much about the accent, or role-playing some story about your grandfather around the campfire – just because it's role-playing. It has to mean something, move something forward, make a difference to someone, or something (be it a relationship, the plot, or some other dynamic). Everyone appreciated that; we never role-played just to 'play the character' (as an aside, this happens a lot in NWN).

On this forum I have a habit of trying to answer, but not making things clearer – so hopefully I'm not continuing in that trend.

Hi Ian,

I'm not Ron, and I'm too short to play him on tv...

But here's my take: from your response so far, it sure sounds like you guys were playing with Premise being the core priority of appreciation when you were you playing.  I'd offer the Buffy game mentioned over on RPG.net sounds quite Nar as well.  But Ron is right: the key element of these disctinctions is what is being reinforced during play.  It sound seems like these tough choices the PCs were drawn to and struggling through were the key.

But this is ostensibly a thread about Premise and making it clear: not a chance to hand out ribbons for naming different games the "right" style of play.

So I want to address briefly the phrasing of your Premise: "Can the character find love with the NPC?"  I want to go on record as saying that's a fucking lovely Premise.  But, there's a qualification: it's only fucking lovely with all the other details you wrote out before you typed the actual Premise.  All those other details are found "within" the Premise, packed up tightly within it.  The phrasing you have is emtional and grabby.  In the context of the character's background, it's perfect.

Now, there are some people who seem to have bugs up their frontal lobes that a Premise has to be phrased a "certain way" or it is of no use as a Premise.  In particular, it has to be set up in such a way that it sound dry and academic.

Not so.  What matters to the Premise is that involves the choices everyone always is so quick to talk about, but also that it grabs us.  Especially it must grab the player.  And it certainly sounds like it grabbed you.

The fact that a Premise can be personalized -- Can This Person do this, when there's this to consider," is a brilliant way to phrase a Premise.  It's brilliant because it tosses the PC right into the story, into action.  It sets the story underway.  You could rephrase your Premise easily to be more academic: "Is personal love worth betraying one's responsibilities to the world?"  But, given the background set up, why go that dry route?

A not-Premise version of this might be: strip out all the backstory and ask, "Can the character find love with an NPC?"  No Premise there.  You might even have great scenes, terrfic commedy, sadness, Acadamy worthy acting of scenes of sorrow and romance.  But they probably won't hang together.  The focus might well be on using the rules to seduce somebody, or the cultural minutae of the courtship... But without that choice -- implicit in the background -- no Premise.

For this reason, every Premise mentioned the in Buffy game on the other thread is clearly a solid Nar Premise.  However, it is always up to the players and GM to activate the Premise.  But since that's what they came to the table to do (it's their priority, right), that won't be a problem.

So, to sum up for the viewers at home: Premise does not have to be dry, dull, nor stringently defined.  The phrasing can be quite characters based, as long as, when unpacked, all these other choices larger than the character are revealed (as in Ian's example above.)

Christopher

And here's my example:

In Jesse's Gothic Fantasy Game, my guy was a minor noble who twenty years earlier summoned a demon to destory the man who was having an affair with his wife.  The wife dies shortly thereafter in madness and grief.  The PCs son, ten a the time, not knowing really what's going on, but knowing dad's getting wierd, runs away from home.  

The demon stays. The demon takes the form of a golden haired boy.  He lets my PC dote on him, never ages, always is a kind, loving boy.  A "son" in fact, who never disapoints, and never will.

The PC's kicker was, "After twenty years, my son comes home asking for forgiveness."

The grabby Premise for me was, "Will my PC accept his son back?"

We could phrase it, "Is living in a fantasy of a family worth losing your flesh and blood," or some sort.  But, given all the background, the first hooks me in right away.

Hope this helps.

Christopher

PS Oh, and here are the links to the Actual Play threads for this game (parts 1, 2 and 3).

http://www.indie-rpgs.com/viewtopic.php?t=2702&highlight=jesse

http://www.indie-rpgs.com/viewtopic.php?t=2807&highlight=gothic

http://www.indie-rpgs.com/viewtopic.php?t=2908&highlight=jesse

I'll give an example of Nar that "just happened," back in 1991-ish.  I moved out to the San Jose area back in 89-90, and hadn't done much RPGing for 6 years or so.  I found a group that was playing Talislanta, and joined in.  I now think of the Talislanta system as basically "pre-3e d20," so we're sure not talking about a Nar-customized system here - I mean, Nar didn't exist as a term yet, but we're not even talking about Prince Valiant, Over the Edge, or something like that in terms of system.

Now, what most folks know about the world of Talislanta is that it is rich in detail and filled with many races.  Which is true.  But what turned out for us to actually be *important* about Talislanta was that it (or the slice of space and time we were playing in) was a world obsessed with "trueblood" links back to the ancient past and "mere" Submen - masters and slaves, with magical justifications for various opinions about who should fit into which categories.

I say that is what turned out to be important because there was no real planning for it.  There was a situation in the world - a return of the supposed subman messiah who would unite the diverse "savages" for an assault on "civilization."  The players made choices about their PCs, for whatever reasons - a Cymrilian mage from a "liberal" family, a Bane raised by that family as adopted-sister to the mage, a Gao (pirate, sorta - that was me) returning to normal society, a wizard-hunter familiar with the savages but tied to the liberal Cymrillian family . . . there were a few others who drifted in and out of this years-long campaign, but those were, I think, the key players.

A lot of play would, I suspect, have been unidentifiable in GNS terms, or sometimes Sim - we had the occassional session of "going shopping" for hours and hours (not my favorite), or poking about the big, interesting world of Talislanta as a exploration of its' own.  

But things kept coming back to the issues of slavery, freedom, and the like.  Many sessions - the most enjoyable to me, I suspect - could clearly be labelled Nar.  A lot of the world considered the Bane to be essentially an animal, and yet she was key to helping civilization hold out against the Subman plots on many occassions.  The group as a whole developed a goal of having her accepted by the Seven Kingdoms as a citizen.  As we expored various bits of the mysterious past, it was always the stuff about the true ancestery of various "races" (bio-magic manipulation by the ancient Arcane) that grabbed us.  Stuff that engaged us with questions about the nature of sentience, what gave folks the right to order others around - that's what got people's attention.  The GM was fairly ruthless is making any attempt to change the status quo incredibly difficult, but we didn't stop trying, even when offered other directions to persue in the game.

It was a while ago, and memory is sometimes faulty.  The more Sim-oriented sessions may fade a bit in my mind.  But trying to think about it as rigorously as possible - overall, it seemed to me the real people playing became engaged by those issues as issues, not purely as facets of the game world.  As we played, decisions would clearly be made (by players and the GM) that brought them to the fore.

Something about the aspects of the world we chose to focus on, the nature of the characters we choose to play, and the way we made decisions as the game progressed provided an opportunity to engage with those issue - and we did.  In the end, it was our desire (never played out) to try and save even the Subman army itself from those who were "using" it - and we were willing to risk (RISK, not simply allow) a lot of death and destruction within the Seven Kingdoms to attempt that.

Anyway, I think the proto-Premise was about slavery and freedom in a world where "races" could be created and tinkered with via magic, and what you were willing to do to acheive "freedom" - for yourself, and for who else?  That dominated play, in a way that the players involved clearly were grooving on.  

Could it have been more focused?  Hell yes!  Would that have been good?  Probably varies by taste - I could have done without some of the "shopping trip" type stuff, but that was probably important to some players - it was to at least one that I know for sure.  And my Gao was a coin-collector, which I indulged in as (I'd say now) pure Exploration  some times . . . but the GM would often find a way to tie that - or even the shopping trips, come to think of it - into the issues.  

Hope that's the kind of thing this thread is looking for - it was that game that convinced me there really was something cool about RPGs, I wasn't just harboring nostalgic boyhood/high school memories, and that I should continue to persue this hobby.  So I've thought about it a lot - feel free to probe for more details as appropriate.

Gordon

Hi folks,

A month and a half ago, I ran a one shot demo of HeroQuest.  I loaded it with the Premise, "What is Justice?", although I never explicitly explained this to the players.  The scenario was a classic kung fu revenge thing, but the real Premise-statements were put forth by the players in how they went about exacting revenge, and how far they were willing to go.

One tool that helped very much in making this happen was each character description ended in a question, such as, "Has her path to revenge cost her humanity along the way?"  Although the players probably didn't actively think about answering the questions, in play, they did so.  

Chris

Hi Chris,

I think that's great.

And it's a perfect example of something that I knew -- but never thought on the surface about before: Premise is the Priority in Narrativist Play, but how you get there is *your* business.  

I'll reiterate that I think too many people focus on the "how's" of getting a Premise "shoved" into a session, instead of focusing on the much more vital question -- "What's an issue that I fucking care about?"

I suspect that the human brain is able to riff on a Premise deliverd with a light touch much more easily than most people assume.  I use Gordon's post as an example:  For certain sessions, it was in Nar mode.  How?  Someone mentioned slavery, and brought it into the concern of the PCs.  For some reason we'll never know, all the players picked up on this as an interesting Premise and began riffing it.  

When you're sitting around a table riffing fictional stuff, things will happen -- words spoken, ideas suggestd -- and a lot of this is going to be reflections and refractions of what's already been said.  Thus, a group Premise -- worked and re-worked by the needs and interestes of the players.

Christopher

Quote from: Christopher KubasikThe fact that a Premise can be personalized -- Can This Person do this, when there's this to consider," is a brilliant way to phrase a Premise.  It's brilliant because it tosses the PC right into the story, into action.  It sets the story underway.  You could rephrase your Premise easily to be more academic: "Is personal love worth betraying one's responsibilities to the world?"  But, given the background set up, why go that dry route?

A not-Premise version of this might be: strip out all the backstory and ask, "Can the character find love with an NPC?"  No Premise there.  You might even have great scenes, terrfic commedy, sadness, Acadamy worthy acting of scenes of sorrow and romance.  But they probably won't hang together.  The focus might well be on using the rules to seduce somebody, or the cultural minutae of the courtship... But without that choice -- implicit in the background -- no Premise.  

That is interestiing, because  I have had the opposite experience.  For me, in-game romance (or any other interaction) has never worked when specifically planned.  i.e. If I go into the game thinking something like "Let's focus on the romance of Thorgerd and Arnor?", the result has always been uninteresting to play and hasn't hung together.  

However, I have found that there have been great romantic relations which were not planned out.  The past session in my Vinland game was an example.  In a spur of the moment, Jim played a Whimsy Card ("Something Missing") to declare that his (Skallagrim's) step-daughter Vagnhild had disappeared with the young man Atli who was interested in her.  This then ensued a search lead by Skallagrim's carl Matunaaga, who had always had a crush on Vagnhild.  

So all of this was totally unplanned.  I had pictured this session as moving onwards to spring without any huge events.  However, that change lead to a very powerful and interesting confrontation of Matunaaga, Atli, and Vagnhild.  In particular, Matunaaga's attraction to and failure to win Vagnhild -- which are tied up in his status as an outsider (he is an exiled Mohican chief) and his feelings about honor -- juxtaposed against Vagnhild's position as an unmarried woman in a patriarchal society.  I have a preliminary write-up at:
http://www.darkshire.net/~jhkim/rpg/vinland/campaign/sessions/session49.html

For me, it has never really worked to set the story underway and guide it to answer some question.  For example, I had planned out from the beginning of the campaign a romance between Thorgerd and Arnor with the cooperation of the player -- which was loaded by the question of her settling down vs acting against tradition as she originally did.  However, it never held up as an issue.  In contrast, I have had a lot of success with taking a set of characters and seeing where they lead.  

The thing is, I don't see this as a different goal -- just different means.  What was interesting to me was the emotional investment and relevance -- i.e. that Matunaaga's dilemma as an exile carried real emotional power, because we could relate that to our own lives -- such as the balance between career and romance.  However, I have a different approach to this.

I've been thinking a lot about this in regard to Burning Wheel. Chris' and John's posts solidified my thoughts.

Do I have a premise in my BW games? Do individual characters have premises.

At first glance I said, "No and Yes" respectively. But I find my actual play to be telling, and different from what I suppose.

Last year my group played in a short (8-session) campaign. All characters but one were new 5 LPers built for the setting/scenario.

Before we started, I told my players that this arc was called, "For Love and Money". Usually we title our games after the fact, but this time around I had an idea of what I wanted from play and I wanted to let them know this.

The "Money" because one of the character's goals was to gather an astronomical amount of money. He didn't start knowing this, his character was operating under separate goals of his own devising, as well as his own premise. But he fell into a situation that triggered his BITs (especially Loyal), and his goal became The Money. I knew this would happen before play began (because of the BITs in question).

The Love aspect was more interesting. The players never really moved toward my "love" scenarios. I had two important NPCs fall in love, and this was news, but it never really factored into play.

HOWEVER, the players -- operating on their own, via their character's individual premises -- devised an entire grift based on seducing a young society girl and using her to blackmail merchants. The "seducer" player fell in love with the young girl of his own volition. But I think he was predisposed to the act due to the open but defined premise I set out at the game's beginning. (Though he might retort that he was "playing his character" (aka spinning out the ramifications of his own premise, of which I was unaware.))


So my second look leads me to answer: Yes, my games begin with a premise, generally an open one. Yes, my players bring premises for their characters to the table, some of which I am unaware of and only manifest through play.

-Luke

Hi Christopher,

The major reason many people get caught on the how's and why's of Premise is because many folks want that Narrativist play, but are utilizing techniques that are contrary to their goals.  

For these people, the frustrated Narrativist, they occassionally stumble upon moments of Premise-addressing play("meaningful play"), and assume that its natural to be so rare and hard to achieve.   In fact, its simply a matter of using different techniques, and perhaps, on a subconscious level, they recognize that.  

What's usually gumming these folks up is railroading, lack of player input & protagonism, etc.  Instead of forcing Premise into play, its more about "un-forcing" Illusionist play techniques.  

Once those get out of the way, Narrativism is surprisingly easy to achieve.

Chris

Hello,

I'd also like to call to everyone's attention the tendency to think, "Well, we're having a nice non-problematic game with no particular self-reflective methods, and no special effort to accord with a storyline, and all sorts of cool themes just seem to arise right out of the characters' decisions in this setting. That's too easy. We can't be playing Narrativist!"

Sorry guys. Narrativism it is, when a solid look at it shows what John just described so well.

When I say that Narrativist play requires addressing a Premise ...

1. "One or more" can be substituted for "a."

2. No one said (gnash teeth) word fucking one about actually verbalizing the stupid thing beforehand or ever, or, if having done so, forcing yourselves to adhere to it or some damn thing like that ...

(pant, pant, wheeze) ... (what? I'm fine)

3. Seeing it defined and developed through play itself, over perhaps sessions, is perfectly valid.

Best,
Ron

Quote from: Matt WilsonIn light of some recent threads about narrativism in an undisclosed location, I'd like some accounts of nar play and addressing of premise. How specific was your Premise before the start of play? Were you thinking, "man, I'm gonna sit me down and play me some narrativism tonight" or did it just sorta end up that you played that way?

My best experience with premise in this sense came about partly planned, but mostly along the way.

The campaign was Ars Magica, 3d ed.  Rules were slightly tinkered with, but only insofar as spell and item development were accelerated.

The party were in England, all more or less forced to be a coven, and not at all particularly getting along.  Most characters were in some sense "deviant" from what might be taken to be a stock AM type: that is, relatively few, perhaps half or fewer, were trained in Hermetic magic by the usual coven system.  Some were hedge-types pretending, some were Hermetic with bizarre problems, etc.

My character was actually a priest of the Ordo Malleus [Order of the Hammer], a special order created by Pope Sylvester II [r. 999-1003, born Gerbert of Aurillac] of magicians who were totally in line with the Church and its teachings.  If you know AM, this is a problem: the Dominion Aura, which happens when you're near holy sites like churches, interferes with magic in various negative ways.  My character had this basic problem: he was a priest, he was a spy infiltrating a Hermetic order (he wasn't obvious about his priestly nature), and he had a weird flaw, which was that when he did magic he "leaked" Dominion Aura, screwing everyone else up.

Already, there was a certain premise going on here.  In short, How can you be a priest and a magus at the same time?  But I didn't really think of it that way; I just did it, and the GM thought it was cool.  Note also that this was totally my premise, not a general one for the campaign.

Over time, my character found himself doing such things as using magic to fake the old thing where the murderer touches the corpse of the guy he murdered and it spurts blood.  I confessed this, and it was pointed out that I just faked a miracle, which is very bad news, magic and miracle being not the same thing: in essence, I had taken it upon myself to play God, which is about as big a sin in a priest as you can perform, apart from Satanism or something like that.  This made me extremely concerned about vows and faith and so forth, oddly enough.

Eventually, I found myself becoming an "out" priest and at the same time a really very powerful magus, and having to deal with that.  At one point, where it all came to a head by a combination of luck and setup, the whole coven got attacked by demons, and I just threw every single damn piece of power I had at them (lots and lots of vis), which I couldn't possibly control.  The GM pointed out that I was essentially throwing myself on the mercy of God, which seemed right to me.  So I rolled -- and got a HUGE critical roll.  Several demons simply disappeared, and an angel started hanging over me, defending me physically from all attacks.  I spent the whole rest of the fight wandering around and singing Alleluia, not actually doing anything useful but leaking Dominion all over the place and thus pissing of the demons, and so forth.  I ended up with True Faith (since an actual 100% miracle had happened on top of me) and a need to go back to Tuscany (where the Order was based) to work out how to be a magus with True Faith (impossible in AM).

The point?  I ended up entirely driven by premise.  Everything, for me, was about the interaction of faith and magic, about being a priest and a magus at the same time.  The desperate imbalance, the agonizing problem, never went away.  And in the end, that turned out to be a central point for the whole plot, because my character's desire to spread the Good Word went so against what certain folks expected that they had to take him seriously, and that made it all come out more or less right.

So for me, premise worked best, and most deeply, when we only planned the edges of it ahead of time.  The planning was also specific to the character, not a general principle.  I think you could reduce this to a Sorcerer-like premise, what will you do and all that, but I think I would have run a different character and the others would have done things differently.

I don't know if that helps at all....

Chris Lehrich