The Importance of Premise

Last time we discussed how your character wasn’t a normal person, to the extent that they are a different species. A member of Homo Fictitious. A species that exists solely to tell a story and is, therefore, a more focused creation. It was also revealed that critical to navigating and communicating the inherent story a Homo Fictitious character is designed to create is the fact they are enhanced with premise.

In this entry in the series, we lay out what premise is and what it means when creating your role-playing game characters and how it gets you closer to that intentional, dramatic story being an outcome without needing crazy acting skills.

What Is Premise?

“Premise” comes from two Latin words, meaning to put before. The premise is the foundation of your story-that single core statement of what happens to the characters as a result of the actions of a story.

– James L Frey

That is how James L Frey defines premise and as you can see it is something that is applied to the story. Every story only has one premise. It is the underlying idea of your story, the foundation that supports your entire plot. A simple example would be the story of the Three Little Pigs. The story involves the pigs making bad building decisions and being afraid of the wolf. But these events aren’t random, or about the failure to lookup building regulations, but to support the inherent premise in the story that foolishness leads to death and wisdom leads to happiness.

So it’s easy to see when writing a piece of fiction writing to a premise is one of the key things that elevates the plot from a random sequence of events with little purpose. There is a purpose and that purpose is the premise.

We may come back to adding premise at the ‘story’ level, but for now I’d recommend reading How To Write A Damned Good Novel by James L Frey. We are more interested in how to apply premise to the characters we create as players.

Characters Without Premise

Before describing how to enhance characters with premise, it may be useful to describe a character that isn’t. This is especially the case when you’re translating a concept designed for one purpose, writing fiction, and applying it to another, achieving certain outcomes in your role-playing game.

Let’s imagine the character Tarla. She is a gnome with large eyes. She has a tendency to over-accessorize with necklaces, rings and, for reasons that are a bit confusing, likes to assemble a birds nest of nature in her hair. She has a pet weasel and a small bag of trinkets she obsesses about. Bubbly to the point of incessantly trying to cheer everyone up she likes to make friends. She often keeps her pet weasel hidden, but holds whole conversations with it. Her goal is to make friends and her ‘look squirrel’ personality seems to abhor planning.

Many people may be thinking that is an excellent character? Some of you may even have spotted I’ve paraphrased it from Twiggy in Critical Role with some small changes. It is an excellent character, the need to give characters under 3-feet childlike qualities aside,  but an excellent character to be acted as it provides numerous visual cues and quirks and musical notes to play. On repeat.

The character is totally devoid of any inherent story. Tarla just exists to be acted out and she’s been designed that way around things to hang a performance on. Even to the extent she has a pet weasel so she can be acted when no one else is present in a scene. This is perfectly fine, but our goal here is to not compete as actors but to better support our goal of author-focused play.

Tarla can exist exactly as written here but to help us out she needs to be enhanced with premise and her many characteristics need to be purposed to an actual story she exists to tell. Why? Because our goal is to be intentional about a dramatic story being a result and to have the tools to navigate that as a player.

A Character With Premise

The idea of assigning premise to characters is not new. This article is inspired by two sources. The original inspiration for using this approach when creating my characters was the Sorcerer role-playing game (2002)  which literally creates characters with a premise for the express purpose of enhancing the fiction in that game. Recently, as in only last month (October 2019 for those not checking the date of publication), I read Building A Story Brand (2017), and it added a better way of expressing premise which is what’s advocated here.

A character with a premise has a story to tell. The character exists to tell that story. The character exists with a clear and present problem to solve that has, in big or small ways, disrupted their lives (this links to things like the call to adventure in heroic myth).  We can see that Tarla has no clear and present problem. Nothing has disrupted her life. She does not sit on the edge of stepping into a story.

Tarla just exists in her act-able state.

The premise that represents the story the hero sits on the edge of stepping into manifests as external, internal and philosophical problems. Let’s take the example of Luke Skywalker, his premise could be constructed as follows:-

External: Must defeat the empire.

Internal: Am I a Jedi?

Philosophical: Can good defeat evil without becoming evil?

It can be clearly seen how defining your character’s premise sets out the story your character is meant to tell and, more importantly, flags it to everyone else at the table so they can contribute to it. Luke is going to set out to try and defeat the empire, in doing this he will find out if he can become a Jedi or not and if that in defeating the empire, or not, he finds himself holding the higher ground or falling to the dark side. 

This premise is answered in the moment Luke looks at his mechanical hand and throws his lightsaber aside, but he journeyed to it over the course of three films.

The power of everyone knowing that at the table is profound as all the interactions and moments, big and small, that happen across the table can be created or framed with the fact that the character exists to attempt to achieve these things and answer these questions. Everyone can help journey each character in fulfilling their premise as meta-gaming can be a good thing and this is one of those cases.

I am a firm believer in all three problems being important as it adds depth and clarity to the premise. In the past, I’d state my characters premise as a singular question, which tended to lean things towards the philosophical problem: will my assassin be consumed by revenge? Which is great, but fails to identify the clearer internal question and the external goal that is going to allow the character to answer the philosophical query.

When It Goes Wrong

I have a recent example of when utilising premise can go wrong. Not disaster wrong, just how it’s maximum potential isn’t reached when it’s not articulated fully or clearly. 

In our last Dungeons and Dragons game we played a campaign set during the epic age of the Elven nations in a homebrew setting. It was about a great civil war amongst the Elven nations which was a distraction for something more sinister and evil. My character was the Sea Elf representative and had a bit of an Aquaman thing going on and had been deposed from his rightful position as ruler of the Sea Elf nation.

The trouble was his premise was not complete:

External: Re-take the throne of the Sea Elf people

Internal: Not defined

Philosophical: Not defined

The incomplete premise impacted the game significantly, I believe. It meant that I had a mechanical goal without any emotional weight or depth to it. It meant in play I was never fully clear why I was trying to re-take the Sea Elf nation throne other than because it was his right to do so. It also meant it probably wasn’t clear to other players, especially the DM, what the purpose of it was other than it ‘being a goal in play’.

This is why the three work well together. As the quality of the emergent story would have been different if the premise had clearly been:-

External: Re-take the the thrown of the Sea Elf nation

Internal: Am I a great leader like my father?

Philosophical: Win the nation? Lose the civil war?

Now it has depth. Now it has clarity. Yes, my character’s story could be re-taking the Sea Elf nation, but that is only the mechanical activity, the depth of it is will the journey to re-take the Sea Elf nation answer the question of whether the character is a sufficient leader and if the re-taking of the nation can be done without sacrifices in the wider civil war.

In truth, that was always the story, and it did get answered, but it’s lack of clarity in my head (and I assume others) meant a great game lost the opportunity to be even better as I know I wasn’t creating scenes and moments to the best of my ability with the full premise in my mind. The lack of clarity around the premise meant I wasn’t as pro-active in making it part of the game.

The Power of Intention

The real power of premise is the power of intention. It strips away the idea that a story in a role-playing game is something that happens by accident after the fact. If every character has premise then each of the protagonists at the table clearly exists to strive to resolve an external problem, while answering an internal problem and resolving a philosophical question.

As a player, you have authored the story your character is on the edge of stepping right into when the game starts. Once the game starts everyone can contribute to that journey by creating scenes, framing interactions and setting out situations and challenges that move the character closer to finding the answer. You can also construct your character background to service this story, adding locations and characters that can contribute to your journey and which should be important to finding the answer.

No one will know what the answer will be or how you’ll get to it. The game and each of the other player characters will influence each other’s journey, but one thing is for sure you’ve set out an intentional, dramatic story and your character exists to tell it.

So tell it.