Abstractions

Okay before we start I’m going to introduce some jargon. Please bear with me.

An abstraction is a model of something, usually with less detail than the original. We can say the model abstracts detail from the original. The NYC subway map is an abstraction of the actual tracks below the ground. Riders don’t need to know where the A and C interchange to allow express and local service on the same track; they need to know how to get from their stop to the Museum of Natural History (to look at dino bones).

Abstractions are a necessary facet of thought. When you pay for goods you don’t need to understand Stripe or Mastercard^[1], when you turn a car you don’t need to think about hydraulic suspension, and when you play an RPG you’re abstracting all kinds of stuff. Ever roll a die to decide if something goes well or poorly? That die roll simplifies all the decision making and modeling of your fictional world down to one little piece of plastic.

Recently I’ve been thinking about what our rules abstract and places where the game-model diverges from the imaginary world. I think by turning a critical lens on these divergences we can aim for more open, rewarding, and surprising play. Let’s start by examining some games.

The World’s Most Popular Roleplaying Game

Of course abstractions are crucial to beloved children’s role playing game “House.” Everyone^[2] plays House as a kid, right? There’s no rulebook available in my PDF folder, but I can transcribe the rules as I remember them.

Two or more players are required. One plays Mom and one plays Dad; other players may be Kids.
Dad had a job that is some kind of business thing. Or computers. Or something. He mostly goes to work and comes home from work.
Mom cooks and cleans and stuff. And like, tells the Kids what to do if you have any.
Mom and Dad freely roleplay scenes of their marriage. At any time Dad may have to go to work, at which point both players may freely play their day’s activities. Dad may decide to come home from work whenever he likes, at which time a new scene begins.

The game is played to practice and prepare children for adulthood, much as Kriegspiel prepared Prussian military officers for warfare^[3]. Like Kriegspiel, these rules are highly ideological in their model of the world. It’s one in which heterosexual, monogamous marriage structures the daily life of a salaried worker and his stay-at-home housewife. We could bend the rules by having Mom work or having two Dads, or subvert them with a failing and broken marriage. Either way the abstractions that we make of the imaginary world (some players go to work, some cook and clean, players form a legible two-parent household) continue to shape our focus in play.

Oh sorry I meant the World’s Greatest Roleplaying Game™️

The D&D spellcasting system represents an abstraction that sits askew from the imagined fiction, most of the time. Gale Baldursgate doesn’t have a line about how excited he is to reach fifth level so he can cast third level spells so he can cast Fireball.

We’ve already established that lots of RPG gameplay is based around abstraction anyway, so what’s the big deal? Well let’s peak at my pet peeve, Firebolt from D&D 5e (emphasis mine):

You hurl a mote of fire at a creature or object within range. Make a ranged spell attack against the target. On a hit, the target takes 1d10 fire damage. A flammable object hit by this spell ignites if it isn’t being worn or carried. This spell’s damage increases by 1d10 when you reach 5th level (2d10), 11th level (3d10), and 17th level (4d10).

Why does this spell have different behavior if the target is a worn or carried object? It’s not because Flim-flam the Wizard made those restrictions when creating the spell. It’s because D&D has deep wargame roots, and the rules are principally concerned with balanced and easy-to-adjudicate battles. The abstraction of the miniatures clashing on a square board takes precedence over the imaginary world. Now we’re not modeling the rules of magic, we’re modeling a vague approximation of a fight that we can imagine our characters actually slogging through.

As you may be able to tell, I find this profoundly disappointing. When new players try D&D, they’re always trying to throw furniture at people and light rugs on fire and dramatically slide down a clothesline. We could say they’re “playing the world.” Experienced players tend to lack that joy de vivre, instead “playing the abstraction” as they move their piece around a grid and active pre-defined abilities. They’re not wrong to do so; they’ve simply recognized that the abstracts created by the combat rules model a less-interesting game structure.

Fate and story

In Fate, Aspects are fictional tags that can be applied to any object. Most players first encounter them during character creation, where they serve as both useful bits of characterization and important gameplay mechanics. Your character’s aspects define things that are ‘always true,’ but they aren’t mechanically relevant unless you spend a metacurrency called a Fate Point. The best explanation I’ve seen comes from this unattributed blog post attached to the Fate website (emphasis mine):

But that’s the fundamental reason that aspects are “fueled by” Fate Points. […]

Fate Core, as far as I can see, tries to emulate fiction. That doesn’t just mean “a physical simulation of fictional worlds”. That means the flow and structure of fiction. That means that when we look at how a game of Fate ‘should’ flow, our reference point should be ‘does this play out like a book, or a movie?’ rather than ‘does this work like how it would work in the physical world’?

A slippery, ice-covered surface, in fiction, doesn’t mean that every description or shot of people on it involves them slipping and sliding around. That’s boring. What it probably means is that at some key moment, somebody will slip because of the surface creating some dramatic moment. And that’s what Fate tries to emulate -how the dramatic elements work together, not the actual effects of fighting on a slippery surface. It follows the rules of fiction regardless of realism, not reality -even ‘cinematic’ reality.

Here we see an abstraction again: Fate Points stand in for dramatic pacing and narrative technique. In Fate, details of our imaginary world are principally important in how they impact story beats.

I think this is a self-defeating design decision. We’re right back to playing the abstraction, not the world! Let’s say my aspect says “unbeatable duelist” and the foe is a “third-string brawler” and we get into a fight. What matters is who rolls what and how Fate points are spent. The texture of the imaginary world is smoothed out into the abstract Aspect system, erasing it in the process.

My experience of Fate wasn’t one of aspects allowing free-form fictional play, but instead one of skill modifiers and +2 bonuses. Honestly I’d rather play D&D; the mechanics there provide a little more “percussion” than the Fate model.

If only there was a timely release accompanied by a widely listened actual play that had a different spin on a similar abstract mechanic…

Sentences in Realis

Just Aspects in Fate, Realis runs on Sentences. A Sentence is usually an “I always” declaration (I always bring amusement with my antics, I always wield a spectral power), optionally with some conditions (When I have room to swing a large weapon, I always win duels, I always reveal the truth to others about themselves). Sentences also have a Reality score from 0 to 4, which determines which Sentence wins out in a conflict. Reality increases as Sentences become more conditional (called “realization”).

These conditions are the key differentiator from Aspects; they drive action toward the world and not away from it. Let me give an example. In an early episode of Friends at the Table’s actual play of Realis, the players encounter an obstacle with the Sentence “I always frighten those who see me” +1. Having mostly +0 Sentences (and defenders winning ties), the players will have a hard time prevailing in direct conflict. Instead they… turn out the lights. Now they can’t see the obstacle, so its sentence cannot come into play, so they are able to pass. The Sentence still abstracts the mechanism by which it is true (which is actually sort of the story-logic that controls reality in the world of Realis), but it leaves the conditions and effect as existing firmly within the fictional world.

There are plenty of mechanics that I don’t like in Realis (including the ever-frustrating “class specific trigger”), but the Sentence is TODO

TODO: expand on the parts of REALIS that don’t work for me

Playing Earthsea

How do we put this idea of “playing the world” into practice? Let’s set out to play a game set in Ursula K LeGuin’s Earthsea setting and think about our options.

We could start with D&D 5e, because it’s already a pseudo-medieval fantasy RPG that ‘everyone’ knows. Of course we’ll need to think about tacking on a mechanic for the balance of the world, the management of which is a core theme of the series. Maybe your characters have a limited pool of Tao points that they can spend to take decisive action or use powerful magic. They can regenerate Tao points on a long rest equal to 1d6 times their level—nah I’m just fucking with you. This is on its face a terrible idea. TODO: explain why

We could go with something FKR-y (TODO: explain what that is).

Archipelago

Seven-Part Pact