I’ve been thinking about Jared Sinclair’s Rules Elide. It’s an interesting post, and certainly thought-provoking, but it doesn’t sit quite right with me.
“Rules elide” (to me at least) feels not only contrarian as a statement and in my opinion, inaccurate - it doesn’t give me a meaningful lens with which to work with or change how I work with rules and design. And anyways, I think it’s more accurate to say “rules can elide”.
Rather than drill into the ways I think “Rules elide” elides (heheh), I propose: “Rules abstract”, and how that can help us in thinking about games and systems.
PS: Skip down to “Abstraction As A Tool” if you don’t care about the breakdowns and deep dive.
Abstraction
What does it mean to ‘abstract’?
ab·strac·tion /əbˈstrakSH(ə)n/ noun
- the quality of dealing with ideas rather than events. “topics will vary in degrees of abstraction”
- freedom from representational qualities in art. “geometric abstraction has been a mainstay in her work”
I like this definition as well:
Abstraction (from the Latin abs, meaning away from and here, meaning to draw) is the process of taking away or removing characteristics from something in order to reduce it to a set of essential characteristics.
Generally, when we create rules (for games), or systems, we generally simplify. By necessity, we reduce the totality of something - say, chance - to the emulation of it - with a dX die or several dX dice.
In the many examples of combat we have from games both video and analog, there’s a huge amount of designer expression and statement in how the combat system works - or what essential characteristics of combat have been highlighted and others abstracted away. It’s worth noting even in games or systems striving for full simulation, we always fall short. A true recreation would be a recreation of the world and all its multitudes. I digress. For more on this (and systems), check out Donella Meadows’ Thinking In Systems.
When we create rules for action resolution, we codify our abstraction for the actions those apply to. In other words, we say: “When these situations occur in fictional circumstances, we rely on this simplified logic or procedure to help us figure out what happens, whether it includes chance or not”.
GMK Dots keycaps at Novelkeys.
We can, as we do in programming and intuitively in life, abstract something to different degrees. We can “handwave” it, or we can create a complex interlocking system to model the interactions between elements we find meaningful (as many wargames do with having numbers associated with the combat modeling it cares about).
That’s all well and good, but why do we care?
Working with Abstraction
Abstraction in general can have the connotation of reductive, but in games, and in art, what it can allow for is focus. Rather, it can be a tool for determining focus, like a camera’s focus ring.
As in visual art and any type of composition, choosing where to add detail draws the attention. See “System as Shock” (touched on below in “Abstraction As A Tool”) for a version of how this density applies to TTRPGs. What we draw attention to (the form and shape of the detail itself) is a product of our abstraction.
Let’s take a look at how levels of abstraction (or modeling) can affect the experience of interacting with a system in a tabletop game.
“You Decide”
When a player chooses to lockpick a lock, the GM decides if it succeeds.
In this (arguably contrived) example if followed strictly, the rules call for the GM to make a decision. It does not model the activity in its rules or systems. The GM will draw from their circumstances and own judgment (their intrinsic understanding or internal mental model of the world) to make a decision.
This is a quantum amount of engagement, and the possibilities span the spectrum of abstraction levels. A GM might simply shrug and say “makes sense, you’re a lockpicker, let’s move on” or they might choose to zoom in on the action (a close up on the lockpicking ‘game’, if you will) and play that out moment by moment.
The focus is chosen in the moment and left up to GM intuition. It delegates the choice of level of abstraction to the GM.
“Ok, but how you tilt your lockpick up to get the last pin.” Image by Emiel Boven.
Action Resolution
When a player chooses to lockpick a lock, flip a coin. If it’s heads, they succeed.
This gets closer to our “resolution” mechanics which model probability. This models a very simplistic probability, and one that doesn’t consider character context or really anything we might now be used to games considering.
It abstracts away the activity of lockpicking to one single coin flip, expressing that the essence of the action is the chance of success, and reducing it (effectively or not) to a 50/50 chance. That abstraction is lockpicking is an activity with a set chance of success.
We can reduce the level of abstraction minutely by adding to this by saying “if a character is skilled at lockpicking, they flip two coins, and if either one is heads, they succeed.” Now we abstract lockpicking as an activity to include an (abstracted) measure of skill. Several steps from this, you can imagine, is a system with skills and difficulty checks, and kits, all of which are factors into the abstraction of a chance of success with regards to lockpicking.
Notice when rules become even a little more specific or less abstract, the focus sharpens in such a way that it will tend to create less space for the players at the table (GM included) to substitute their own internal mental model.
“I pick the lock.”
That’s useful for us to consider, when we write rules for games that take place primarily in shared imaginations of others, who play far away from where the rules were written. Even though rules, like laws, can vary wildly in how they are interpreted and enforced.
Sometimes, we want them to rely on their mental model. Having specificity to a rule tends to encourage the reader to assume the rule is the totality of how it should play.
Some tables might point to this and run it “as written” with the trigger being the lockpick. Some tables might say this occurs only if the lock is rickety or tough or what have you.
Lockpicking Minigame
I won’t belabor the point but let’s look last at Errant by Ava Islam, which is a fascinating ttrpg book for many reasons.
For now we’ll just look at the lockpicking section. For simplicity, I’m assuming the layman’s read of “if it’s in the book and tells me how to do things, it’s a rule”.
Picking a lock requires burglar’s tools, and selecting the correct Lockpicking actions in the correct order. These actions are twist, tap, and turn.
Every lock requires three actions to unlock; no action is ever used in a row.
Upon selecting the wrong action, the lock will become stiff. Once a lock becomes stiff, it remains so until it is unlocked. If the wrong action is chosen while the lock is stiff, the lock is jammed and becomes unable to be unlocked.
There’s more, but I won’t replicate them. Check out the rules here if you’re interested in the whole thing.
So - it seems there are certain thresholds of abstraction that move us from “moving on simply” to “zooming in” to the action. The default baseline for our tabletop ‘flow’ in a TTRPG is conversation. This is our natural best, our rhythm, our 4:4 time signature.
It’s the walking-or-cycling-around part of Pokemon before we run into an encounter.
Roll Initiative.
Depending on our design of our rules (or our choices as we run at the table), we encourage a syncopation, or help the table keep to the rhythm of conversation, or introduce a rest and change the key or time signature.
We can change the focus. Or perhaps, as in Errant, provide tools and options for othere to change the focus.
For Further Thought
Consider the difference in how D&D 5e’s class features and combat are often battled over between player and GM in terms of how it ‘should work’ compared to it’s basic action resolution system, which has fewer rules dedicated to it. It’s common for GMs to not even realize they’re changing how it works “as written” (not using difficulty checks or introducing critical successes outside of combat), whereas it’s common for combat rules to be absolutely pored over because of its intricacies.
More rules indicates more guidelines to follow, creating more and more shape (of the designer’s lens) or rather more and more focus onto particular shape. It is less abstract, and tends to feels more like “things I must know or follow”, because there is a reduced set of rules to learn. Gloomhaven’s enemy combat rules are an abstraction of combat and D&D 5e-like combat where the GM’s tactical decision-making is abstracted away.
Consider how 5e handles its abstraction of exploration and the effect it has or can have on the games people play. Travel still exists in many, as does exploration, but how? What tools have popped up to help?
Abstraction As A Tool
Notice how choices in abstraction matter in terms of how ‘zoomed in’ your rules encourage the players (GM included) to go and even when it’s time for it to come into play. It is also something we constantly do as GMs and players. We decide where the focus is, what to abstract away or handwave, or what version of the essence of an activity (say, crafting) matters to us in the moment.
We play out or describe entire conversations in character, or abstract shopping to a table of equipment passed around the group.
What and why and how you choose to abstract creates your focus, and determines what you (or your system, or game, or campaign) tend to find important, or, as Chris McDowall highlights with “System as Shock”: when you encourage the table to slow down (or speed up, in some cases). This can be used to significantly different effects.
“Can I just roll for it?”
We can utilize levels of abstraction and the resulting system shock to ‘zoom in’ and have a close up on an activity as per Errant’s lockpicking, or ‘slow down’ across the board as per combat in D&D, or turn-based computer RPGs, or even ‘step back and watch’ which is my experience of Mothership’s spiraling panic mechanics. We could use it grease the pacing, to streamline complexity, or elide something you want to become less of a focus — rules can elide.
It depends on what you are abstracting, and how you’re doing it.
When you abstract something, you decide what matters about it and how it matters to interact with it, and on what level. When you codify it into a rule, you communicate the intended focus (or lack thereof). Relative to the ‘baseline’ conversation, abstraction and resulting mechanics slow down or speed up play as situations arise and pass.
Use that how you will. It’s another tool in your toolkit.
How you use it is personal to every designer, and their take on the experience they’re trying to help evoke or capture.