Playing in a World of Abstractions
Header Image: Dice of Fate by Cris Loran
No matter where you look in a game, there are going to be abstractions and hand-waved topics. Your hit points are not meat points… but then again, you are still hit for damage and grappled by a T-Rex but it’s all about how much stamina you have and you didn’t take wounds. Or perhaps you’ve blown all your 1st-level spell slots and can no longer conjure the power to cast more… except you still have a 9th-level spell slot to go. You are a powerful swordsman and every time you attack, you somehow always miss 5% of the time no matter what you do.
There are a ton of abstractions in a game, some might leave you scratching your head while others might even make some logical sense to you. But how does this impact your world, your table, and the players who go about stomping across it?
Playing in a World of Abstractions
For the players, the abstractions made by rules are how they interact with the world. They move through the world only experiencing what they are told and using set rules to do so. The very essence of the world is translated to them through these abstractions, and so it’s no surprise that many of them are argued over and challenged constantly. Why does a cat deal 1 piercing damage when a commoner only has 4 hit points? Does this mean that the world that the party lives in is especially vulnerable to death by cats?
The purpose of abstractions in any game is to translate the world of fiction to our reality, and occasionally, you have to accept the strange warts that come with it.
Hit Points
Probably the most commonly argued abstraction one can think of is hit points. What does it mean that a fighter has 20 hit points while a wizard has 6? When do we start taking hit point damage? When we get a cat scratch? A cleaver cuts off a finger? A fireball blossoms and singes off our eyebrows?
For the players, understanding hit points are simply how well they are doing in the game. It can be a bit weird when they are reduced to 1 hit point at the end of the day, go to bed, and wake up completely refreshed with no signs of yesterday’s wounds. Some games limit how much characters get back after resting, but offer other ways to heal like having someone throw a bandage on your gaping wound from being ripped open by a dinosaur with wings or almost having your soul pulled out by a shadow.
These hit points represent their physical well-being and the likelihood of them having to find another character to parade about as. To say that hit points are literally you getting hit in your body would be weird since at much higher levels you could take several arrows, a huge chunk ripped out by an oversized worm, and even the direct fire from a disintegrate spell while still operating the exact same as before. Then again, to say they only represent near misses and getting tired is also an oddity, what happens when that ‘near-miss’ ends up with you inside the belly of a plant? How did the plant near-miss you into its belly and is now happily coating you in some sort of acidic poison substance?
In reality, hit points represent a million different things, and specifically saying they are one thing over another means that there will always be contradictions. Hit points are the measure of your ability to get stabbed in your least important organs, to nearly avoid a fireball, and to somehow keep fighting even through the trauma of being under the effects of powerful spell after powerful spell. Then again, in certain situations, they might simply be your ability to ignore a bruised muscle like if you are climbing up a mountain and a random boulder gets thrown at you by gravity itself and you barely avoid getting smushed.
Living with Hit Points
But what if you were actually someone living in this world? What does losing hit points look like? It could be some torn shirts, a few deep scratches, and a mild concussion. Then again, suddenly dropping to 0 hit points from full by a spell might simply just be your inability to handle large amounts of magic at a time.
For those who live in the world, they know nothing of hit points but they do understand their resolve, endurance, and how much pain they can handle. When they are hit by an attack, they don’t take damage to their hit points but rather have visible wounds or rips through clothing and armor that didn’t quite tear flesh. These minor nicks and wounds are how they would count hit points recalling how a sword almost cut them in half but they were somehow able to move just in time.
Hit Points in Game
So what does hit points really mean anyway? It really depends on the situation and circumstances. For some fights it is escaping a bolt of lightning by just getting hit by the edges of an electrical current, for others, it’s avoiding the gnashing teeth of a zombie, and other times its somehow surviving being scooped up in a single bit and being swallowed whole to be digested for over a thousand years.
This does create the confusion of telling a player that they were ‘hit’ for 29 damage by barely escaping a sword’s blow as it scraped across their armor. Do they take the damage? Or did they not get hit? For me, I stick to general overviews like saying “you are slammed by the Jackalope for 29 damage” or “you take half damage from the meteor swarm as you hide behind your shield”, but sometimes there just isn’t a good way to narratively say how a cat dealt one damage to the wizard and that they are bleeding out.
Spell Slots
How does magic even function? Why is it that you can’t combine lower-level spell slots to make a bigger slot? Why can’t I turn a big slot into smaller ones? What even is a spell slot and what does that mean? Does my wizard even know that they have four 1st-level spell slots?
While hit points might get the most chatter about it, spell slots are a concept that few seem to ever be satisfied by, they just don’t have any other experiences. In many RPGs, it comes with predetermined strengths and power, with no fluctuations from it. Many have adopted a hardcoded stance on magic, which helps make it easier to approach it but creates many problems about why or how things work.
A player knows that they can only cast a maximum of four 1st-level spell slots, no matter how powerful they get. They know they can’t ‘depower’ their magic, at least within the rules of many popular RPGs, and they can’t simply exchange a few low-level spell slots into a major spell slot. For whatever reason, their character is tied to a very certain number of power pools. In each of these ‘pools’ there is only a limited amount of mana/water that can be used, and once that is gone, it is gone until they can refill via a long rest or some unique ability. What they can’t do, though, is simply move mana from one pool to another. It is an impossibility and so when they pull that mana out to cast a spell, that spell only casts at a certain power with no way to depower it or whatever.
(I’m ignoring the sorcerer's ability to move points and focusing on the general use case.)
Living With Spell Slots
So what does this mean for those who live in our fiction? How do they rectify these weird quirks and limitations? For them, this might just be the secret of how magic works. That they can only use certain ‘pools’ of mana at a time with no real control over its influence or its shape. That casting spells at certain pools takes a certain amount of energy and oomph out of them, and to do it any other way would just put too much strain on them.
Magic is dangerous, which is a fact that can be easily verified all around the world. How many horrible owlbear and chimera monsters do you have to face until you realize that you shouldn’t tamper with things unless you are especially powerful? How many creatures have lore that included they were created to be servants by powerful wizards, but they ended up just killing their masters due to poor working conditions?
Each spell that a player gets access to is defined, known, and quantified by those who practice and spread magic around. Spells are like cooking recipes, they require certain amounts of ingredients and follow a specific formula, thus each spell that is formed has been codified and hardwired to only use a certain amount of mana for a very specific effect. It is written into the spell that it can’t be cast lower and when you power it up, it pulls a specific amount of mana from a pool and then discharges the effects by exploding your enemies.
In this world, every piece of magic that can be cast must first be codified, quantified, and have set boundaries worked into the incantations or else there is a greater chance for backfiring. Perhaps in this world, those who try to push the boundaries of spells end up drawing too much mana from themselves - perhaps this kills them or they simply some other foul magical effect happens. Magical institutions would even have warnings to those who would try their luck at such experimentations.
Spell Slots in Game
Spell slots are just the abstraction of the system for how magic works. Instead of giving you a huge expanse of powers, costs, distances, etc that having a more freeform system would allow, most RPGs are going to just codify how magic works to keep things simple and reduce any abuse or exploits that could arise from it.
Of course, knowing why something is the way it is doesn’t mean it isn’t a pain. In one of my campaigns, I used the variant spell system where players could instead use spell points to power their magic, with the prerequisite that they couldn’t cast their maximum level spell more than someone using the traditional spell slot could with the reason being, in-game, that their bodies simply couldn’t handle the intense strain of that magic just yet. This simply allowed them a more freeform structure with their magic and removes the weird rule that you only get four 1st-level spells no matter how many free slots you still have left.
Attacks
Combat can be quite a bothersome quandry. You are a veteran sword fighter and in the span of 6 seconds you can make a single attack with your weapon while you and your opponent just stare at each other for the remaining time. Except… that’s not really what is happening.
In the span of 6 seconds, there are feints, jabs, parries, and more! When you get to make that single attack it’s an opening that you can attempt to exploit! As you get more experience, you are better equipped to find new openings and exploit different tactics allowing you to overcome monsters with even more oomph. But that brings us to the other problem of attacking.
Why do you miss 5% of the time? You could be fighting a stationary, non-mimic wall and 5% of the time, you are going to just whiff on an attack against it. This 5% follows you your entire career as some sort of yips that keeps you from increasing your average to more respectable numbers.
Living with Attacking
For those who reside in our fiction, they aren’t held to the 6 second abstraction that we are. For them, time passes normally in their chaotic brawls and the fact that warriors can only find an opening every six, twelve, eighteen seconds wouldn’t be something they could rationalize. Openings and feints don’t come at preset times and every chance to land a blow is going to look different for them. As far as they are concerned, when two knights meet in a field to duel, it’s a wild explosion of swords, shields, and violence.
As for the high miss chance, how would they know what is a miss from a failed feint or parry? For those in the fight, there are plenty of blows that didn’t take or lunges that were dodged at the last minute. For them, this is a normal fight and if it’s harder for them to land a blow, they can either ascribe it to having an ‘off’ day or that their opponent is simply quite good and a worthy adversary.
Attacking in Game
While it might seem weird that there is always a 5% chance to miss on your only attack each round, when you realize that your character is raining down blows constantly, that one attack is you seeing an opening, like an overextended swipe or a sore foot that slows down the attacker. The fact you might miss consistently at 5% is just a fault that lies within our abstractions and the use of a d20 which can’t offer more minute percentages.
In my own games, I rarely prescribe a missed attack roll as the character lacking skill. Instead, it is the environment that causes them to miss or that their opponent’s armor is too thick or they are able to move out of the way at the last split second. Rarely should you ever claim that a character is missing because they are bad at fighting when it might literally be the name on their class.
Playing with Abstractions
The games we play all abstract their fiction, we then interact with those abstractions as the game’s rules. We only experience the fiction through those abstractions, making it so that our experience of the fiction and that world is solely through how the game chooses to abstract it. Does magic feel clunky and confining? That’s a problem with the abstraction that the game chooses to use. Then again, maybe you love that hit points can represent endurance, meat, and concentration - or you hate it and can’t understand how you can have 200 endurance and live in the same world as someone who can die from a cat hitting them four times during 24 seconds.
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