I’ve played Dungeons & Dragons for years.  Even when I’ve been involved in long-running campaigns in other games I’ve always found myself coming back to D&D.  With the release of 4^th edition this past year my love affair with the game that introduced me to role-playing has grown that much stronger.  I love 4E.  Individually there are many components of the game that I think are fantastic, in fact some may even be revolutionary.  But the thing I like most, from a game design standpoint, has been the way the game’s designers’ embraced abstraction.

Abstraction has always been a part of role-playing games.  From assigning numeric values to represent personal attributes to comparing which type of weapon should cause more damage to a creature, we’ve always used abstractions as the mechanical framework for our games.  Over the years I’ve noticed that many games seem to struggle against abstraction.  Many games, and gamers for that matter, put massive amounts of effort into making a game more “realistic”.  In fact virtually every house rule I’ve ever bumped into has been argued from the standpoint that the purposed rule would be more realistic.  But no matter how we try no game system is ever going to be a simulation of reality, the real world is entirely too complex. 

So then, what is “Realistic”?  The reality that we live in is realistic because it adheres to the governing set of rules and principles that define our shared paradigm.  For example, if I drop a book it falls.  Anyone witnessing the book falling expects it to fall and therefore the experience can be said to be realistic.  If the book just floated there without explanation that would be considered unrealistic.  Likewise any RPG that adheres to its own rules in a coherent and internally consistent manner can be said to be realistic.  That being said the big questions for me are; what aspects of the game do I want rules for and what are those rules attempting to accomplish.

It is with this in mind that I think Wizards of the Coast has created something exceptional in Dungeons & Dragons by doing three things. 

They have focused on creating mechanics in places where they are really needed.

• Combat, damage, recovery, and dying
• Skill usage, success and failure
• Game structure and balance

They have focused on internal consistency.

• Use of Keywords
• Character advancement structure
• Mechanical assumptions (high rolls good, low rolls bad / always round down etc.)
• Self-contained Power rules and descriptions

And finally, they are not trying to simulate any reality outside the one they’ve created.

For example let’s talk about Hit Points.  There was a time when I thought the hit point was an archaic concept destined to go the way of the dinosaur.  In fact the entire RPG industry moved away from hit points and embraced things such as wound damage, stun damage, fatigue, attribute degradation and other methods to present a more “realistic” view of injury.   Once you have wound damage you need a system to track damage that might disable but not “wound” a character.  You also need a system to describe how wounds are healed.  If wounds can be healed, how quickly can they be healed?  Can they be healed in combat?  Does healing require a special skill or ability?  As you can see the more realistic a rule attempts to be the more complex it becomes.  Over the years some games have nearly collapsed under the weight of their own mechanics.

Back to 4E hit points.  They are very abstract.  The hit point is still a gauge of general health but it represents more than just physical damage, it also represents the effects of fatigue, luck, moral, motivation and more.  Instead of trying to simulate the specific results of an injury on a physical body the designers simply use the hit point as an abstract measure of combat durability; how long a creature can continue to be effective in combat.  When a creature is “hit” for 10 hit points what is that that?  It might be a minor cut, it could be a little wind knocked out of him, it might be his motivation waning in light of being on the receiving end of some smack-down, heck it might just represent the energy the character exerted in avoiding more severe damage.  At any rate it doesn’t really matter.  Since Wizards of the Coast decided not to define it (keeping it abstract) I, as the DM, can say what it is.  Or better yet my player can tell us what it is.  Besides my players and I have a better idea of what is appropriate for the specific situation than any designer ever will. 

And therein lies the true beauty of abstraction; it encourages descriptive narration and creative role-playing.  We, the players at my table, decide what something “looks” like and how it “feels”.  The game rules simply give us a framework for internal consistency (and thereby are providing realism).  The rules are not attempting to simulate the conditions and mechanics of the world you and I live in.  So long as we are internally consistent with the rules framework we can apply any sort of “window dressing” to the way the rules manifest in the characters’ reality. 

This brings me to one of my biggest pet peeves in role-playing games; mechanical rules for things that should fall into the category of window dressing.  I personally don’t want rule mechanics for character alignment, personality, quirks, goals, or motivations.  These are all things that need to manifest through the way the character is played, or rather role-played.  I don’t use the term window dressing with any sort of negative connotation in fact these are all incredibly important facets of the game (perhaps the most important).  But they are all areas that just can’t be over-simplified by assigning “rules” to them.  These are areas that need to holistically manifest through the dynamic interaction of players, dungeon master, campaign world, and plotline.  Admittedly that is easier said then done (sounds like the basis for a future article). 

Anyway back to abstraction.  The players in my group are slowly shifting their paradigm to embrace the abstract nature of the rules.  When they take a 5 minute rest for example, I hear things such as “I’m sitting down and catching my breath.” Or “I take a couple of minutes to bandage up the cut on my arm.”  Or even a little self-help; such as one time, after a nearly deadly encounter, when our warlord looked into a nearby mirror and said “OK Dayereth, pull yourself together man.  You can do this! You are good leader, your allies respect your abilities, and gosh darn it, people like you!” 

All of the above were simply characters spending a few healing surges between encounters. 

And that is why I love Dungeons & Dragons.