The Devil is in the Details: On Abstraction & Design (Patreon)

Hey hey it’s Willy! I’m gonna set a couple of axioms for this post so everyone needs to get really cool for a hot second.

Design is the communication of ideas between two parties.

Design is evaluated on:

• The speed in which the ideas communicated by the first party reach the second party

• The clarity of the ideas that are received by the second party in respect to their particular needs

Designs involving two distinct parties do not exist in a vacuum:

• There will always be some amount of clarity lost on ideas being communicated between parties within a design.

• Parties external to a design may observe the design and misattribute themselves as its intended second party.

I believe James has talked about wanting to design beasts in a way that we have a couple of stat blocks ready to go, but we don’t need to make a stat block for every single animal. I can safely say that we won’t have a specific stat block for the black-crowned Central American squirrel monkey. Nonon, he wants to abstract out a series of traits that a director can add to a stat block so that the other players are given the idea that they’ve come across the black-crowned Central American squirrel monkey.

Flee, mortals!

The animal kingdom has many identical traits shared by animals that might work differently under the hood but still achieve the same goals. When you think of a chameleon, you might imagine it changing its skin colors for camouflage. When you think of an octopus, you might imagine it changing its skin colors for camouflage. Bees and scorpions both sting, and bats and birds both fly.

You can see what that means in the context of a game. If we abstract the ideas of camouflage, stinging, and flight into their own set of rules, then they can be used to create hundreds of animals in one go.

I don’t want to linger on the beasts since I’m sure James will wanna talk about them when they’re up and running, so I’m going to switch to using an identical system to the beast idea we’re using in the game to keep talking about abstraction. Check out the [latest iteration of the] Devil player option I got to do up!

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Devil Benefits

Devils gain the following benefits.

Silver Tongue

You can twist how your words are perceived to get a better read on people. You have an edge on discovering an NPC’s motivations and pitfalls during negotiations.

Fiendish Features

You have 3 fiend points. When you create this character, take a number of features from the list below that add up to your fiend point total.

Glowing Eyes (1 Fiend Point)

Your eyes are a solid, vibrant color that flare when you are incited. When you take damage, you can use a triggered action to curse the creature or object that dared to do you harm. The source of the damage takes 1d10 psychic damage.

Hellsight (1 Point)

Your eyes let you see through the dark, fog, and other types of concealment. You don’t take a bane on attacks against concealed, unhidden creatures.

Horns (1 Fiend Point)

Your cherished crown is a hardened representation of your force of will, granting you an edge on Presence resistance rolls.

Barbed Tail (1 Fiend Points)

Your pointy tail allows you to punctuate your attacks. You deal an extra 1 damage with all melee attacks.

Beast Legs (2 Fiend Points)

Your powerful set of legs improves your speed by 1.

Prehensile Tail (2 Fiend Points)

Your prehensile tail allows you to stay armed on all sides. You can’t be flanked.

Exposed Skeleton (2 Fiend Points)

Your bones are visible and hardened above your skin, granting you Weapon damage immunity 2.

Wings (2 Fiend Points)

Your wings are powerful enough to bring you airborne. As a maneuver, you can switch between walking and flying when you are touching the ground or vice versa when you are within 1 square of the ground. While flying, your FMR drops to 0 and you have damage weakness 5. You can stay aloft for a number of rounds equal to your Might (minimum of 1) before you fall prone.

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If you must know, the name of the work doc this is in is titled The Build-A-Belial Workshop.

Right, so you see here, a devil can be made up of any assortment of little physical traits without losing its identity as a devil. You don’t need every trait in the fiendish features list to be recognized as a devil unless you intend on ruining your Director’s day.

From a full set of facts and truths about a devil, you can abstract the idea of your devil with only 2-3 details that allow everyone at your table to quickly recognize that they are, in fact, a devil. Then, as if by magic, your table will be able to extrapolate the rest.

This is from a comic talking about universality of ideas, which works for us in our abstraction discussion

"Abstracting is a mechanism by which an infinite variety of experiences can be mapped on short noises (words)," says Anatol Rapoport. It’s one of the most powerful tools that a designer has in their tool kit, and it’s kind of the backbone of the cinematic pillar of our game. Abstraction allows us to use rules, such as difficult terrain, that map to more complex and harrowing ideas in a variety of different contexts, such as a craggy earth, a sticky floor, or a forceful current of water underfoot.

Going back to the devil. A few fiendish features serve as an abstraction of a devil, but how do we abstract a fiendish feature? As game designers in particular, we have the power to tie ideas directly to tangible game elements to more easily communicate what something is to you. You don’t need a lot of details to get an idea across the table quickly and clearly, and using game rules cuts down the amount of detail you need even further.

The beast legs feature is an easy example let's use that one:

Beast Legs (2 Fiend Points): Your powerful set of legs improves your speed by 1.

We’re using the title of the feature (beast legs), since imposing beasts immediately call up the idea of fast and strong threats. Then, half a sentence of description (powerful set) to reinforce the title, and then a game rule (speed) to provide a consequential example of what these legs actually do.

All this to evoke an idea about devil legs that a good portion of the audience (you) are already familiar with, or at least within the ballpark!

Hell yeah!

Could we have done something like Speed +1 (2 Points)? The game will probably still function, but the player’s engagement will waver or shift away from actually playing it. “Why does this character option receive speed?” “No c’mon Sammy please roll the dice we’re in the middle of combat right now.” You may think Sammy is doing this on purpose because you can immediately think of an idea that maps to the bonus, but a lot of people need the help on little stuff like this; these games already require so much use of imagination plllleeeeease cut Sammy a little slack.

I hope this all got the idea across, since now I’m going to switch gears to something else I’ve worked on that’s super abstracted.

Do you know this man?

Hell yeah! 

Donkey Kong is known for starring in many different types of games, but the platforming games are where some of his most iconic mannerisms and kongisms stem from. Let me list a couple of those isms:

• Powerful, destructive ape

• Big fists

• Noisy levels and loud celebration

• Barreling forward at breakneck speeds

• Suddenly stumbling upon bonus rooms

• Collecting unfathomable amounts of bananas

• David Wise’s music

With that list, I was able to make a dice racing game that evokes Donkey Kong! Nothing about the specific game rules and player mechanisms have featured in any Donkey Kong game, but when the music is playing and you start rolling dice with multiple people, my abstraction of DK starts to work for a pretty sizable audience. Give it a shot!

Make sure you play this track in particular to time your game: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=riCDOHaaF90