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The Devil is in the Details: On Abstraction & Design
🕑 Added 2024-07-29 18:29:53 +0000 UTCHey 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
Comments
Murilo Trigo
The Banana Slam game is very smart design
Zaire Selden
This is amazing thanks Willy.
Eran Arbel
That's a programming paradigm I'm also using in my games: If an ability is repeating, just create a separate component and reference it.
Roman Penna
This was a fun read. Thanks for the post on abstraction Willy. :)
David Lewis
banger post (bananager?), 10/10, no notes. Genuinely very insightful and appreciated the breakdown of what abstraction is, what it means to you, how you apply it through designing, and the end user experience
Graeme Carey
Bars
Gustavo
Banana Slamma!
Otto
Have you seen those Mario Party dice sets?!
nugetthechicen
Really cool post, I feel like I knew a lot of this in concept, but seeing it laid out like this feels like I went from looking at a 240p image in my head to a 4K image. Like I did a lot of this in my own homebrew designs, but now I know why some of them got the message across and some didn’t, and how to get the message across more frequently in the future. Dope.
Alex
Banana Slamma!
Josh Garfinkel
delightful read! love the left turn donkey kong dice surprise
Evermore
Yes is loading, thanks!!
MCDM Productions
Ok should be fixed.
MCDM Productions
Are you on the website or the mobile app?
MCDM Productions
I'll fix it! Gimme a min.
Irving Flanagan
One of the best things to come out of this game so far has been the MCDM design team clearly explaining their approach to translating design goals into useful rules. It's the same thing that makes Matt's videos so great. Thanks everyone.
Dalen W. Brauner
"Few turn tail at the sight of the black-crowned Central American squirrel monkey... allow me to teach you the error of their ways."
Chris Comstock
Wow, I was NOT expecting a David Wise reference when I opened this post!
T. Ashley Jenkins
Donkey Kong Dice alone was worth the price of admission
Schoopdoop McGoop
Banana Slamma!
Evermore
I have the same issue :(
Annirodon
I have not read the post, yet. But I can't seem to view the images: "Your client does not have permission to get URL" Edit: I have now read the post and seen the images :)
