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<blockquote data-quote="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 6677154" data-attributes="member: 996">It's as abstract as the designers needed it to be to make a workable system.&nbsp; Abstraction may be qualitative (I'm honestly not sure, there may well be ways to measure it quantitatively that I'm unaware of), but it isn't a subjective quality:&nbsp; opinions about it may be highly subjective.&nbsp;Without changing or ignoring the rules, you can't really increase or decrease the level of abstraction.&nbsp; For instance, deciding that a 7 hp wound always represents an injury to the left arm would be reducing abstraction and changing the rules.&nbsp; Even deciding that 7hps of damage always represents a physical injury as a way of reducing abstraction (slightly) would be changing the rules (and in a way that would incongruous for, say, the psychic damage type).&nbsp;Correlated is different from concrete (the opposite of abstract), you're right that an abstraction is correlated with the the range of more concrete things it's standing in for.&nbsp; You're mistaken if you think that means it's optionally correlated with only one thing in that range instead of others, or that the ability to visualize one concrete set of events that validly correlate to the more abstract model (or to visualize one that doesn't) precludes other visualizations (or invalidates the model).</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Tony Vargas, post: 6677154, member: 996"] It's as abstract as the designers needed it to be to make a workable system. Abstraction may be qualitative (I'm honestly not sure, there may well be ways to measure it quantitatively that I'm unaware of), but it isn't a subjective quality: opinions about it may be highly subjective. Without changing or ignoring the rules, you can't really increase or decrease the level of abstraction. For instance, deciding that a 7 hp wound always represents an injury to the left arm would be reducing abstraction and changing the rules. Even deciding that 7hps of damage always represents a physical injury as a way of reducing abstraction (slightly) would be changing the rules (and in a way that would incongruous for, say, the psychic damage type). Correlated is different from concrete (the opposite of abstract), you're right that an abstraction is correlated with the the range of more concrete things it's standing in for. You're mistaken if you think that means it's optionally correlated with only one thing in that range instead of others, or that the ability to visualize one concrete set of events that validly correlate to the more abstract model (or to visualize one that doesn't) precludes other visualizations (or invalidates the model). [/QUOTE]

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