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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 8290069" data-attributes="member: 6790260">I think some stacked quotes happened in there, [USER=6696971]@Manbearcat[/USER] so I'm going to try to respond to the high-level stuff rather than response-in-detail as I normally do.For me, things like cuisine, music, and TTRPGs are "pure abstraction" because the rules/instructions only exist at a pretty high level. They may be very good at generating specific emotional/sensory experiences (e.g. a perfect authentic cadence feels like an ending, even to someone who doesn't know anything about classical music composition), but the rules are pretty much divorced from anything but incredibly basic practice (e.g. you still have to cook things, but I can make "stir fry" in an ordinary steel-and-copper skillet even though that's NOT how "true" stir fry "should" be made).A sport, on the other hand, is almost always tied to very specific, very physical tools--a particular ball shape/design, for example--and specific permission for how one may interact with those physical tools. E.g., only goalies can touch a "football" with their hands, being "off sides" is a bad thing, holding a basketball for too long is a bad thing, etc. It's significantly more difficult to blend baseball with basketball, where the tools are entirely distinct and the rules for interacting with them could hardly be more different, than it is to blend Italian cuisine with Chinese cuisine even though the "physical tools" (meats, vegetables, starches, sauces, etc.) are still extremely distinct.TTRPGs involve very few distinctly physical tools: some type of random-number generator (often dice, but digital tools are common these days, and other games use cards, spinners, or coins), pen and paper for recording information, sometimes movable pieces and maps to put them on (but not always, TotM is really big these days). As a result, much more like music than like a sport, the "rules" of the experience are mostly "abstract," in that they correspond either entirely or almost entirely to manipulations of the ideas that lead to the emotions/sensations, rather than manipulation of the physical practice itself.My example of an electro-swing cover is useful: "electro" refers to changing the instrumentation, which changes the timbre and tonal color of a piece (I grant this is pretty physical), but "swing" refers to stylistic flourishes and composition choices, which exist completely independently of what instrument you play it on, or even if you play the piece at all. I see the difference between "SP" and "storygame," between "simulationism" and "gamism," in a very, very similar light. Not perfectly identical, I grant, but the similarity is significant and practical. Much of what makes a game an "SP" experience lies in things that I would call pretty abstract, like the design of the random-encounter tables. These are things that can easily be combined with other styles--e.g., you could quite easily make "wandering monster" tables for 3e, 4e, or 5e, despite these often being seen as wildly divergent from "SP" play at the outset.</blockquote>

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