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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Doug McCrae" data-source="post: 5256655" data-attributes="member: 21169">Continuing with the 'degrees of abstraction' thought upthread, what is the major restriction on the GM preventing him from moving between levels of abstraction? I'd say it's the rules. And perhaps also custom, or the expected form of gameplay.D&D has detailed rules for combat so it's expected that the GM follow them, playing out each individual 'to hit' and damage roll. Declaring a fight over and that the PCs have lost X amount of hit points and spells is Not The Done Thing. D&D has a pretty well set level of abstraction for combat. If you wanted a lot more, for a one-on-one duel against an arch nemesis, playing out each individual feint and parry then you're outta luck. If you want a lot less, say for a massive battle against wave after wave of chaff, then that's quite a tricky thing for the GM to adjudicate.It's expected that a dungeon is played out room-by-room, corridor-by-corridor, fight-by-fight. For a GM to handwave a whole section, just declare X PCs dead, X amount of treasure found, etc would be Very Not The Done Thing. It would be very close to Not Being D&D At All.That said, it's something I've experienced a few times. In a D&D oneoff, we went from level 6 to level 9, the GM simply declaring time had passed, so we could have the climactic final encounter against our old nemesis. Not having anything bad happen in the handwaved period seems key to making it acceptable to the players.When I was running a systemless* superhero oneoff, the PCs got involved in a huge battle towards the end of the session. Prior to this I had been describing each fight in a fairly detailed, blow-by-blow sort of way, but for this I just declared the PCs to have lost, after a huge struggle. But then one of the players asked if they could please win instead! So I said yeah, okay, but you're all really badly beaten up.<- Ratbastard GM!!!*This is a huge advantage of systemless, that it's so easy to move between levels of abstraction, even in areas which have traditionally been rules heavy ie fights. It was around 2000, and I was heavily influenced by Amber at the time.EDIT: Incidentally with the last fight I had a fair bit of difficulty explaining to one player that I was shifting the level of abstraction. I asked her what she was doing and she wanted to describe her actions at the blow-by-blow level. Understandable given that's how I had been handling things up to that point and that that is how rpgs usually are run. But not understandable at all given the scale of the encounter and how long it was obviously going to take if it were described in detail. At the time I struggled with my words rather trying to explain the concept using terms like 'summarise and 'fast forward' but I couldn't really get thru to her.</blockquote>

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