Conceptual Distance

(Part 1)

The vast majority of us are not medieval scholars. And by “us” I mean people who play RPGs, many of which are set in a quasi-medieval world but with, you know, magic and dragons and things. What this means is, your D&D game or your Pathfinder game do not greatly resemble an accurate depiction of the Middle Ages.

Thank goodness.

I don’t say that because the Middle Ages sucked (although let’s be honest here—the Middle Ages sucked). I say it because if you ran a particularly accurate game it would be unapproachable, and thus unplayable, by most people; certainly by any casual player. Because most people don’t have a working knowledge of what it would be like to live in that time and those locations,  they wouldn’t know how to deal with the events and social systems that would naturally occur the very first session, let alone during an ongoing campaign.

For our purposes here, I’m going to refer to this idea—how far apart the players are from their characters in knowledge/experience/understanding—as conceptual distance. If players don’t know what their characters are supposed to do, don’t understand the world the game is set in, or are constantly butting into barriers between what they want to do and what the game says they should do, there’s a lot of conceptual distance. Conceptual distance makes every aspect of a game’s design more challenging.

If we look back at the three motivations of roleplayers I wrote about last time, a large conceptual distance puts all three types farther from where they want to be. It’s harder to strive for accomplishment if you don’t understand the parameters of what you can and cannot do. It’s hard to tell a story in a setting you don’t comprehend involving characters and events very different from what you’re used to. And it’s harder to relate mechanics to a concept that requires more effort to grasp.

When I started working on Numenera, a science fantasy game focused on the extremely weird repercussions of the incredible technologies of prior civilizations, I needed to make the basis for the culture the PCs come from to be, well, un-weird. Because the weird needs to play up against something to have its real impact and because I was worried about the conceptual distance involved. I chose the concept of a quasi-medieval setting for this. Because even if you somehow found yourself sitting at a table to play Numenera and you’d never played D&D, you still have likely seen the Lord of the Rings films, played Skyrim, or even simply read a fairy tale or two. The concept of “quasi-medieval” is pretty firmly established in our culture. Very few of us might be able to explain the intricacies of feudalism, or the complex role of the Church in European medieval politics, but we have a pretty good idea of the sort of house Jack lived in before he traded his cow for some magic beans. We know Aragorn didn’t pull out an M-16 to fight orcs, but rather a sword. In the quasi-medieval world, people ride horses. Kings live in castles. No one has a smartphone. Everyone speaks with an English accent for some reason. We all get it, without anyone having to explain these things.

As a game designer, then, I would say there’s not a lot of conceptual distance between the player and the character. The only setting that would likely have less conceptual distance would be modern-day Earth.

Allow me, however, a brief digression on that topic. Traditional fantasy settings might even have a leg up on modern-day ones in shortening conceptual distance. And that’s for one very big reason:

Magic.

Because our modern reality has lots of rules: physics, biology, geography, and so on. But magic hand-waves its way past such things. Rivers flow into the sea, not out from the sea—unless there’s magic involved. You can only build a structure so high—unless there’s magic involved. Magic, in this way, is the great leveler at the game table regarding conceptual understanding. Because if the GM states the giant is 50 feet tall, it doesn’t matter if one player knows it’s impossible due to the cube-square law and another doesn’t, because… magic. Magic can be used to explain away whatever you don’t want to deal with.

Actually, you know, I called that a digression from the topic at hand, but is it? Doesn’t some kind of hand-waving make conceptualizing something easier? On the Simpsons, when Homer was telling Bart the story of “Hercules and the lion”, Hercules (not Androcles) pulled a thorn from the lion’s paw and the lion was so happy he gave Hercules “a big thing of riches.” When Bart asks how a lion got rich, Homer replies, “It was the olden days,” and that reply satisfies Bart.

So yeah. Hand-waving can do wonders.

The point of conceptual distance is how far do I (the player) have to go to understand the concepts surrounding my character and the world they live in. And it’s easier to understand “magic” than it is to understand actual physics, actual politics, actual… anything.

Anyway—back to designing games with conceptual distance in mind, regardless of magic. For Numenera, I thought, the conceptual distance would be even more diminished than in a “typical” quasi-medieval setting (D&D, Game of Thrones, etc.), because thanks to an understanding of the science of the prior worlds, even though the common folk cut their hay with a scythe and live in thatched roof houses, they could conceivably know germs cause disease and spontaneous generation isn’t actually a thing. In other words, the game has no pretense to make players pretend to think differently than they do about basic things like how to make gunpowder or the viability of healing illness with leeches. It’s like quasi-medieval on “easy mode,” at least as far as conceptualizing goes.

Conceptual distance is one of the reasons why science fiction games are harder to play than fantasy ones. In any game, if the GM looks at the players and says, “Okay, what do you do?” The players need to have some concept of how the fictional world works or at least their place in the world before they can answer. Standard medieval fantasy offers easy answers because it’s not very complex. You do what they would do in the Lord of the Rings. Or what you’d do in the modern day but without a car or cell phone. (I’m exaggerating, obviously, but when we talk about conceptualizing, we have to use very broad strokes.) 

Futuristic science fiction is a little harder. Players often feel—particularly at first—at a loss for what they’re supposed to do because it seems like it needs to be more advanced or more technical than the life they’re used to. (It’s easier to imagine things being simpler than things being more complex.) Do I have something like a smartphone or something embedded in my brain? Is there some kind of monitoring system allowing the authorities to watch our every move? Thankfully, there are shorthand references we can use for sci-fi settings the same way  we use fairy tales and Tolkien  fantasy. The GM can say, “it’s kinda like Blade Runner.” Or, “it’s like Star Trek.” That gives people something to go on, at least to start. It narrows the conceptual distance they will feel.

A game designer probably can’t get away with those kinds of references but they can more or less communicate the feel of the setting in design. It behooves the designer to make it very clear, right away, who the player characters are and what they do. (Think of it this way, in D&D, characters are adventurers, and they go into dungeons to fight monsters and get treasure. Yes, I’m oversimplifying, but the basics are exactly what we’re going for here—they will ground the players in the game.) This is going to come through in every aspect of the game. The examples the designer gives when explaining the rules, the kinds of character options are available, and even the rules themselves need to reflect these attempts at shortening the conceptual distance. They all need to inform the players (and by players, I’m also including the GM) of who the characters are, and what they do.

But maybe a game designer wants to do something really weird. Maybe the game is set on an alien planet without humans or anything like human society, and every character species has a unique form of communication, societal interactions, reproduction, and very different motivations. (Okay, yes, as a teen I tried very hard to get my group to play Skyrealms of Jorune, but I failed. . . because of conceptual distance.) There’s going to be a lot of conceptual distance between the players and their characters,  making it a hard sell.

That doesn’t mean game designers shouldn’t ever try to push the envelope. Just because things are hard doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do them. But we have to be aware of what we’re asking of the players. We have to find something a player can grasp onto. For example, in the game I’m currently tinkering with, the characters are from very far in the future, and have been exploring alternate dimensions in a craft meant for plying the myriad universes. That’s going to be weird for a lot of players. But the game is set in modern-day Earth, where our dimensional explorers from the future have ended up. And what’s more, as they do what they need to do, they also need to try to fit in. And while we already established that trying to operate in a society a thousand years in your past would be a conceptual challenge—modern people trying to understand an accurate medieval setting—here the “past” is the world the players—not the characters— live in. So there’s the “handle” that players can grab onto for some initial understanding. Their characters might have weird tech and special powers, but the world they operate within is extremely familiar (at least at first).

There’s a lot more to the game than that, I’m only mentioning the portions that apply to the topic at hand to show that thinking about conceptual distance. It’s really about how far the players are going to have to jump to get to where I want them to be to play this game and considering all the different ways I can offer them help to make that distance easier to cross.

For example, another way that I’ve planned to make the whole thing easier for the players is that their characters for the most part are the ne’er-do-wells of their society, so they’re already strangers in their homeworld to a degree. The players’ lack of experience or an understanding of the society their characters originate from is mirrored in the characters’ outsider natures.

These mavericks and misfits are called upon precisely for their less than honorable skills and backgrounds to confront the problems at hand in this game. But this highlights a different but equally significant issue with conceptual distance: when the characters have to do things their players have no skills or knowledge of. We’ll talk about it in Part 2.