De-Abstraction rocks, yo - or "I Finally Get Cottonmouth"
I've been periodically playing on The Bad Doctor's Orc Spike Dungeon game, which uses her much-hallowed & ballyhooed Strong Kung Fu rules (as far as I know only I call them that), and prior to that I was playing Gold Horizon with Nathan's Fantasy Violence rules, and the thing both of them have in common is that they're pretty non-abstract rules. I think that's pretty sicknasty. Pretty gnarly, pretty tubular - if you'll pardon my French. It's inspired me to take a stab at it in my current game of Hearts Aglow and I feel like it's been going quite well.
I think the case for abstraction in games makes itself - you don't want to think about where you're wounded every single time, or what does 17 Strength mean, or all that nonsense. If you're just prowling around a dungeon with the boys and girlboys, one hand in the dorito, the other on the mountain dew, yelling at the top of your lungs at every roll of 20 because of course you're playing some variant of DUNGEONS & DRAGONS â„¢ Rules for Fantastic Medieval Wargames Campaigns Playable with Paper and Pencil and Miniature Figures - and believe me, I have passed many a pleasant afternoon bedusted with the cheeto and the Moun'n Dew (spiritually of course, I don't drink soda) - this is all fine and good. However, I think there is much sauce on removing those guard rails and trying to shave as close to the face as your razor can get. It reminded me that the essential vitality of these kinds of games for me is the imaginative aspect, and that is best expressed in as plain as the words can get.
It can also let you allow the characters to do Crazy Shit that genuinely feels cool rather than something the system is letting them do. For instance, my character in the Strong Kung Fu game, Santo la Muerte, has "elbows like hammers", "heels like cleavers", and is assumed to have an extremely high level of athleticism and physicality. When we arrived at a corridor where the ground was made up of mouths pointed to the air, waiting to bite a passer-by's tendons off, I simply said Santo crossed it by jumping, landing on his heels on the face of two men, then using the impulse to flip and land on his elbows, breaking the mouth of two more men, and so on until I left the corridor. And it was sick. Every single character was doing some nonsense like that.
Even when we broke out the dice for a situation that required a more random touch, it was still just limiting the extent that we could concretely declare our actions in the world. It was gamey in the sense that we were still strategising on top of game mechanics - "This guy has a spin move, so we have to make sure we wrap him twice so that he can't easily escape!" - but we were still using information and strategies that both we the players and we the characters knew about; we just weren't speaking in character the whole time because we didn't feel like it, but we theoretically could.
Even when we had that cool combat in Gold Horizon, which was much shorter than the kung fu fights and had much less elements, it felt raw and violent in a way that I never had a fight where wounds become "-3 HP but we'll pretend it was a blow" felt. I had experimented with this ages ago, with the Spectre King fight and the conclusion is always the same: saying "he's going to chop your neck" and having the answer "nah I raise my shield in time and parry the blow, though that leaves my arm pretty rattled" is really cool. It feels visceral and real, like there are no barriers between you and the characters.
It's what I think Jo was getting at with Cottonmouth, but it took me a while to actually understand that on a spiritual level, and now I don't think I really want to go back to "I rolled 19, I hit up to AC 2 for 4 damage. Cool the zombie is dead." That has its place, and can be very cool, but they're not the kinds of games I want to run or play.
I don't think I have nailed this perfectly in my own game yet, but having less abstractions and less of a focus on stats (I ditched them entirely in favour of plain, descriptive words) almost makes me feel like I did when I played my live-text games way back then, when we frequently ditched rules based on vibes and aura.
I see this as a natural evolution of my style of gaming. It's how I ran Delta Green, like I mentioned before it was how I was trying to veer Pendragon into, and it's a big part on both why I don't super care for the GLOG and other hyper-mechanic things like that, as well as why I think the Bad Doctor's posts (as well as others, such as Newt) make me so philosophical. This is the stuff that feels true to me.
Still, it is a fine line to walk on, because at some point you do need to bring up the dice - even if it's just "we both roll 1d6 and whoever gets the highest wins" - so figuring out what exactly is the minimum viable procedure for the kind of game I like to run is my current enterprise, and there is power in borrowing freely too; for instance, despite being a very abstracted system, I think HârnMaster has a lot of wisdom that can be adapted and digested, such as how it goes about classifying and thinking about wounds.
And sometimes you just don't know too. Last session I was thinking on what bonus I'd put on the 2d6 if two giant cicadas attacked my player characters - is +2 too low? Is +5 too high? If I pick the wrong number, things will be inconsistent in the future - but I think ultimately the stakes just aren't that high. If I put it too high, those are just particularly strong monsters; and if too low, those were just my mulligan and there's some reinforcements coming soon. Having de-abstracted wounds means things get deadly FAST. But I think that is, much like all things in these games, a matter of practice.