Against Abstraction, Or, Tags Are A Mind Virus
In which I argue for a radical diegesis against abstraction.
1 - Imagism
Ezra Pound was a fascist monster. He was also one of the greatest poets of the 20th century and had an incredible influence on poetics. These facts are unfortunately both true.
Nevertheless, the man had a handful of good ideas when it came to imagism, a poetic movement focused on direct treatment of "the thing" either subjectively or objectively.
To clarify what an "image" is: an image is a clear mental picture evoked by words. In its purest form, an image is nearly the thing itself. You read the words and you get the picture in your head.
The imagists (I recommend H.D. - she is my favourite poet) wanted to avoid abstraction by creating poems that show you the thing rather than tell you how to feel about it. They wanted to present the reader with the image as directly as possible with as little linguistic mess in the way as they could manage. Cutting away every unnecessary word, focusing wholly on the reality of the subject. Imagist poems are lean, complex, and burn their images into your mind. They want to make you see what they're talking about rather than suggest things about them.
The results are, in my opinion, stunning. Beautifully crafted works that elevate the image from its auxiliary role in previous poetic frameworks to the nexus of the poem itself.
Here's the famous one, In a Station of the Metro:
The apparition of these faces in the crowd: Petals on a wet, black bough.
I would ask that you sit with this poem for a while. Read it over.
You can picture petals on a wet, black bough. In my head, they're white and pink. This is the image.
Notice how Pound doesn't compare the faces to petals; he uses a colon and line break to connect the two phrases so you know the second is describing the first. The faces are not "like" petals on a wet, black bough. They are not even "are" petals. The apparition of these faces in the crowd: Petals on a wet, black bough.
It's almost clinical. Yet it's soft, beautiful, maybe even true. Language stripped to bare wood. I hope you can see the petals, and in seeing them, see the faces.
Note that the act of peeling away unnecessary words is not the reason that this works, but rather a tool to achieve the desired effect. It's not enough to cut down on your word count. You must also center the thing you're talking about - slice away abstraction, get to the marrow.
There is no (or almost no) level of abstraction in this poem. The poem consists of two things placed next to one another and your brain, because you're very smart and Ezra Pound was also very smart, knows to associate them. You do not need to be told that the faces are similar to petals. Faces: petals. Pound has found a way to remove the sinew words that would normally bind "faces" to "petals."
We can apply this same idea to TTRPGs. The treatment of the thing itself should be paramount.
2 - What are you even talking about?
Tags - gear tags, monster tags, ability tags - are an unneeded level of abstraction and we can do away with them.
I'm talking about stuff like:
Sword (one-handed, unbreakable, holy) Revolver (one-handed, loud, Near Enough) Banshee (incorporeal)
Tags do two things: one, they point to diegetic facts. Two, they point to external rules.
Diegetic facts - This sword is one-handed. This gun is loud. This banshee is intangible. For the most part, we can all agree on what this means at the table, and our characters can experience the reality of The Thing as referenced by the tags. Your warrior can hold the sword and find it most comfortable to use with a single handed grip; your wizard can pull the trigger on the mystic glock and draw the attention of the beasts pursuing the party as the bang echoes through the tomb's dismal corridors; only the cleric's silver mace seems to harm the banshee, as all other attacks pass like wind through fog. These are all facts about the world. I am advocating for the removal of these facts as Tags, and that we should instead convey diegetic reality by dealing directly with the Thing itself.
Tags are half measures. They remind us that something is ornate or glitchy or cursed or umbral by pointing to those facts. Instead of reminding, we can use those words to make the thing what it is. An ornate sword in the stone. A glitchy drone. A cursed bronze breastplate. A dagger made of umbral iron, passing through all things but flesh.
We can go further, of course. The blade's golden filigree catches the light, untarnished after all these centuries. The drone, assembled by master dwarfs in the sacred forges of Zerek-Uth, struggles to differentiate friend from foe through its cracked ruby optics. The breastplate, blackened by wyrmfire, draws out the ferocity of its wearer, turning their mind to violence and bloodshed. The dagger feels like nothing in your hand, as if it were the mere suggestion of a knife rather than the knife itself. As it dips through your glove, you feel the edge, cold and heavy, press against your skin.
This is, at its core, a call for better prose and fewer shortcuts.
These types of tags are the least offensive and the most easily remedied. Just remove the brackets, get rid of the italics, and use the descriptor tag as the adjective it was always meant to be. A sword (one-handed, holy) becomes a one-handed holy sword, or a broadsword blessed by the saints. These are in-universe facts about the sword, facts with weight and meaning not just to us as players, but to our characters. Give me the thing itself.
External rules - These are usually range tags, or tags that reference specific mechanical actions. Another term could be nondiegetic rules (the stuff with all the dice and numbers, basically). A gun might be Near Enough and Near Enough means that it's useful up to the length of a hallway. This isn't needed.
We can assume our reader understands the basic facts about firearms. We can add clarification in the item description if it's truly warranted for clarity, but it probably isn't. A pistol is not a sniper rifle and can't shoot as far as one; we've all seen a movie before.
If you're playing with people who need to be told they can't shoot a CEO from half a kilometer away with a revolver, don't play with them anymore. They probably don't exist, and if they do, they aren't allowing themselves to experience the diegesis, and are likely interested in aspects of games I simply don't care about. This is a strawman. Whatever.
A crossbow (long range, reload) requires one to look to the rules about reloading to define what it can and can't do in the game world. This tag not only points to mechanics, but also influences the diegesis in a way that has negative consequences for the believability of a given scene. While reload might be a convenient shorthand for an external, nondiegetic rule, that rule has diegetic consequences. It's a level of abstraction we can do away with.
The easiest solution is to just present the external rule without the tag. Crossbows take 1 round to reload (or 10 seconds, whatever). This isn't great design and kind of sucks but that's why we iterate.
If we care about the time it takes to reload a crossbow, we can figure out a rule for it. Games with guns usually care about reloading enough to have rules for it and few, in my opinion, do anything interesting with it (I promise I'll write a post about bullets at some point).
We might not care. Diegesis is not the same thing as simulation.
Ambiguity and negotiation at the table is fruitful. We are constantly re-negotiating the reality of the game world already (that's what discussion and narrative is, after all). By relying on descriptions rather than prescriptive tags, we encourage a more natural collective narrative, rather than one that relies on the external mechanics of a drone being glitchy to define what a glitchy drone can and can't do.
And you might rightly say, how is tagging something different than describing it? The externality of tags is the problem. They force themselves onto the diegesis rather than arising from within it, a way for designers to narrow the field of possibility by defining what specific adjectives mean within a hypothetical game world before it ever reaches the table.
3 - Okay but why do I care?
Diegesis is the creative force from which play emerges.
Diegetic elements of a story are those elements experienced by characters within that story rather than the elements external to it. A classic example is radios in movies: when a song is playing in the scene and everyone can hear it, that's diegetic. When a song (or soundtrack) is added over top of (or maybe underneath of) a scene, it's nondiegetic. The characters don't know it's there and can't react to it.
A sword in the stone is diegetic, as is the legend that its bearer shall be king. The sword's weight is diegetic, and so is the colour and composition of the stone.
The sword giving +2 damage vs undead is not diegetic. No one in the game world knows what +2 damage means. If the sword is said to be effective at slaying the servants of the vile Necromancer, that's diegetic.
You can have your sword deal +2 damage vs undead. That's not what I'm saying. This is not a tag. It's a mechanic. It's kind of boring, and I wouldn't use it, but we're playing games with rules, and sometimes rules have numbers with no exact correlation to the diegesis.
Games are shared stories. You sit down at the table and everyone agrees that for the next four hours, you are Tharg, Son of Crandal and not an unemployed guy. Tharg has narrative weight; he exists within the dungeon and the fact that we all agree that this is true alters the collective understanding of the narrative (on a base level: Tharg exists in the same fictional space as the other party members and therefore his presence matters).
If we cannot agree on the diegetic facts, we discuss until we reach a consensus, often by exploring the fictional world in character and discovering what is and isn't true, or by asking questions and creating answers. We are playing to find out in the most literal sense. You do not need tags to do this.
Tharg is diegetic; he exists within the scene. You can say many things about him that are also diegetic: Tharg is the son of Crandal. Tharg is a dwarf. Tharg carries a polearm and uses it to poke skeletons from behind his allies.
You can also say many things about him that are not diegetic: Tharg is level 3. He has a +4 attack bonus.
There are some things about him that are hyperdiegetic - rules that govern the world itself, tantamount to gravity, that have been imposed as a result of play: as a dwarf, Tharg cannot use shields. In a previous session, another player with a ring of three wishes wished that the dwarfs they were fighting didn't have shields. This affected every dwarf in the world.
Tharg's player chooses to roleplay this as a deep cultural disgust with shields.
A hypodiegetic rule (as defined by Sam Sorensen) is a rule that "exists within the imaginary world, one created and followed by diegetic people or organizations. A rule not of the world, but a rule in the world." A knight owes fealty to his lord, that kind of rule.
You could argue that the shield thing is hypodiegetic, but you'd be wrong. It's not a law, it's a fact - dwarfs can't hold shields anymore. If it were a hypodiegetic law, Tharg would merely need to pick up a shield and reveal that this law, like every other, is held together by ideology. But he can't. If I were to say he does it anyway, that would break our diegesis - I wouldn't be playing by the rules we all agreed to play by. It'd be kind of a dick move.
A knight, however, could betray his lord. It would have consequences, but they would be diegetic consequences. The consequence of Tharg using a shield is that the game becomes less believable because our rules no longer matter. Breaking a tag doesn't really have clear diegetic consequences, but tags still ask to be treated as part of the diegesis because they describe diegetic qualities of the thing they're attached to. This is, as I've said numerous times, an unnecessary level of abstraction that gets in the way of the diegesis.
All these diegetic and nondiegetic elements come together to create the diegesis, the believable and tangible truth of the game world.
Give me the thing itself. Give me Tharg, a dwarf, and all the facts that come along with it. I don't need to know that he has the tags Short, Resilient, Gnomehater, Clever, just like I don't need tags to describe what an item can and can't do. Give me the blade that cannot be broken by mortal hands, not a sword (unbreakable).
Cast out your tags.