DCC across the 2 Axes of Abstraction

Murkdice wrote about what games are about based on what they have rules for and what they don't have rules for. It's an interesting ludological article, though I'm somewhat skeptical of the suggestion that anyone seriously claims 5e isn't about combat specifically because most of its rules are for combat, though. There were some cool four-sector charts in there so I wanted to do one for DCC, and in the process I had a few thoughts of my own about what the axes of abstraction actually tell us.

Go check out the original article. There's more charts!

It's a bit more cluttered than Murkdice's examples but the point of that post wasn't to deep dive into any one game, it was to demonstrate an overall point about what games tell us they are about.

When you illustrate the point like this, it becomes clear that the things the game is about are the things it expects to become complex. This is true across the entire coded-free spectrum. DCC goes to great lengths to tell you about all the things it wants you to do but doesn't have specific rules for, so it's really a perfect demonstration of this.

DCC is about unpredictable magic because it has a lot of rules and charts to follow (making it complex), and DCC is about Questing For It because it leaves the quest-and-reward process open and free (making it complex). You can entirely throw away the axis of codedness and find that the number of rules a game has about a particular thing actually has no correlation to what the game is about.

It turns out a game is actually about what you spend time focusing on while you play it.