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Fun and physics can seem at odds in fiction at times. Sometimes physics gets injected into media that traditionally have played pretty fast and loose with it. I am thinking specifically of the infamous Gwen Stacy incident in Spider-Man, where Gwen is pitched from the top of the George Washington Bridge by the Green Goblin. Spider-Man uses his web shooters to latch on to her leg just before she falls into the Hudson River (or was it the East River?). All is right in the world, right?

Gerry Conway, the writer of the title, had different ideas.

Mr. Conway injected real-world physics into the story, and the sudden deceleration that Gwen suffers snaps her neck and kills her.

Editor's Note: It is said that the Goblin himself did the neck snap, and fans and creators debate it to this day. Please don't email me!

It is a brutal reminder that actions have consequences, even in comics. It is an iconic work that probably would ruin Friday night's game 🙂

Welcome to the inaugural blog post for the Abraxas tabletop role-playing game (TTRPG). Thanks for stopping by. I'll be your nerdy guide through this series exploring TTRPG design issues like balance and, well, fun. My name is Phil, and I am the lead designer on the Abraxas project. I am a lifelong student of gaming who picked up the hobby in the late 80s. I have played and run all sorts of games in my life and love to tinker with game mechanics and story.

Gifts From the Ancients

Abraxas didn't get built in a vacuum. It has roots — deep roots — that go back to the dawn of the hobby. It's a synthesis of two main branches of gaming royalty, Hero and OpenD6 — today, we will look at the OpenD6 Open Game Content in this work. OpenD6 uses pools of six-sided dice in its core resolution system; the more dice you have, the easier the task you are trying to accomplish.

Why Abraxas is built on the work of the designers before me is simple: they were brilliant and generous. They gave us OpenD6 and the Open Game License (OGL) version of the d6 game engine. In this article, I wanted to pick up on a fun mechanic that directly interacts with the physics of the Abraxas game engine: Scale. Scale is a relational term in Abraxas that significantly affects gameplay.

Setting The Stage

We have all been there: we're playing a game, and someone has managed to get an obscene Strength score. They have picked up a car (or wagon, or speeder, etc.) and have heaved it across the void, directly onto the face of your precisely tuned boss encounter. The player looks at you and says:

"That car is huge and weighs a ton. How many dice do I get as bonus damage?"

They want the object's weight and size to directly affect the attack's damage. And they're right. It should. Now what?

In Abraxas, this is where the Scale mechanic says "hi." A Scale modifier assigns an integer modifier representing the relative size of an object. Scale is relative to 0, which is the same Scale as a human being. A car is about a +6 Scale modifier, while a microchip is about −21. The Scale chart goes all the way up to a small moon:

Reference Object	Scale
Small moon	+96
Aircraft carrier, star freighter	+50
Space yacht, jumbo jet	+46
Eight-story building, castle	+24
Longship, four-story building	+20
One-story building, two-story house	+14
Tank, city bus, elephant	+10
Large carriage, average car	+6
Motorcycle, horse	+3
Average human	0
Small child, guard dog	−3
Briefcase, house cat, bread box	−6
Laser pistol, rat, fashion doll	−9
Palm computer, action figure, mouse	−12
Coin, cred-key, army figure	−15
Ant, computer chip	−21

On Flung Cars

Back to the thrown car that struck your poor boss. The Scale modifier does +6 damage: the player rolls their Strength dice and adds a flat +6 to the total. However, throwing a large, heavy, non-aerodynamic object is difficult and adds +6 to the target's Evasion. Also, large objects are by their nature an Area of Effect (AoE) at the impact site — a car-shaped AoE, in this case. In game terms, this means they are attacking an area rather than a specific target, and the Target Number to do so is base 3, modified by the thrown object's Scale modifier — 9 in this case.

At the table, the ruling breaks down like this:

The ruling	Rule invoked	Result
Bonus damage	Car's Scale added to the damage total	+6
Harder to land	The object's bulk adds to the target's Evasion	+6 Evasion
It's an area hit	Car-shaped AoE; TN is base 3 + Scale	TN 9

Abraxas Tactician Corner: How does the mighty Brick handle the elusive Speedster or Martial Artist archetypes? Those archetypes rely almost exclusively on never being struck. The answer is you take away their greatest strength by attacking where they're standing — not them directly — with an AoE. Car-shaped AoEs thrown at a Speedster force them to dive for cover, putting them at a disadvantage.

What this teaches us is to reward players without breaking the game. The player got exactly what they wanted: a numerical and tactical advantage, and a genuinely cool visual. Take a victory lap around the room 🏆

The GM wins in this scenario, too, because the game didn't break. It bent a little, but it didn't implode and degenerate into an exercise in power gaming. Perhaps more importantly, no house rules were invented in the process of this ruling — it's literally already codified in the rules.

Closing Thoughts

Scale is an elegant mechanism that models interactions between objects of different sizes. It is a masterclass in game design, crafted by talented game designers. It expresses these interactions very nicely. Real-world physics are punishing, and remind us of just how fragile we are as human beings. That was one of the hard-won lessons Spider-Man learned that day — and so did a generation (or three) of nerds.

A narrative engine, like Abraxas, is built around physics, yes. There were conscious choices made, though, for the purpose of game balance. The last thing GMs want is for the game to turn into the "who throws the biggest thing first" contest. That's not fun or healthy for this game. Other games love that crunch and incorporate more realistic physics and rules for things like bleeding and velocity. When constructing Abraxas, we tried to thread the needle between cinematic physics and realism.

What do you think? Would you prefer to play in a world where Gwen lived at the end of the story, or do you like the current outcome? Where is the physics sweet spot in your gaming preferences?