We present an approach over arbitrary fields to bound the degree of intersection of families of varieties in terms of how these concentrate on algebraic sets of smaller codimension. This provides in particular a substantial extension of the method of degree-reduction that enables it to deal efficiently with higher-dimensional problems and also with high-degree varieties. We obtain sharp bounds that are new even in the case of lines in $\mathbb{R}^n$ and show that besides doubly-ruled varieties, only a certain rare family of varieties can be relevant for the study of incidence questions.