What is a "Narrative Mechanic"?

[AbdulAlhazred]

Well, strictly speaking I am saying that it is open to imagine mechanics diegetically, and I can recollect cases where we have done so at the table. Mostly, we've done so for humour, but we've also designed takes on specific mechanics like dice and inspiration that have made them diegetic. If anyone feels able to offer a robust definition that excludes my corner cases, I will gladly embrace it, but I don't think "game mechanics aren't allowed to be diegetic" works!

My definition states what diegetic looks like when applied to roleplaying games rather than movies or books. It incorporates the fairly obvious point that unlike a movie or book, participants (via the ludic-duality) get a say over what their characters know. That in itself is useful. For example, BitD flashbacks have the glitch that a cost incurred in the past such as the ongoing consequences of trauma can't reasonably be retconned to already-played scenes that fell chronologically between that past moment and now. At least, not without replaying them, which is something I have never seen anyone talking about or doing. That continuity glitch is not explained in world, it's solved through participants simply acting as if their characters don't know it.

We're still discovering ways to adequately describe games, so there is value in getting our terms right even when we don't immediately see what that value will be. In this case I can certainly see glimmers of value right now, let alone what might be discovered in future.

As I pointed out earlier, all this ends up boiling down to is another term for verisimilitude, of perhaps only certain species. That is, you or I or others here might decide that we feel a certain sequence of game processes, fiction, etc. can produce a reasonable transcript which includes fictional causal chains which we are willing to accept and suspend our disbelief about. It is no more, or less, than that! If you like the way hit points mapped to the character's idea of his own health and was concordant with a set of decisions the character (the player while RPing) made that can be plausibly explicated by only the character's idea, then you call it 'diegetic'. Its just a form of verisimilitude, you accept that you can believe that hit points is telling the player basically what the character should be feeling/thinking right now.

 

[Micah Sweet]

As I pointed out earlier, all this ends up boiling down to is another term for verisimilitude, of perhaps only certain species. That is, you or I or others here might decide that we feel a certain sequence of game processes, fiction, etc. can produce a reasonable transcript which includes fictional causal chains which we are willing to accept and suspend our disbelief about. It is no more, or less, than that! If you like the way hit points mapped to the character's idea of his own health and was concordant with a set of decisions the character (the player while RPing) made that can be plausibly explicated by only the character's idea, then you call it 'diegetic'. Its just a form of verisimilitude, you accept that you can believe that hit points is telling the player basically what the character should be feeling/thinking right now.

So your answer is, "feel differently"?

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

That draws attention to what sorts of things one might picture characters know about a saving throw (depending on game text it subsists in)

Their odds, much as you outlined above
What sorts of things influence those odds
That their odds change, depending on what they're evading or resisting
That they experience an evasion or resistance interaction with some things, but not others
That they can learn things that persistently improve their odds
That others can learn things that persistently worsen their odds
If the mechanic is assumed to play out with fidelity in world, then the scientifically-minded in that world could derive the mechanic. They might measure for example that the probabilities are stepped, rather than continuous, say by casting spells requiring saving throws at test subjects.
They might perhaps realise that there is a simple theory that is statistically predictive, despite the myriad of details it apparently elides.
That if they fail to evade or resist initially, they might do so in time.

Alternatively, one could say that the saving throw prompts narration, but does not truly represent anything in world. The problem is then to answer how said narration is constrained, if in fact nothing in world accords with that prompt? How do I say that the mechanic is not possibly diegetic while in fact it successfully predicts what will happen and that seems like something that could observed by characters astute enough. This sort of dilemma leads to sequences of play in games in which characters wryly discuss their circumstances in terms of what they know about the game mechanics.

I'm thinking of moments in the scripts of Red vs Blue, or play at the table when we've been the unhappy victim of system and resolve our sense of dissonance by breaking the fourth wall, or moments when we're just having fun with it. I'm also thinking of the inhabitants of Duskvol's blanket blindness to discontinuities arising from the flashback mechanic. It seems to me that as author-audiences, we choose to act as if game mechanics are generally non-diegetic in order to sustain playfulness. That is, it is part of our lusory-attitudes to maintain a separation between saving throws and what's going on in world. Not because they're not tied together, but because to acknowledge they're tied together breaks play just as much as a cheat or spoilsport does. And there are moments when our play wryly embraces them.

Sure, people often maintain immersion by way of imagining how the world works either because of, or despite, how mechanical game processes map or don't map onto fiction. And when I say 'map onto fiction' I'm granting a bit more leeway for that kind of phrase than @pemerton is when he mentions that mechanics are inherently non-diegetic. I agree with him at the level of "no dice roll ever happens in fiction." (aside the gambling example or some weird 4th-wall-breaking play). Actually it is probably more accurate to say that 'game process' is simply non-diegetic, but the resulting STATES, mechanically, could correlate with specific things in the fiction. So an attack roll is non-diegetic, of necessity, but the outcome produced, the resulting mechanical game state of hits, misses, losses of hit points, etc. can be imagined as mapping into the world, and thus having a type of verisimilitude, potentially, that you're effectively labeling 'diegetic'. You follow me?

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

So your answer is, "feel differently"?

I'm just saying, a definition like @clearstream advances is tantamount to "I feel that this fulfills my criteria for something to seem connected to the game world sufficiently to give me a sense of what is going on in fiction."

 

[Micah Sweet]

I'm just saying, a definition like @clearstream advances is tantamount to "I feel that this fulfills my criteria for something to seem connected to the game world sufficiently to give me a sense of what is going on in fiction."

Sounds good to me.

 

[clearstream]

As I pointed out earlier, all this ends up boiling down to is another term for verisimilitude, of perhaps only certain species.

I'm not saying that for a game fact to be diegetic equates with its verisimiltude.

 

[pemerton]

The die roll represent all the hidden variables that lead outcomes to be unpredictable in the real life too. Not particularly precise, but good enough for me. Like if in the real life someone is throwing tennis balls at you and you're trying to dodge, sometimes you do and sometimes they hit you. Same in the game.

It substitutes for those variables. I don't see how it represents them: for instance, in real life you actually (say) slip in a puddle or get the sun in your eyes. But the die roll doesn't tell us any of those things. If you want to know what, in the fiction, produced the randomness, you have to make it up. And how does a d20 roll represent something X if X could be whatever we, the participants, want it to be?

Which goes straight back to the "ownership" question - who gets to make up that stuff, according to what sorts of principles and considerations? I just see no profit at all in trying to frame this issue in terms of "diegesis" or "representation". It's a distraction, and obfuscating on top of it.

 

[pemerton]

Sure, people often maintain immersion by way of imagining how the world works either because of, or despite, how mechanical game processes map or don't map onto fiction. And when I say 'map onto fiction' I'm granting a bit more leeway for that kind of phrase than @pemerton is when he mentions that mechanics are inherently non-diegetic. I agree with him at the level of "no dice roll ever happens in fiction." (aside the gambling example or some weird 4th-wall-breaking play).

I just reiterate here that I am applying the word "diegetic" in its literal meaning, as describing an aspect of the performance that is also understood to be experienced by the characters within the fiction.

Orson Welles' narration in The Magnificant Ambersons represents various parts of the fiction quite accurately. That doesn't make it diegetic!

Actually it is probably more accurate to say that 'game process' is simply non-diegetic, but the resulting STATES, mechanically, could correlate with specific things in the fiction. So an attack roll is non-diegetic, of necessity, but the outcome produced, the resulting mechanical game state of hits, misses, losses of hit points, etc. can be imagined as mapping into the world, and thus having a type of verisimilitude, potentially, that you're effectively labeling 'diegetic'. You follow me?

Again I just don't see the word "diegetic" as doing any useful work here. If we want to say that a mechanically-framed state of affairs (eg a to hit bonus, a hit point tally, etc) is a more-or-less regimented descriptor for some fictional state, let's just say that.

We might then say that having the Lucky feat is not such a descriptor. Of course, that will then produce a puzzle about whether being Level X is such a descriptor, given that one way being of a certain level manifests in the mechanics is by having a certain number of feats, and we've just posited that having one of those feats doesn't describe anything in the fiction about the PC. One of the strengths of D&D is that it has always been rather ambivalent about the extent to which, and manner in which, various mechanics do or don't serve as descriptors for fictional states.

A contrast could be drawn with (say) Classic Traveller, which has nothing like the Lucky feat as a mechanical element. Everything on the Traveller PC sheet - whether generated via PC build (say Skill Expertise Ranks) or via action resolution (say wound levels) - is a descriptor of some fictional state. I don't see that we need to complicate this by labelling Traveller's mechanics as "diegetic".

 

[Crimson Longinus]

It substitutes for those variables. I don't see how it represents them: for instance, in real life you actually (say) slip in a puddle or get the sun in your eyes. But the die roll doesn't tell us any of those things. If you want to know what, in the fiction, produced the randomness, you have to make it up. And how does a d20 roll represent something X if X could be whatever we, the participants, want it to be?

Which goes straight back to the "ownership" question - who gets to make up that stuff, according to what sorts of principles and considerations? I just see no profit at all in trying to frame this issue in terms of "diegesis" or "representation". It's a distraction, and obfuscating on top of it.

To me this just seems like semantic quibbling. In real life we don't reasonably know what produces the randomness most of the time. Sure, there sometimes might be some identifiable elements such as terrain conditions* that affect the performance, but most of it is not identifiable. To me this is plain as day. Put a cup on the ground and try to throw a coin in it from two metres away. Some go in, some don't, and I bet you cannot identify the factors which contribute to this randomness. So yes, to me it is accurate enough to say that the die roll represents this randomness.

* And more dedicated sim games would already take such constants into account, and I don't think it would be unreasonable to give a disadvantage to certain checks on slippery ground in 5e D&D either.

 

[Fenris-77]

I think its trivially obvious that die rolls (by themselves) are adiegetic (or whatever term we want to use). However, mechanics and rules in TTRPGs are not simply die rolls by themselves and I'm pretty sure we're discussing those mechanics, not die rolls. If we take as a standard base for comparison the usual declare-decide-describe cycle of an action declaration I think a couple of things become obvious. One, the possible use of die rolls to stand in for fortune isn't really germane to the idea of diegetic or 'in fiction' or whatever. The cycle works both with and without die rolls and the use of a die in cases where the system calls for it doesn't change whether the mechanic in questions indexes something in the fiction or not. When I declare that my rogue will attempt to scale the castle wall we are dealing with an action 'in the fiction' that my avatar could have decided to do. This is the common ground for enthusiasts of immersion and theorists who use words like diegetic as a label to identify actions and mechanics that occur in the rough present of the diegetic frame. Two, this standard declare-decide-define cycle also does a reasonable job highlighting mechanics that seem to escape this notion of 'something the avatar could decide to do'. This second set of possible mechanics is enormously fuzzy but that doesn't mean that people don't recognize them when they see them. I also think it's the case that the idea of 'the conversation' is key to this idea.

The clean diegetic lines of the standard action declaration can become, if you'll forgive a muddy phrase, less diegetic feeling, based on the conversation at the table. Two good examples are Fate points and the Devil's Bargain from Blades - both commonly identified as 'meta' in some way. Both of those mechanics alter the telos of an action declaration by introducing multiple and competing narrative moments within the adjudication cycle. With Fate points I'm specifically talking about the GM proffer version which essentially reads I'll give you this piece of meta currency is you accept X into the resolution cycle. We now have two competing possible realities existing at once that the player (very much not the character) must decide between. The Devil's Bargain is quite similar - an additional die is proffered, increasing the chances of success, with multiple possible realities existing during a short period of negotiation. Again the choice rests with the player and generally escapes the idea of 'something the avatar could decide'. Setting aside for a moment the slippery notion of immersion and what may or may not scaffold it, I think this is a pretty clear moment of difference, a moment where the game pulls back from the avatar to the player and then dives back in after a secondary and interior moment of resolution. I'm not sure exactly how to best capture this definitionally but I think it's one place that words like meta and narrative start to be used in an attempt to grasp the difference.