D&D General [rant]The conservatism of D&D fans is exhausting.

[Hussar]

I'm curious how you'd respond to my #18,941?

As for disingenuous, no. I genuinely do not see how rolling dice and following written procedures around a table supports really clonking an opponent over the head with a flanged bit of metal by actually clonking them over the head with a flanged bit of metal.

All right. I'll bite. I'm completely at sea here. I honestly do not follow what you are trying to say. Can you please clarify?

 

[clearstream]

Good grief. LEARN THE WORD. For something to be diegetic it MUST EXIST for both the audience and IN the fiction. The easiest example of this is music where the audience can hear the song, the character in the movie turns off the radio and the music stops. Why did the music stop for the audience? Because it's diegetic - turning off the radio in the fiction turns off the music for the audience. IOW, for something to be diegetic, the audience MUST KNOW how a result occurs. They can see, on the screen, right in front of them, playing out in full color, the character walking over and turning off the radio and the music stops. That's diegetic.

I suspect that what is diegetic in TTRPG differs from what is diegetic in other forms of narrative.

So, yes, for something to be diegetic, the audience and the characters in the world must be able to follow the same causal links. You can't have post hoc justifications in a diegetic system. That doesn't work because you can't have post hoc justifications for the audience. Is that clear enough?

Do you mean that when an actor picks up a fake gun that a set dresser put there a moment before, audience and the character the actor is playing must be able to follow that causal link? Don't they in fact have to ignore that causal link, and imagine instead a different causal link that happens only in the fiction.

It is likely a fundamental error to conflate what is happening around the table with what is diegetic in the fiction. As has been touched on in the context of the "runes" example.

 

[Enrahim]

To me, the issue is that the number of DMs who think making a super-specific setting is great fun vastly outstrips the number of players interested in exploring them.

Like, I have a bunch of fantasy setting ideas I’ve loosely fleshed out over the years. If I had groups that wanted to explore them, that would be great. But I’m experienced enough to know that desire to explore someone else’s setting simply isn’t a common player motivation.

This we agree on

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I don't think the player wanting to ignore the setting and/or campaign concept is "a mild request." People who want to play wookiee jedi is a Star Trek game are a problem, as it tells me they are not interested in playing a Star Trek game in the first place, so this will be just first of the many issues.

And I see this as just another example of intense over-extremization, of painting the other side as utterly unreasonable buttholes rather than as pretty ordinary people with pretty ordinary tastes.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

There’s a big difference between a Wookiee Jedi in Star Trek (where both concepts belong to a separate IP) and wanting to play an ancestry that’s in the core rulebook of the game being played.

The apples-to-apples comparison would be a Star Trek game where Vulcans aren’t allowed.

No. D&D is just a game system, which can be used to represent many different worlds. Not every world needs to include everything the game has rules for, any more than a Regency romance game using GURPS needs to include mechas because GURPS has rules for them.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

And I find both very unlikely? Where did @Lanefan explicitely state they wouldn't have an adult conversation with the player to unearth why they were interested in playing a dragonborn, before needing to assess if they were going to accept or reject it? It seem like you are inserting the assumption they wouldn't? If I were forced to make a guess I would lean much more toward the intepretation that they would indeed have this discussion.

So if we indeed assume my most likely intepretation, the fact that Lanefan find themselves needing to make a judgement call sort of implies to me that there must have been some sort of insistence going on at the player's part.

And this kind of player isn't a hypotetical. I have been on the receiving end of something like this:

Spoiler: Extremely minor spoiler for WotBS

I had a first time player that was really disapointed there was no halfling in my list of allowed races. We were running war of the burning sky, and I think I limited to human, elf, halfelf and half-orc (possibly dwarf, I do not remember for certain), the intention was to have some anchoring between their race and the central conflict. I had a chat with the player, and came relatively quickly to the conclusion that I should allow it. It wasn't a hard insistence, but it was a well founded wish. It required some extra work on my part to try to integrate some hallfling society into the setting, but it was importantly no demand for making the halfing race as important as the others in terms of relevancy for the scenario.

I see no indication that this situation is not matching what Lanefan might have had in mind when making their relatively short and to the point statements.

....so....

What you're telling me is, you let the player play what they wanted...and it wasn't them riding roughshod over you, it wasn't them being a jerk, it wasn't them being demanding or rude or a sign that they were going to be a bad player. It was just the player making their case, and thus what they wanted, happened.

Where is the problem here? The thing you described is precisely what I'd like to see. A little adjustment from both sides. An acceptance of not getting absolutely everything one wants, but getting the core things that will support the experience. Etc.

Where is the problem here? You worked out a solution that would make both of you happy. It required you to do some extra work, and you were willing to do that extra work. It required the player to accept that their character would be somewhat more..."satellite", let's say, to the conflict, while the other characters will be more core to it. Give and take. Compromise on both sides. Acceptance of limitations. People working with one another, not announced demands from on high.

What exactly was I supposed to object to here?

 

[Hussar]

I've already answered. The reason you fall of a cliff is because as a player your didn't hit the target number. Any other answer no matter how it the answer is determined is justification and fluff after the fact. As far as diegetic, look it up in a dictionary if you're confused.

Nothing new here.

Yes, that's true. I fell because I failed to hit the target number. Now, since none of that has any actual meaning in the game world, as "target numbers" and "die rolls" don't actually exist in the game world, there is still that pesky middle part between me on the cliff and me now lying in a bloody, mangled mess at the bottom of the cliff that is completely unresolved. And the system provides zero guidance as to why I fell.

And, honestly, the reason you're having such an issue here is you really, really don't seem to understand what diegetic means. In an RPG, the clearest example of diegetic would be a player speaking in character. There is a 1:1 correlation at that point between what the player is doing and what the character is doing. That's about as diegetic as you can get. Another good example of something diegetic would be something like Bilbo's map from The Hobbit. That map in the book is meant to be the same map that everyone is looking at in the story. When they talk about the runes on the map (sorry, runes again) the reader can look at those actual runes on the map in the book. That's diegetic.

A typical D&D map, OTOH, isn't diegetic. There aren't numbers written on the floor in various rooms linked to a key. Which is fine. The DM's map isn't meant to be diegetic. That's the point. It serves a completely different purpose.

But, for skills or mechanics to be diegetic, the audience (the players) need to be able to see a correlation between what's going on in the game world and what they are seeing at the game table. The mechanics for a climb aren't diegetic at all. All we know, after the roll, is did you progress upward or did you fail to progress or did you fall. Why is entirely absent. We the players have no idea why we fell or why we succeeded, other than a number on a die roll (which obviously isn't diegetic). The narration of why the character succeeded or failed is in no way connected to the results of the die except to justify the results after the results are known.

Which is why these mechanics are not diegetic.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

In BW, as per the example I gave, there is a pretty tight correlation between the fiction and the difficulty. This is the underpinning of the explanations, and exhortations, in the rulebooks and commentary about using the obstacle system to establish the nature and texture of the setting.

That would indeed be simulationistic, if you used these things to derive odds of things related to them but often you don't.

I'm not familiar with how this is done in 5e D&D. For instance, I don't know what it tells me about a (near-, semi-)vertical surface that the DC to climb it is 15.

There are some guidelines for DCs, but this is an area where I wish there were a lot more examples (and I have said this often.) I have my own guidelines to keep things consistent. Regardless, the DC is to represent the diegetic challenge of the task.

To me, this suggests that you don't know how to play or GM Burning Wheel.

That makes two of us then, given that what I describe happens often in your game based on the play reports you've provided!

 

[TwoSix]

No. D&D is just a game system, which can be used to represent many different worlds. Not every world needs to include everything the game has rules for, any more than a Regency romance game using GURPS needs to include mechas because GURPS has rules for them.

That is the stance I’m arguing against, yes.

 

[Hussar]

Can you say how you discount weaving, when the player says ducking?

Again, disingenuous pedantry. If we're going to get that far into the weeds that we need to debate the definition of "ducking" then we're done here. That's so far into bad faith territory that it's not even funny.

So you are content to know that in D&D, attacks can miss due to the disadvantage imposed by their target dodging?

Prove it.

Show me the work. The PC takes the dodge action. Ok, fair enough. The dice are rolled and the attack misses. Prove that the miss was caused by disadvantage. You don't know which attack was rolled in what order, since both dice are rolled at the same time. Even if one attack would have hit, we have no way of knowing that that was the attack you would have rolled without disadvantage.
All we know is that the attack failed. We have no idea why it failed. Did it bang off a shield? Was it dodged? DId it fail to penetrate armor? Who knows? The system certainly doesn't tell you.

So, no, there's no "arbitrary threshold" that you're claiming. The threshold is "DOES THE SYSTEM PROVIDE ANY INFORMATION?" Yes/No. Since D&D doesn't actually provide any information, it is a resounding "no".