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

[Enrahim]

I posted it upthread. (And have posted it many times on these boards over the years.) It's not mysterious:

If D&D gets classified as "simulationist", then what RPG doesn't?

If "simulatinionism" is to be a meaningfully analytical category, I assume it has to mean more than supports the creation of a shared fiction during play. Because all RPGs do that. That's the core of the activity.

Who say there have to exist a meaningfully analytical category related to the concept of simulation?

 

[AlViking]

Because that's not what diegetic means. It simply isn't. For something to be diegetic it has to exist for both the characters in the story and the readers/viewers OF that story.

So, again, it's not diegetic if the wheel all of a sudden falls off from the character's car without the player knowing something about how that happened. Because in order for that result to occur, the process has to be visible to the audience. The music stops because the character turns off the radio. We know exactly why the music stopped. Why do we know that? Because it's diegetic. Non-diegetic music usually stops to indicate a new scene of some sort. It doesn't exist for the characters.

Something cannot be diegetic without the audience knowing at least in part, why it occured. It's simply not possible to be diegetic without that information. They don't have to specify it in the definition because it's impossible otherwise.

Can you give me an example of a diegetic scene from a movie or TV show where the audience would be completely without any information about how the results of actions in that scene occurred? I've given several examples of how my definition is required in order for something to be diegetic. How it would be impossible to be diegetic without the audience knowing how the results occurred. You keep claiming that it's not necessary in order to be diegetic, but, so far, have failed to provide any evidence other than a failed reading of the definition of diegetic.

You are the only I've seen that adds the bolded.
Diegetic: existing or occurring within the world of a narrative rather than as something external to that world AND explains how things happen

 

[AlViking]

Huh? How do the PCs perform actions without the "outside" influence of the players declaring them? How do the PCs form beliefs about their surroundings without the "outside" influence of the GM telling the players what their characters can see? Etc.

What happens in that fictional space of the game must originate from the players of the game. If you reject that then nothing can ever be considered diegetic, I'm not even sure the word simulation has any meaning any more.

Since nobody defines it that way unless they're doing it to say "Hah! You're wrong!" I'm not too worried about it. On the other hand, a player hoping that runes lead to an exit to the dungeon and then the hope comes true because they rolled well is not diegetic. The character in the fiction did not interpret the runes the player decided what they wanted them to be.

 

[TwoSix]

So what I would consider if this was me… how much does that lore about war between elves and drow inform play? How much does it matter? Is it actively informing events in the game? Is it just a bit of background flavor? Must it have all played out exactly as commonly understood?

For me, the purpose of the setting is to provide a framework for play. So how does any given element do that? How important or influential is it to play?

I'm a fan of Daggerheart's campaign frames for building setting. They give a sense of setting texture and boundaries to help with building characters and NPC adversaries. They're "real", in the sense that they're right in the core book and thus easily accessible to all the participants. They have a baseline map to help everyone focus on the geography, but it's very loosely defined to allow for both GM and player authorship into setting elements.

And picking a campaign frame during character creation/session zero emphasizes that the GM is not in charge of building out the setting and that the work should be more colloborative.

 

[Maggan]

I mean, we can assume every game (outside of some sci-fi and extraplanar settings) has weather happening as a background assumption.

I don't know about that, though. In this thread I've learned that everything can be explained by pixies. All the way down, it's all pixies.

Raining? Pixies pis ... crying. Wind? Pixies flapping their wings. Snow ... pixie dust, in all probability. So no bakgrund assumptions, just pixies!

So many pixies!

 

[TwoSix]

Who say there have to exist a meaningfully analytical category related to the concept of simulation?

I don't think we need to. But people seem interested in defining it since the concept has been around for decades.

 

[FrogReaver]

Multiple posters in this thread have pointed to examples of play from Burning Wheel as not being simulationist. You appear to do so here, with your reference to Circles tests and Wises tests.

I speak more to the specific mechanics in dispute. Depending on how often and fundamental those mechanics come up would depend on how simulationist I think it is. I don't know the game well enough to answer that.

But by @Enrahim's and @clearstream's accounts in this thread, those episodes of play are simulationist because (i) they foster immersion and (ii) they foster understanding and appreciation of the subject matter of the shared fiction.

The point of noting this is? Are you wanting to pit me against them? Are you just trying to say my definition may be wrong? To show that simulationist is a not well defined and agreed upon term? Because I agree it's a not well defined term that multiple people use different ways.

I'm also fairly certain that both of them are using simulationist more holistically than a single experience. I'm not. I believe we can look down to individual mechanics and instances and determine what if anything they simulate. Though I also believe we could classify a game as more or less simulationistic than another based on how many such mechanics and instances they have (including taking into account the negative space examples (X thing actively hinders simulation), which might be even more important here).

 

[TwoSix]

I don't know about that, though. In this thread I've learned that everything can be explained by pixies. All the way down, it's all pixies.

Raining? Pixies ... pis ... crying. Wind? Pixies flapping their wings. Snow ... pixie dust, in all probability. So no bakgrund assumptions, just pixies!

I climbed up a cliff, and it turns out on the top of the cliff was a cook the whole time, just cooking up weather.

 

[Enrahim]

I don't think we need to. But people seem interested in defining it since the concept has been around for decades.

Well, the concepts of aether, and phlogiston was around for quite a while as well..

 

[TwoSix]

Well, the concepts of aether, and phlogiston was around for quite a while as well..

All taxonomies do a terrible job, right up until you try and create a better one.