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

[Lanefan]

I can start a sandbox game in waaaaaaaay less time than 6 months. If you've gathered anything from this thread, it's that tradtional/sandbox DMs run their games in a variety of sandboxy ways and with a significant variety of prep involved.

You can't use @Lanefan as some sort of baseline. He preps a lot more than most DMs I've encountered.

Thing is, I too could start a sandbox game in well under six months. Well under six days, if it came to that; likely even under six hours. And it'd probably work out great for the short term.

BUT - the lesson I've learned over time is that starting without enough prep will eventually catch up to me in the long term, some years down the road when everything I've tacked on to whatever I did start with collapses under its own inconsistencies and impracticalities.

 

[Lanefan]

Again, a straw man. Before Tolkien, "elf" meant something like Thumbelina or Tom Thumb.

Well, and the guys who work making toys for Santa Claus at the north pole.

Thumbelina was more seen as a sprite or pixie, I think. Ditto Tinkerbelle.

That's a dramatic shift: human-sized, immortal, powerfully magical, blessed by divine beings, remnants of a better and brighter age, etc. Maybe instead of inventing things to show how others are stupid, it would be better to actually respond to the arguments I make.

Thing is, Tolkein didn't invent his elves from whole cloth. He based them on, I think, the Norse concept of the alfar, among other things. He got his Dwarves from somewhere else (and they ring true with Snow White's Dwarves, which pre-date his work). Hobbits, however, are I think entirely his own creation.

Which means that for Elves and Dwarves one could go to Tolkein's sources, distill them through one's own creative mill, and maybe arrive at something much the same as he already did.

 

[pemerton]

Actually, that one is diegetic. It exists for both the character and the audience. It is considered diegetic because it has real existence for the character (the character is actually thinking these words) and for the audience listening to it.

Interesting - is that the standard view among critics?

My thinking was that, for the audience, there is a sound (the voice). But in the fiction there isn't one.

Your Princess Bride example is clear (but as you say layered/convoluted). Another one is the introductory (and concluding?) monologue in Sunset Boulevard, which comes from a character who is dead.

 

[pemerton]

That's not what the definitions and explanations say.

Which ones? When I Google "diegetic definition", I get Oxford Languages telling me:

(of sound in a film, television programme, etc.) occurring within the context of the story and able to be heard by the characters.​

So we're talking about something that occurs in reality (say, sound) that is also seen and heard in the fiction. Films (and radio plays and TV) produce real sounds, and so the contrast between a sound that the performance produces but that is not part of the fiction, vs a sound that the performance produces and that is part of the fiction, is clear. Generalising beyond sound I think is almost always going to be metaphoric to a degree, because whereas the sounds that films produce are real, the images are representations. But the contrast between the audience seeing a fake shark, whereas in the fiction it's a real shark, seems moderately clear.

If you use the term "diegetic" simply to label something that is part of the fiction, without attending to its reality, then all fictional elements are necessarily diegetic; while all non-fictional events (like rolling dice, or players saying things like "I pick up the backpack") will be non-diegetic. Which then makes it pretty hard to talk about "diegetic mechanics"!

 

[Lanefan]

Okay, but do you not see how all of this still comes back to "this is the Lanefan-specific thing"?

Well, obviously it is, as it's my own setting we're talking about!

Someone coming to this with no knowledge except what 5e is (whichever version, both include playable drow) wouldn't know these things. Meaning, as I already argued, explaining yourself is kinda important. You need to get the player on board, not shout at them that you're pulling rank and they'd better fall in line.

Someone coming in with no knowledge except what 5e is is probably in for a lot more of a learning process than someone coming in with no RPG experience at all; because before learning my system and game they're going to have to unlearn 95+% of what 5e has taught them.

AIUI, formally, there isn't one. But for my own personal concept, I would say Ghostwise halflings.

Huh. OK. Never heard of those.

Okay. The problem is, several of the species that have been "monsters" really do look exactly like "demonized groups of IRL humans". Orcs are another good example, because (unfortunately) from their very inception, they've had some unfortunate Orientalist tropes woven into their story, and a big part of why they're getting a huge injection of nuance is...we'd like to keep what makes orcs cool, without making them "see, these humans are okay to murder indiscriminately because we asserted that they're a different species, and they're green!" Because that has unfortunately been an all-too-common failing of human nature across history.

Racism (rarely) and species-ism (always) is a very real thing in my game. As are slavery, genocide, colonialism, and various other things now seemingly considered too edgy for today's game. The world ain't a pretty place, that's just how it is; though as PCs there's always ways to in some sense have an effect against these things if so desired.

One thing that's rarely if ever present, though, is sexism.

Which is super cool! I love that stuff.

It sure wasn't what I expected, but hey, play to find out and go where it takes ya.

To add perhaps a bit of clarity to my previous stuff, "monsters" include things like mindflayers (inherently horrible creatures that literally need to murder to live), undead, constructs, vampires, and things like mutants.

I've got all those too, plus demons, devils, jellies, oozes, githi, and so on. The problem is that most if not all of those are simply too powerful for low-to-mid level parties to deal with, and people will understandably get tired of bashing low-end undead, giant rats, and minor jellies for six adventures in a row. Kobolds, Orcs, Hobgoblins and the like can also throw some actual strategy and tactics at the party now and then that those other low-level thngs won't or can't.

And it's not like I use humanoid monsters constantly; I just want the ability to do so if needed.

Now, one can change the concept and demonstrate the truly inhuman nature of something that hasn't been super great in the past, e.g. actually showing that one's "orcs" are grown in labs and programmed by fantasy computers or the like. (Though even then, there's something to be said for "why does it need to be 'orcs' then? Couldn't it just be human clones altered to be mindless shock troops?" Aka, one can do a lot with pig leather, but there comes a point where one must recognize it won't make a silk purse.)

I had clones as an ongoing sidebar for a long string of adventures in my current game. Problem was, while the cloning process itself was horrific the resulting clones were often perfectly decent people (the cloners wanted to erase the "think for itself" part of the clones' sentience but never quite managed it) as they tended to retain the personality of the original and many of the originals were captives taken from Good or Neutral-aligned places or armies. Kinda based on the Kamino cloning facility in Star Wars II.

Some of the clones were nasty, though. Not sure if you're familiar with the A2 Slavers' Stockade module, but the boss in that thing is an Elf named Markessa. They killed her in that module, then subsequent parties have killed four more of her (they thought for a while she was getitng revived each time then finally realized she had cloned herself); they have reason to believe there's at least another half dozen out there somewhere, including the original.

 

[pemerton]

Thumbelina was more seen as a sprite or pixie, I think. Ditto Tinkerbelle.

I think these are distinctions without a difference.

Here are some definitions (Oxford Languages via Google), which show that ordinary usage basically doesn't draw distinctions between elves, faeries, sprites, pixies etc:

elf: a supernatural creature of folk tales, typically represented as a small, delicate, elusive figure in human form with pointed ears, magical powers, and a capricious nature.

fairy: a small imaginary being of human form that has magical powers, especially a female one.

pixie: a supernatural being in folklore and children's stories, typically portrayed as small and humanlike in form, with pointed ears and a pointed hat.

sprite: an elf or fairy.​

Supernatural (ie having magical powers), small (and often delicate) and of human form, typically with pointed ears. Being elusive and capricious is not mentioned for fairies and pixies but both labels seem pretty applicable.

 

[pemerton]

Why did the music mysteriously stop in the movie? We don't know and neither does the character. - Diegetic.

I don't think this is correct. If the music is diegetic and is (say) coming from an instrument, then the characters (like the audience) can conjecture that the player stopped playing. This is a fairly common trope/motif to generate suspense. And typically the answer will be revealed in reasonably short order.

If there's a bang in the fiction and neither we nor the people in the fiction know how the bang was achieved(fireworks, explosion, accident, et), it is still diegetic as it happened entirely in the fiction and we the audience heard.

Again, the reason will typically be revealed in short order. The audience does not need to conjecture, or come up with it's own explanation (perhaps things are different in some David Lynch or similarly unconventional films, but I think we can confine ourselves to relatively mainstream cinema).

After all, the reason the film maker uses diegetic sounds (again, sticking to conventional storytelling) is to lead the audience to focus on particular aspects of the fiction, generate particular reveals etc.

I think this is the contrast that @Hussar is drawing (or at least a contrast that Hussar is drawing) with mechanics that invite a question (eg why did the person fall?) but don't, of themselves, provide an answer or lead the game participants to an answer. The participants have to insert their own answer.

Here's a way to set up a contrast: suppose that there were standard DCs for climbing various sorts of (near-/semi-)sheer surfaces, with a standard bonus for using a rope, and then a reduction in that rope bonus if the surface has notably sharp edges. If the check is rolled, and fails, but would have succeeded but for the sharp edges reduction, then the rules lead us to suspect that it is the sharp edges that caused the climb to fail (by cutting the rope). That would look more like a simulationist mechanics, to me at least: it is the sort of thing that I would find in Rolemaster.

 

[Lanefan]

Distant lands can have Strange Things.

Or consider, for instance, ginkgo trees. Today, there is only one species (Ginkgo biloba), from a single genus--and, indeed, the "only one left" goes up all the way to the division/phylum level. Two hundred million years ago, there were dozens of such species and they were distributed worldwide. Today? The solitary surviving species of this entire classification of plants grows wild only in a small region of China; the only reason we know of it worldwide today is because humans liked the colorful, interesting leaves so much, we planted them elsewhere for decoration. Coelacanths were thought to be extinct for decades until we found living specimens. Hell, we thought kiwi were extinct for a good long while, until we found out no, they aren't, they're just very good at hiding from people because people almost drove them to extinction.

It's eminently possible that a species can exist, survive, perhaps even thrive in various forms of isolation from the world around it. Even sapient species. Homo floresiensis, aka the "hobbits", lived undisturbed on an island in Indonesia until about 50,000 years ago.

All you need is the right kind of isolating environment and local sustainability. Even without an isolating environment, it really truly is only in the past like 300-400 years that humans have even begun to have a good idea of what is beyond their local region. Remember, the ancient Greeks (ca. 500 BC) genuinely believed there were dog-headed people just a couple thousand miles east of them. Egyptians in the following thousand years likewise believed that dog-headed people existed; the Coptic St. Christopher, for example, was held to have had two dog-headed attendants who were fiercely loyal to him. And that's stuff that should've been verifiable even to them--it's not like India was inaccessible to the Greeks, Alexander tried to conquer it.

So...no, I don't buy the idea that a distinctly medieval-stasis world where knowledge gets lost easily and even folks who DO travel rarely go more than 1500 miles from their place of birth. (That's about the radial extent one could expect from a very well-travelled Roman during the time we would call the "Roman Empire", reaching the British Isles, Scandinavia, most of Egypt, parts of the Levant, etc. Even if you put a similar circle centered on Baghdad, often the cultural if not political center of Golden Age Islam, it barely gets you Pakistan, to say nothing of India proper--and that 1500-mile Baghdad circle only has like ~20% overlap with the previous!)

In a non-magical world, I'm fully on board with this.

D&D worlds, however, almost without exception not only have magic, they have lots of it; and some of it involves long-range travel.

And not just teleport. Someone with an always-on flight device can go anywhere. Someone polymorphed or shapeshifted into a seagull (or more extreme, an arctic tern) can fly across a big chunk of water. Some settings include airships and the like as basic conceits. Even basic ordinary ships are usually far more advanced than anything the Romans had to work with, and could cross oceans.

Toss in the idea of generations of curious adventurers wanting to explore everywhere even if only to loot it and no, there won't be many if any truly secret cultures or peoples left on the planet by the time the PCs come along.

 

[Maxperson]

Which ones? When I Google "diegetic definition", I get Oxford Languages telling me:

(of sound in a film, television programme, etc.) occurring within the context of the story and able to be heard by the characters.​

So we're talking about something that occurs in reality (say, sound) that is also seen and heard in the fiction. Films (and radio plays and TV) produce real sounds, and so the contrast between a sound that the performance produces but that is not part of the fiction, vs a sound that the performance produces and that is part of the fiction, is clear. Generalising beyond sound I think is almost always going to be metaphoric to a degree, because whereas the sounds that films produce are real, the images are representations. But the contrast between the audience seeing a fake shark, whereas in the fiction it's a real shark, seems moderately clear.

If you use the term "diegetic" simply to label something that is part of the fiction, without attending to its reality, then all fictional elements are necessarily diegetic; while all non-fictional events (like rolling dice, or players saying things like "I pick up the backpack") will be non-diegetic. Which then makes it pretty hard to talk about "diegetic mechanics"!

You should have read further. This is also from Oxford.

(adj diegetic) A term used in narratology (the study of narratives and narration) to designate the narrated events in a story as against the telling of the story. The diegetic (or intradiegetic) level of a narrative is that of the story world, and the events that exist within it, while the extradiegetic or nondiegetic level stands outside these. In narrative cinema, the diegesis is a film's entire fictional world. Diegetic space has a particular set of meanings (and potential complexities) in relation to narration in cinema as opposed to, say, the novel; and in a narrative film, the diegetic world can include not only what is visible on the screen, but also offscreen elements that are presumed to exist in the world that the film depicts—as long as these are part of the main story."

 

[Maxperson]

Please stop nit picking. It's incredibly frustrating. Note, the "climb halfway rules" (which I honestly had forgotten) aren't really part of the issue. If you don't like climbing, then how about opening the lock? Obviously the character cannot "half open" the lock. And I love the cherry picking of the rules of climbing since it SPECIFIES that your character has slipped and fallen (AD&D PHB P 28) if you fail the check. As in, anyone ruling a "broken rope" or "crumbly rocks" is actually ignoring the system.

The problem is, in later D&D, your chance of success is not based on your character. It's based on a combination of factors - what DC does the DM decide that the climb is and a die roll that massively overshadows the character's actual skill. And the die roll includes everything from being hungry to broken ropes to whatever the DM decides is appropriate.

IOW, you have no idea why the character fell. It could be any number of reasons. The mechanics do not, in any way, inform you of how you fell. In earlier editions, that explanation was built into the system - you failed because you were not skilled enough. And we know you aren't skilled enough because you cannot try again until you improve your skill. In 5e, I can try so long as my HP hold out or I succeed. Skill doesn't play into it at all. I can have a 3 Str, no proficiency in Athletics, and still climb a DC 15 climb. No matter what, so long as I have enough HP, I will climb that wall. Skill plays no role in it at all.

The rope broke and he slipped... The rock crumbled and he slipped... There are many reasons for slipping, but slipping itself isn't a reason. You can slip because it's wet. Because you didn't grip hard enough. And so on.

What caused him to slip? Slipping! Doesn't work.