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

[Maxperson]

I am not sure if my take on this equates with yours. Top of mind is that what is diegetic in TTRPG will be different in some respects from what is diegetic in film, just as what is diegetic in film differs from what is diegetic in literature. That's down to players being authors, actors and audiences.

A good first step that should provide plenty to disagree with is to define each of those...

Author players are authors when they change the imagined world other than from within it​

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Actor players are actors when the pretend to be entities within the imagined world​

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Audience players are audiences when they receive narratives concerning the imagined world, which in turn makes them audiences of internal pictures they form about what is narrated​

Proposed: diegetic things are those experienced by players as actors and audiences. What they know as authors about those things has no bearing.

That's why I say that there are diegetic mechanics. The climb mechanics of D&D are the representation of the climb occurring in the fiction. It's the path player used to experience the climb being done by his character. The mechanics and the fictional climb are essentially one and the same.

 

[Enrahim]

I have taken that to be a premise of the exercise that you and @clearstream are engaged in, of discussing what makes RPG play "simulationist".

I cannot talk for @clearstream . I think I am engaged in several layers of this.

- On the level of game I have expressed strong sceptisism with regard to whe value of having a "simukationist" classification at all.

- On the level of play I have tried to amplify @clearstream 's recent musings about self reported experiences, as I think this is indeed a promising way to assess level of simulative experience in actual play. However I am sceptical to if this can be used as a clasification as "simulationist. I believe all RPG play likely contains some extent of these experiences, but that it could provide a basis for an ordering

- On instances of play I have been quite alone in strongly advocating the concept of supporting or hindering a given simulation. I think there are aspects of play that can be identified as doing one or the other; and that as such this could be used as a basis for classificating the given aspect in that instance of play "simulationistic".

This is a bird's eye perspective, that my remaining reply fit into.

Experiences occur during moments of play. If some extended period of play is supposed to be simulationist, in virtue of the experiences that it contains, then presumably we can point to candidate experiences.

I've pointed to a rules framework - namely, Marvel Heroic RP and a fantasy hack of it- that supports simulative experiences: immersive and noetically satisfying ones. But there seems to be a widespread consensus, of which you are a member, that the moment of play, the play overall, the rules, etc were not simulationist. I'm trying to work out what that consensus is based on.

I think I am not part of that "consensus". I have been speaking up regarding the single play instance, as I find it very interesting to analyse (more of that below). However as you can see above I hold different stances on the play and game level.

My (ii) is taken straight from @clearstream. See, as just one of probably a dozen or more examples, this post, which you "liked": D&D General - [rant]The conservatism of D&D fans is exhausting.

Yes, but that phrasing is from my understanding taken more or less directly from Eero Tuovinen, and i guess was used when replying you as an assumed common language ground. I read @clearstream 's post regarding experience as an attempt to introduce a new language and methodology to approach talking about simulation. I find this promising, and hence I didn't like seeing this mixing of what I consider "new" and "old" language.

When you say that (i) and (ii) are not applicable, are you saying that I am wrong in saying that various examples of play I've described fostered immersion and fostered understanding and appreciation of the subject matter of the shared fiction? Because I was there and I know that they did!

I say it is far from obvious that they are applicable. The issue is that in my quick reading they appear to not be applicable at all, but I have not done the work of deep diving into the terminology to see if there might be some understanding of the terms involved that would indeed make it applicable. I don't like to be associated with a claim I do not understand how can be true myself, even if it might be true.

However a bit further down I will try to dive a bit deeper into the situation.

I think that comparing the play of MHRP to (say) a side-game of noughts and crosses is pretty ridiculous. I am not suggesting that the moment of play I described is simulationist despite what happened during it. I am suggesting that it ticks the boxes for immersive and noetic satisfaction because of the game play that occurred during it.

I already addressed this concern in the post you quoted. Indeed the entire next paragraph was meant to clarify this, but in particular

However as apart from tick tack toe, there are merits to this situation that possibly could open it to be usefully labeled "simulationistic" via some other labeling scheme I cannot recognise right now.

Was intended to clearly call out that the tick tack toe example was only relevant for this particular possible scheme of classification.

However, now comes the announced analysis. You here make a claim that there was a causation between the action, and the immersive and noetic experience. This is a different way of trying to extend the concept of simulative experiences into a classification scheme for instants of play than the one I proposed, that merely required correlation. The big problem with this is suggestion is that causation is insanely hard to establish - in particular in terms of human experiences.

Imagine ripping this incident completely out of context, and say that your first session of play stared with you asking "what do you want to do with the runes?" The player now utterly confused utters "read them I guess? Is this some sort of map?" You procede to roll some dice and declare "Yes it is indeed a map". Would that player when asked indicate they had an immersive experience, and that they got a sound dose of noetic satisfaction? I would expect a heavy no on both, and very empathichaly on the second, as this session in no way started as they would have expected.

But this is likely true for any isolated incident no matter how simulativistic whatever is going on in that moment is supposed to be. Hence I do not think we can find a way to clearly establish a causation between a single incident - the experience is a product of many things that lead up to that moment. You could point out that the play didn't ruin the experience, but neither did the tick tack toe game.

This is why I think that for single incidents it is more useful to look at what we want to simulate rather than the similative experiences, as I think it then is possible to point to causation. For instance if we want to simulate that there tend to be rain in the tropic, and we have a table with weather that is rolled every day - it is actually possible to say something about if this table supports the desired simulation by looking at distribution of outcome.

So in this perspective: What did you want to simulate when the runes were resolved?

So if it nevertheless does not count as a simulationist experience, or a constituent element of a simulationist experience, why not?

A resolution isn't an experience in this context. The experience is something personal to the player. If it can be said to be a constituent part depends on what is the threshold for considering something constituent. If it is a thing that happened as a integrated part of the activity that provided the experience, then yes - this was a constituent element of a simulationistic experience in my understandings of those words.

("Integrated" is my attempt to exclude tick tack toe, while quite clearly including the runes resolution. However I think the edges of this concept is to fuzzy to make it immediately useful for wider application as basis for a "simulationistic" term based on correlation. I am also sceptical to the usefulness of such a term with this basis, even if we manage to make it well defined)

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Finished up the part addressed to me. Will se if I have more to add from the rest of the post later.

 

[clearstream]

That's why I say that there are diegetic mechanics. The climb mechanics of D&D are the representation of the climb occurring in the fiction. It's the path player used to experience the climb being done by his character. The mechanics and the fictional climb are essentially one and the same.

Did you see my #19,300?

 

[Maxperson]

I worry this will rest on cherry picking and lead to unsustainable complexities. What I mean by the former is that if it supposed that there are "diegetic mechanics" and "non-diegetic" mechanics, how are players as characters and players as audiences supposed to keep track of which is which? What if some players around the table perceive a mechanic as diegetic and others perceive it as non-diegetic?

I've managed to play and run the game for 42 years without once trying to keep track of which is which.

It should be easy to determine, though. Is the mechanic directly representing an action or occurrence in the fiction? If yes, diegetic. If no, no.

The to hit mechanics to hit mechanics would be diegetic as they represent the swing, spell attack, etc. happening in the fiction. The rule allowing re-tries for skill tests would not be diegetic as it does not directly represent to what is happening in the fiction. Each individual attempt would be diegetic, but not that rule since it's a metarule that enables all those attempts.

What I mean by unsustainable complexities includes, what if a mechanic is made up of supposedly diegetic and non-diegetic parts? It would seem to require precise deconstruction of each mechanic to excise the latter and pay regard only to the former. But I don't think players are normally doing anything like that during play.

I don't think players even think about diegetic vs. non-diegetic during play. This is an outside of play kind of discussion and analysis. People on a forum or sitting around a table at a restaurant would be having discussions and paying attention to this kind of thing.

This is an example of what I mean above. It demands a precision of perception by players so that as characters they selectively experience only the diegetic parts while ignoring the non-diegetic parts. That in itself is circular, because if being diegetic amounts to being experienced by actors and audiences, then it's self-fulfilling. Such parts of a mechanic that a player experiences are diegetic because they experience it.

It's done unconsciously. The player is aware of the roll of the die being outside of his character, but the mechanics aspect of it gets reduced to success or failure within the fiction and is basically just experienced as one thing. If the DC is 18 and I roll a total of 19, success! I experience success in the climb at the same time as my character succeeds at the climb in the fiction.

 

[Maxperson]

Did you see my #19,300?

Not at the time that I wrote that.

 

[Lanefan]

He fell because he was not skilled enough. Why can't he try again if the rock crumbled? Why can't he get another rope and try again?

Depending on how hard he hit the ground he might not be in condition to try anything again.....

 

[Lanefan]

We had the ability to traverse the Silk Road from ca. 200 BC to ca. 1400 AD. Nearly two thousand years of traversing a road.

During most of that time, things not even a quarter of the way along the Silk Road were shrouded in myth and legend, despite us having incontrovertible genetic proof that there was small but measurable genetic intermixing between these populations (likely "merchant A marries into family B, has kids, those kids stick around and thus create a group of descendants related to A's distant homeland").

Magic certainly helps, but remember, these are worlds where medieval stasis is in full swing. If we're saying China should've been a well-known, well-reached area for over a thousand years, gunpowder weapons emphatically should not be a rarity. They should be commonplace.

I suspect most DMs simply handwave it that the faux-Chinese in their settings never invented gunpowder, for whatever reason, and leave it at that.

Since that is almost always not true of these fantasy worlds, and indeed enormous other swathes of technology move even more slowly than they did in our actual world? Magic seems to make it harder to see beyond the horizon, not easier!

One could argue, given the prevalence of monsters and threats in a typical D&D setting that our own history never had to deal with, that such technological innovation never gets much of a chance to take root because those who might do it are too busy dealing with those threats instead.

That, and in a D&D setting "academia" is largely replaced and-or supplanted by "magical studies"; the brightest minds tend to either go into magic or adventuring, or both. Which means, it's more likely that a new spell will be invented to solve [generic problem x] than a new technology, with the side effect of keeping that solution gated behind the ability to cast spells and thus exclusive to the casters - who can then profit from it as they like.

Magic for the masses is the main thing that makes Eberron an atypical setting.

Think on it: in your own game, once they get to half-decent levels consider:
--- how often do the PCs engage in long-range travel?
--- how far do they go?
--- what are their means of getting there (and-or back)?

Your own setting might be different, but in a typical setting there will be other adventuring types doing similar travels, never mind mages and clerics who may well (and it's not unreasonable to think they would) have set up globe-spanning teleport or planeshift networks for their own use.

End result: long-range travel would be considerably more common among the elite than in our own history, and often stupendously faster.

Our own real world shows that local problems and local concerns are far more immediate for the vast majority of people, and even with magic, it's an established fact that much knowledge gets lost or forgotten in the stereotypical medieval-stasis worlds so many GMs (and very particularly old-school D&D GMs) tend to favor.

Local problems and concerns are much more immediate for the common folk, sure, and as they make up the vast majority of the population your point is valid. Elites and adventurers (who tend to make themselves elites pretty fast even if they didn't start out that way) would likely take a different view; and as play revolves around the particular adventurers that happen to have players attached, that "elite" view is what we as DMs find ourselves having to deal with.

 

[clearstream]

It should be easy to determine, though. Is the mechanic directly representing an action or occurrence in the fiction? If yes, diegetic. If no, no.

I'd like to test some notions here

Player 1 "Did Jo-character open the door?"
Player 2 "Nope, Jo is over there by the pool table.... you'd be better off by the door"
Player 3 (plays Jo) "Okay, I run to the door with that broken bottle in hand"

An action or occurrence in the fiction is directly represented in the conversation between P1 and P2, but their conversation wouldn't be counted diegetic. Jo-character for instance can't hear their conversation.

The to hit mechanics to hit mechanics would be diegetic as they represent the swing, spell attack, etc. happening in the fiction. The rule allowing re-tries for skill tests would not be diegetic as it does not directly represent to what is happening in the fiction. Each individual attempt would be diegetic, but not that rule since it's a metarule that enables all those attempts.

Continuing

Player 1 "I'm climbing the wall"
GM "Sure it's sheer: DC 18"
Player 1 "Huh, cocked. I'll reroll it"
Player 1 "17"
Player 2 "Failed by 1... rats, you aren't at the top yet with us."
Player 1 "Yup, I'm making no progress"
GM "I'm going with Success at a Cost. Fail by 1 gets you to the top, but... you drop one of those scrolls"

Some of the steps here must be retroactively excised to see what characters experience.

I don't think players even think about diegetic vs. non-diegetic during play. This is an outside of play kind of discussion and analysis. People on a forum or sitting around a table at a restaurant would be having discussions and paying attention to this kind of thing.

Seeing as it concerns experiences of players as characters and as audiences, it's at issue whether they can plausibly have those experiences. As well as keeping the non-diegetic parts of mechanics separated from the putatively diegetic step, there'd be differences in sensitivity to abstraction at work. If parts of game mechanics are considered diegetic, those experiencing what the label supposedly applies to are going to say that it applies to different things... as evidenced by this thread.

It's done unconsciously. The player is aware of the roll of the die being outside of his character, but the mechanics aspect of it gets reduced to success or failure within the fiction and is basically just experienced as one thing. If the DC is 18 and I roll a total of 19, success! I experience success in the climb at the same time as my character succeeds at the climb in the fiction.

That doesn't really respond to my argument that the notion of diegetic mechanics entails circular reasoning.

 

[Maxperson]

Player 1 "I'm climbing the wall"
GM "Sure it's sheer: DC 18"
Player 1 "Huh, cocked. I'll reroll it"
Player 1 "17"
Player 2 "Failed by 1... rats, you aren't at the top yet with us."
Player 1 "Yup, I'm making no progress"
GM "I'm going with Success at a Cost. Fail by 1 gets you to the top, but... you drop one of those scrolls"

Some of the steps here must be retroactively excised to see what characters experience.

Only the bolded portions are steps. The rest is player conversation. You can remove it and nothing would change.

Seeing as it concerns experiences of players as characters and as audiences, it's at issue whether they can plausibly have those experiences. As well as keeping the non-diegetic parts of mechanics separated from the putatively diegetic step, there'd be differences in sensitivity to abstraction at work. If parts of game mechanics are considered diegetic, those experiencing what the label supposedly applies to are going to say that it applies to different things... as evidenced by this thread.

There aren't really all that many non-diegetic mechanics. I had to search for a bit to find the one I mentioned in my last post. Most mechanics are there so that you can play the game in the fiction properly, so are diegetic as they correspond to actions and events in the fiction.

That doesn't really respond to my argument that the notion of diegetic mechanics entails circular reasoning.

Sure. My point there was to show that it's not really going to take much effort on the part of the players. They don't need to consciously weed out non-diegetic things and focus on the diegetic ones. It just happens.

I also don't see any circular reasoning. The entire fictional world is diegetic, because the players are experiencing it and so are the characters. The mechanics are diegetic because they correspond to those in fiction actions and events, so are part of how the players are experiencing those in fiction actions and events.

 

[AlViking]

I suspect most DMs simply handwave it that the faux-Chinese in their settings never invented gunpowder, for whatever reason, and leave it at that.

One could argue, given the prevalence of monsters and threats in a typical D&D setting that our own history never had to deal with, that such technological innovation never gets much of a chance to take root because those who might do it are too busy dealing with those threats instead.

That, and in a D&D setting "academia" is largely replaced and-or supplanted by "magical studies"; the brightest minds tend to either go into magic or adventuring, or both. Which means, it's more likely that a new spell will be invented to solve [generic problem x] than a new technology, with the side effect of keeping that solution gated behind the ability to cast spells and thus exclusive to the casters - who can then profit from it as they like.

Magic for the masses is the main thing that makes Eberron an atypical setting.

Think on it: in your own game, once they get to half-decent levels consider:
--- how often do the PCs engage in long-range travel?
--- how far do they go?
--- what are their means of getting there (and-or back)?

Your own setting might be different, but in a typical setting there will be other adventuring types doing similar travels, never mind mages and clerics who may well (and it's not unreasonable to think they would) have set up globe-spanning teleport or planeshift networks for their own use.

End result: long-range travel would be considerably more common among the elite than in our own history, and often stupendously faster.

Local problems and concerns are much more immediate for the common folk, sure, and as they make up the vast majority of the population your point is valid. Elites and adventurers (who tend to make themselves elites pretty fast even if they didn't start out that way) would likely take a different view; and as play revolves around the particular adventurers that happen to have players attached, that "elite" view is what we as DMs find ourselves having to deal with.

Just because this thread doesn't have enough tangents, I've kind of cycled through multiple explanations for why there is not gunpowder. It hasn't ever come up as anything I need to explain in game because there's no reason for a character to ask about something that doesn't exist that they couldn't know of so I've never settled on an answer. But as a philosophical debate, the reasons gunpowder doesn't exist that I can remember:

1. Early gunpowder weapons were not very effective. We think gunpowder and at the very least with think flintlock type weapons but it took centuries to get there. So if someone comes along and says "I can make a flash and smoke" everyone else just looks at them funny and casts a low level spell (or cantrip in current editions) that is much, much more impressive. Nobody is going to fund the R&D in order to make something useful.
2. The chemistry of Magic World is slightly different and gunpowder either doesn't work or it's less stable than normal gunpowder.
3. Gunpowder could work, but it's like a drug to fire based elementals. So people work on it for a bit, make some progress and the next thing you know some minor fire elemental comes along and makes everything go boom.
4. Every time gunpowder has gained any traction at all, wizards everywhere look at it as competition and created spells something along the lines of sending out tiny sparks that home in on gunpowder causing it to explode.
5. The gods have foreseen the chaos that would follow the development of gunpowder and forbidden it.
6. There is a secret order of <insert long lived race> that fear gunpowder in the hands of humans. Anytime someone starts making progress ninja assassins take them out.
7. The people that would have developed it are smart enough to do magic or do things like transform lead into gold. Also explains why gold is so relatively abundant and devalued.