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

[Faolyn]

The question rests on a false premise, that it is the GM who "has people roll".

<sigh> You love your pedantry, don't you? It's not cute.

OK, so if the sign was in a language they could read, would they get to hope what it means, and then roll to see if they were right? Or would you have established the sign's meaning ahead of time and just tell them right off the bat?

 

[pemerton]

Once again, since you missed it when you read the Oxford site and apparently again when I quoted it directly to you,

"diegesis​

(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"

I didn't miss it. I have read that, and the Wikipedia page that I linked to not far upthread, and also things like the following, from an OUP Dictionary of Media and Communication":

1. A narrative world.

2. (film theory) The spatio-temporal world depicted in the film. Anything within that world (such as dialogue or a shot of a roadsign used to establish a location) is termed diegetic whereas anything outside it (such as a voiceover or a superimposed caption) is extradiegetic. This distinction is especially associated with diegetic sound: for example, when a record-player is shown to be the source of onscreen music. A diegetic audience is an audience within the depicted world.

3. (narratology) The relation of story events by telling, as opposed to showing (mimesis).​

The "offscreen elements that are presumed to exist in the world that the film depicts—as long as these are part of the main story" are things like a monster the characters can see and are running from, that hasn't yet been revealed to the audience. Not things like the moment that a minor character who appears in only one shot was born or random spiders and cobwebs that haven't been narrated/depicted.

 

[Maxperson]

I didn't miss it. I have read that, and the Wikipedia page that I linked to not far upthread, and also things like the following, from an OUP Dictionary of Media and Communication":

1. A narrative world.​

​

2. (film theory) The spatio-temporal world depicted in the film. Anything within that world (such as dialogue or a shot of a roadsign used to establish a location) is termed diegetic whereas anything outside it (such as a voiceover or a superimposed caption) is extradiegetic. This distinction is especially associated with diegetic sound: for example, when a record-player is shown to be the source of onscreen music. A diegetic audience is an audience within the depicted world.​

Do you really not understand that it's referring to things outside the fictional world, but still within the movie? Voiceovers. Captions. The examples spell it out for you. Nothing in that paragraph excludes people or mechanics from being a component of the diegesis, because it's only concerned with the movie itself. Not other ways of being diegetic.

The "offscreen elements that are presumed to exist in the world that the film depicts—as long as these are part of the main story" are things like a monster the characters can see and are running from, that hasn't yet been revealed to the audience. Not things like the moment that a minor character who appears in only one shot was born or random spiders and cobwebs that haven't been narrated/depicted.

Um, cobwebs can be a part of the main story. And the spiders that made them. Depends on the story.

In a D&D game where spiders and cobwebs are a common narrative dressing, they are absolutely a part of the main story/theme.

 

[Hussar]

Diegetic music: the characters in the film an also hear it. So? The character falling off the cliff also knows they're falling.

Show me one definition, one explanation, one blog post, anything at all anywhere other than your repeated statements that support your addition. Just one. Shouldn't be hard since you believe it is the definition.

What definition? That the audience needs to be able to know what the characters in the story know? That's the definition of diegetic.

You still have failed to show a single example of something diegetic where the audience would have no idea how it happened. I've shown repeated examples of how it works.

The character doesn't actually know they're falling because, by the mechanics, all they know is that they FELL. As in past tense. They were climbing and now they are on the ground, possibly wounded in some fashion. There is no point in between because the mechanics ARE NOT DIEGETIC. They don't provide any information other than the result. The character has no idea why they fell.

Until, of course, the voiceover narrator backfills the narrative and explains to the character how they fell. So, unless you think that the DM's voice is actually diegetic, that the characters in the story hear the DM's narrative, which is ONLY provided after the result, and is based on absolutely no information provided within the world itself, then, no, you are still wrong here.

 

[Hussar]

Wait ... rolling a percentile dice is diegetic but rolling a D20 is not?

Whooosh. That is the sound of a point soaring WAYYYY over your head.

The actual die isn't important. However, that the die ONLY REPRESENTS SKILL is the important part. That's why it's diegetic.

 

[Maxperson]

You, in fact, did.

I misspoke. The dice are the roll that is required by the mechanic for the mechanic to engage properly. The ability check is the vehicle, not the dice.

Context is important. I have been stressing the mechanic as the vehicle the entire time.

 

[Hussar]

I'm not going to argue criticism with you - my handle on it is modest.

But if by "diegesis" we mean simply what happens in the world of the fiction, then by definition there can be no diegetic mechanics. And there will be very few diegetic resolution processes even if they're non-mechanical - eg as soon as a player describes their PC doing something, the mechanics creates or constitutes an event that is not part of the world of the fiction.

Sort of.

The mechanics themselves? As in the physical rolling the dice and whatnot? Sure, that's not diegetic. But, what those rolls actually represent can be. If the roll provides information about how a result was achieved, then that information is diegetic - it is known and knowable within the game world. That's why the mechanics can be said to be diegetic. I suppose the more accurate descripition is that diegetic mechanics provide diegetic narratives - not that the mechanics themselves are diegetic. They are no more diegetic than the script that the actors are reading from, but, when discussing diegesis, we don't really have to worry about that. That's not the issue. Yes, we, the audience, know that there is a script and a director and all of that. Fair enough. Even though none of the actual creation of a movie or novel is diegetic, it produces a diegetic result.

 

[pemerton]

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​

​

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

​

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.

I'm not sure how your author/actor/audience distinctions relate to diegesis.

For instance, a player pretends to be a person in the imagined world. And then says "I turn around to see what's behind me." Those words are not diegetic, that is, the imaginary person is not saying them. But they do not count as authorship in your sense, as they are not changes to the imagined world that are otherwise than action taken within it.

Tweet in Everway, and Edwards following Tweet, call this "drama" resolution: ie deciding what happens just by saying it. In this episode of "boxes and clouds", Baker characterises drama resolution as being clouds-to-clouds (scroll down to just above the comments). But that doesn't mean that everything that is said, in establishing a shared fiction, it itself an element of the fiction.

I don't think correspondence or representation is sufficient for a mechanic to be diegetic. What we describe a character as doing in the fiction is different than the process we use to determine what the character is doing in the fiction. The results, as we describe them, are clearly diegetic -- the characters and the players (audience) experience them in the same way -- but I really don't think the processes are.

I also think that the words used to describe the results are not themselves diegetic: that is, the character in the fiction isn't accompanying everything they do with a first-person present-tense narrative overlay (unless they are Elan in Order of the Stick).

This matters in RPGing, because of the whole "Did your character actually say that?" issue which comes up from time to time.

 

[Hussar]

Mate, no, just no. This is less simulationistic as it is not affected by the difficulty of the task, thus failing to simulate that part of the game reality. Frankly, you seem to have no idea what simulating something even is.

Ohhhh, we're back to claiming that simulationistic must reflect reality now are we? I thought that simulationistic didn't have to follow real world realism. Or is that only when it's convenient to the argument.

Simulationist simply has to provide some information that informs how the result was achieved. It doesn't have to be affected by the difficulty of the task. If it does then virtually every single actual sim game out there - GURPS, RQ, Rolemaster - aren't actually simulationist because most of them don't set the DC based on the task. Because their rules are actually simulationist and provide information whereas your rules, with its floating, arbitrary DC (almost always set by the level of the character) and a die roll that includes everything under the sun, don't provide any information and are thus not simulationist.

 

[Faolyn]

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.

Don't see why you'd need faux-Chinese when you have dwarfs, gnomes, and dozens of other sentient species who have a reason to blow things up and a tendency to experiment with materials and chemicals. And even if they never do it, humans have a tendency to blow things up and experiment with materials and chemicals.

Honestly, I think that if you ever need to come up with racial traits for human beyond a generic "we're good at everything and so get a small bonus to stats/skills," blowing stuff up and experimenting with stuff we probably shouldn't should be our species' hat. Human like big boom.

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.

Well, in the real world, the more threats there are, the more people focus on creating tools to deal with those threats... like newer, better weapons. Unless you go for a post-apocalypse feel. But if you have people who have money (nobility/royalty), then they will get people to make newer, better, and more deadly instruments of war and means of protection, and that will lead to advancements in other fields as well.

(Now I want to watch Connections again.)

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.

Problem here is that someone will eventually figure out how to make versions that don't require magic.

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

While Eberron is not my favorite setting, it's honestly the most logical. D&D magic is not only repeatable but reliable. A spell will always work, and always in the same way (with the very rare exception of spells like teleport). There's no rolls to cast the spells and no problems with miscasts causing problems (except for wild mages, assuming that the edition uses them), and there are no limitations as to who can cast, beyond, perhaps, a minimal Int score or (ugh) racial limitations.

So logically, unless the GM introduces something into the setting that seriously limits spellcasting in some way (either rules or some sort of in-fiction limitation), every D&D setting should be magitech. And if the GM does introduce something that limits casting, then there should be higher levels of real-world tech. Including guns.

(Or you can just go "%&*! logic" and simply not have them in the world. And if a player wants to create them, well, they're playing with explosives and have to roll really well not not die while doing it. Or simply set your game in the stone or bronze ages, not the iron/medieval/renaissance periods that are typical.)

In thinking about it, it might be better to simply have magic be the real-world equivalent of electronics, not mechanics--let the nonmagical folk create their tech, but they'll be building with clockworks and steam and primitive internal combustion while the wizards have computers with AI (bound spirit) and holographic (illusory) interface that let them hack the world, Mage: the Ascension style. At least that way, if someone magic-less mortal tries to reverse engineer such a device, they'll release the spirits and probably get killed by them in the process.