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

[pemerton]

<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?

It's not about pedantry. You're assuming a map-and-key-esque approach to play, similar to a D&D module. And your questions don't really make sense for the MHRP approach.

I mean, unless you're asking something like "If I told the players 'You see a sign saying <stuff>', would that fiction be established"? In which case the answer is yes.

 

[Hussar]

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.

Oooh, I like this tangent.

My gunpowder rules said that dragon dung is needed for gunpowder. So, it's possible to get, but, requires you to follow a dragon for a while, thus making it prohibitively expensive. When my PC's found an island populated by wyverns, they learned that wyvern guano could also be used to make gunpowder, meaning that this island was now the most valuable piece of real estate in all of Greyhawk. And it was just off the shores of the Sea Barons. I'm very disappointed that that campaign ended prematurely.

 

[pemerton]

Creating a simulation isn’t authoring fiction it’s creating a simulation.

Let’s say I as dm create a dungeon with certain inhabitants, each with certain behaviors, etc. if my goal is to simulate what they do based on my prep and game mechanics then I didn’t simply create fiction, I created a simulation.

Are you saying that a module like ToH is a simulation? If so, I don't agree.

Are you saying that running a module like ToH can be a simulation? If so, I've got some doubts based on my own experiences of running bits of ToH adapted to RM, and also based on my own experiences of running the somewhat similar White Plume Mountain in an AD&D variant.

But some elaboration might help me get what you are saying.

Contrast with your runes example. There was no goal to simulate what the runes meant, only a goal to author what they meant.

I don't know what it means to "simulate what the runes mean". I mean, the runes are writing. They mean what they mean. How does one simulate the meaning of a bit of writing?

 

[pemerton]

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

I wasn't talking about the film Arachnophobia, though. I was talking about a GM having prepped their material, and their prep doesn't mention cobwebs. And then a player asks "Are there cobwebs on the ceiling?" The answer, in accordance with Sorensen's principle 3 which requires all additions to the fiction during play to be diegetic, must be "no".

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.

I don't know what you mean by saying that a RPG game mechanic can be a component of the RPG's fiction. The mechanics are real world things that real people use to govern their agreement as to the shared fiction. Except in some edge cases, the mechanics are not part of the fiction itself.

 

[pemerton]

The mechanics themselves? As in the physical rolling the dice and whatnot? Sure, that's not diegetic.

Nor are many of the words that the players speak, like "I [as my PC] turn around." No in the fiction hears those words spoken.

As I posted not far upthread, this is a recurring source of confusion and tension in RPGing, when the GM asks the player "Did you really say that?"

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.

The stuff that is represented might be part of the fiction, sure. The act of representation typically isn't, though - as per the example of the player saying, as their PC, "I turn around".

What is part of the fiction is the turning around, not the act of saying "I turn around".

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.

Here I think we part ways. Because I agree that, speaking accurately, the mechanics are not diegetic. But isn't "diegetic narrative" a tautology? Or very close to one at least.

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.

I think I agree with this. But then I want to restate your points about the climb check - which basically I agree with - like this: the climb check isn't representational. And so it does not introduce elements into the narrative (that is, into the diegesis). As per my post somewhere not too far upthread, it's like the film cutting from the character getting ready to climb, to a scene where the sweating, red-faced character pulls themself over the top of the cliff (success) or to a scene of the character tumbling down the cliff to their doom (failure).

This is why I liked your map and puzzle square examples: because these are ones where we don't even need to talk about representation. What the players are doing (poring over the map or the puzzle) is exactly what the characters are doing.

But if we talk about representation, we at least need the mechanics to map to descriptions of processes or events. The Rolemaster Move/Manoeuvre table does a bit of this - eg, here are some of the failure entries, in increasing degree of seriousness:

Fail to act

Freeze for 2 rounds

Fall. Sprain ankle. You are -30. +15 hits

Fall. Knock yourself out. You are out for 30 rounds. +10 hits​

This still doesn't tell us exactly what went wrong for the character, but it does provide descriptions of whether they choked at the outset, or tumbled down the cliff.

TL;DR - I don't think we are disagreeing that much over the basic points at issue.

 

[pemerton]

Oooh, I like this tangent.

My gunpowder rules said that dragon dung is needed for gunpowder. So, it's possible to get, but, requires you to follow a dragon for a while, thus making it prohibitively expensive. When my PC's found an island populated by wyverns, they learned that wyvern guano could also be used to make gunpowder, meaning that this island was now the most valuable piece of real estate in all of Greyhawk. And it was just off the shores of the Sea Barons. I'm very disappointed that that campaign ended prematurely.

Unrelated - isn't gunpowder in Greyhawk verging on heresy? (Unless you're Murlynd!)

 

[Maxperson]

I wasn't talking about the film Arachnophobia, though. I was talking about a GM having prepped their material, and their prep doesn't mention cobwebs. And then a player asks "Are there cobwebs on the ceiling?" The answer, in accordance with Sorensen's principle 3 which requires all additions to the fiction during play to be diegetic, must be "no".

How about virtually every adventure movie? The great outdoors. Ruins. Deadly and/or scary encounters. Spiders are right at home as a part of those stories. Kinda like adventures in D&D.

I don't know what you mean by saying that a RPG game mechanic can be a component of the RPG's fiction. The mechanics are real world things that real people use to govern their agreement as to the shared fiction. Except in some edge cases, the mechanics are not part of the fiction itself.

There is no diegesis without an audience to watch the movie. The audience is a component of getting diegesis.

Mechanics are similar. There is no climb in the fiction without the mechanics, making the mechanics a component of that climb.

 

[Maxperson]

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.

He literally said "game reality." I think you were reading too fast.

 

[pemerton]

here is no diegesis without an audience to watch the movie. The audience is a component of getting diegesis.

Mechanics are similar. There is no climb in the fiction without the mechanics, making the mechanics a component of that climb.

There are no trucks without the sun. But the sun is not a part of any truck - it is 10s of millions of kilometres away from all of them.

There is no imagining of Frodo without a person to imagine him. This does not make readers of the LotR part of the story. (And thinking otherwise will cause confusion and contradiction, as the following argument shows: when you read LotR I wasn't part of the story, even though I've also read it; and yet we read the same story; hence I wasn't part of the story when I read it; hence (by generalisation) no reader is a part of the story.)

There is no film without prop-makers, set managers, hairdressers etc. But those people are not part of the film's story.

The mechanics are a process that the game participants use to reach consensus on the outcome of the attempted climb. But they are not part of the fiction.

 

[Maxperson]

As per my post somewhere not too far upthread, it's like the film cutting from the character getting ready to climb, to a scene where the sweating, red-faced character pulls themself over the top of the cliff (success) or to a scene of the character tumbling down the cliff to their doom (failure).

No it's not like that at all. With the skill check we see the character climbing with his skill up the cliff, because with the failure of his skill as told to us by the mechanics, he can fall from part way up. If we cut away, we can't see that, and we are ignoring what the mechanics are telling us with the roll, which is that he succeeds by his skill or fails by his skill.