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

[pemerton]

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.

Which RPG are you talking about?

With the climb rules for 5e D&D (based on a STR (Athletics) check) how do we see the character climbing? What do they do? How do we know whether they made it part way up and fell, or whether they couldn't work out a way to even start the climb?

 

[Maxperson]

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.

And bad analogies are horrendous. A more accurate analogy would be without a person or self-driving AI, the trucks can't get to other places. There's a direct connection with what I am saying, unlike with that horrible analogy above.

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.

You win. Diegesis happens without anyone around to experience the media. Nobody has to be present, because if they did have to be present, they would be a component of the process. That of course doesn't mean your Strawman that requires audience to be in the story itself. Being a component of the process =/= being in the story itself.

 

[Maxperson]

Which RPG are you talking about?

With the climb rules for 5e D&D (based on a STR (Athletics) check) how do we see the character climbing? What do they do? How do we know whether they made it part way up and fell, or whether they couldn't work out a way to even start the climb?

You left out the skill portion of the process.

A successful climb check lets you move half speed for that check. If you succeed twice with a speed of 30, you've made it up 30 feet. That might be the whole way, half way, a tenth of the way, or whatever.

 

[Enrahim]

What was being simulated was exploration of a weird dungeon, looking for answers to omens and portents.

I think that is to broad to be directly useful for the analysis I was looking for. But I think this gave me something to work with to show a possible framing where I think the mechanism in the runes example can indeed be recognised as supporting the simulation.

As we are in a world of omens, one thing we might want to simulate is that in such a world events would tend to take on an unambiguously good or bad flavor. We might further want to simulate that the virtue of honing your skills are embedded in the world (karma like), itself working as an omen for if good or bad things are going to happen when you engage in related activities.

The described mechanics seem great for supporting a simulation with these two features.

I don't see how talking about some different, hypothetical event bears upon the actual game play that I described.

I have been repeatedly told, in this thread, that - because of the resolution process - it cannot have been a moment of, or a contributor to, simulationist play. I am asking "why not?" Your description of something completely different doesn't answer my question.

Ok. In that case I cannot provide the answer you seek, as I am not among the people doing what you say some people have been doing. I might have done something that I can see that can have been confused as such, but I hope my previous post would clear up that confusion.

 

[clearstream]

Thanks!

To build on it: is the use of the reaction roll to establish backstory seen as a concession to playability, or a good/creative thing?

It's hard for me to recall my beliefs/orientations of 30+ years ago, but I tentatively suggest that in RM play it would be considered a concession. Whereas MHRP (just to pick on one game) treats it as a good/creative thing.

Here's a non-mechanical example from MHRP, to illustrate how it embraces in-play creation of backstory; it is a Milestone for Wolverine:

OLD FRIENDS, OLD ENEMIES​

1 XP when you declare someone an old ally or foe.​

Wolverine's player is encouraged to come up with backstory during play, and is awarded an XP for doing so.

A further question is whether this is at odds with simulationism. I take one consequence of @clearstream's posts to be that it is not.

In the subject matter, Wolverine has old allies and foes. Would anyone argue that it'd be more simulative of what it's like to be Wolverine if he didn't recognise one in play.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

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.

I doubly love this because, one, awesome concept, but two...as you probably already know...bat guano was one of the prime sources of nitrates during the 19th century in North America.

 

[clearstream]

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.

To avoid possible misapprehensions, I think we're debating what it is to be "diegetic" and not "diegesis". Those terms cover different things. With that noted, you raise a good case to consider. I am arguing that we should define "diegetic" in TTRPG as "things players can pretend their characters know." By "can" I mean that it's possible: I don't mean that their characters necessarily know it at any given moment of play.

With that background, I agree that "I turn around to see what's behind me" is not a description of anything characters can know, it's narration of something characters will be able to know it if it accepted into the fiction. I'm entertaining a notion that this sort of improvised narration amounts to authorship, and it continues to amount to authorship even when using game mechanics to help fabricate it.

What I wanted to get at is that because players can participate as all three of authors, actors and audiences, they must separate what they know about the imagined world on account of authorship of it from what they pretend their characters know. I observe that they do make that separation, and when a player fails to they're sometimes censured.

Coming back to "I turn around to see what's behind me" why do you say that it doesn't fit with my authorship? It is narration that we agree isn't part of the imagined world, that changes that world (the character turns around.)

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.

Agreed! And part of why I exclude game mechanics as such from being diegetic.

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.

Agreed. I'm taking the words used to describe results as non-diegetic. Only the results in the fiction are diegetic.

 

[pemerton]

Being a component of the process =/= being in the story itself.

What process?

 

[pemerton]

A successful climb check lets you move half speed for that check. If you succeed twice with a speed of 30, you've made it up 30 feet. That might be the whole way, half way, a tenth of the way, or whatever.

I'm not sure how this relates to failure.

Nor do I see how this shows that the d20 roll is a representation of anything.

 

[pemerton]

In the subject matter, Wolverine has old allies and foes. Would anyone argue that it'd be more simulative of what it's like to be Wolverine if he didn't recognise one in play.

I dunno. But there seem to be multiple posters in this thread who think that the player having the capacity to be the one who establishes these elements of backstory is at odds with simulation: @Micah Sweet, @The Firebird, @Crimson Longinus, @FrogReaver, I think @Maxperson and possibly @Enrahim but maybe not in light of post 19374.