Adding fluff and detail does not change the essence of the fiction. No author of any book ever fills in exactly every detail. No plans can include everything possible. That doesn't mean that there are no cobwebs in an old ruin, it just means there is no mall kiosk inside my house showing where the exit is. The cobwebs make sense if it's an environment that supports spiders, a map to a building that doesn't have constant visitors does not.
By that definition nothing can ever be diegetic. Watching a movie? It was recorded on a camera and then edited. Reading a book? There was an author, multiple drafts, and editor. No fiction whether it's movies, books, games, have no outside influence.
But these goal posts keep moving on this topic trying to find some angle to say "Nah, you're wrong and so is the horse you rode in on." By your criteria? No game could ever be considered simulationist.
Sure it can.
As noted: diegetic music. You are hearing it. Your assumption is that you're hearing it and the characters are not. But then the narrative actually demonstrates that no, the characters
are hearing that music. That's clearly the thing
you're doing, also being one and the same thing as what the
character is doing.
And I gave an example, albeit from a video game, where a specific mechanic could be diegetic in one case and not in another:
Deus Ex and its character JC Denton reading emails (or other computer files), which is done through a menu screen, and the player saving and loading the game, which is done through a menu screen.
The mechanic is functionally identical in each case, apart from changes to shape and location. Some parts are literally identical up to the width of the menu itself and what words appear. It's a menu screen either way. But the former is diegetic, because Denton
is in fact interacting with a menu, and the characteristics of that menu are tailored to be what he sees. Same goes for, as an example, interacting with medical or repair bots; you can even
see the menu screen objects on their chassis. But, and I should hope this would be obvious, the
game menu is objectively not diegetic. JC Denton doesn't have the power to Save Game where he feels like it. He cannot adjust the brightness of his world. He cannot alter difficulty settings. Etc.
Clearly, some mechanics can be diegetic. A lot of them can't be, just like how a lot of film elements can't be diegetic. I wouldn't actually say that cutting and editing is non-diegetic
a priori, but it is almost always so. Long "single take" shots are rare because they're exceedingly difficult to pull off well, even though that is actually what humans experience. However, if a film is being recounted as a visual depiction of a story a person is telling, then it can be diegetic to have cuts or skips because that's the nature of human memory. (Or, in the case of something like
The Princess Bride, the grandpa is actively "editing" the story down for digestibility for his young grandson, so although the "cuts" are not diegetic for Buttercup and Westley etc., they
can be for the boy, because that's the story he's actually experiencing.)
But yes! This does in fact mean that essentially every mechanic used in D&D isn't diegetic and almost certainly can't be made so. That shouldn't really be a surprise. We are still primarily using slight variations of mechanics invented around 50 years ago primarily to let some wargamers get up to some silly shenanigans with swords and sorcery. They weren't meant to be diegetic at all; they were simply meant to be adequate to get useful information across.
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