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

[Pedantic]

As always I dread to discuss immersion, but this whole thing feels like a diversion from arguing that player and character decision making should be aligned. It seems to me that the desirable thing is that players and characters share decision making incentives, information (or at least have strongly analogous information, like a +4 strength bonus and an understanding of their approximate athleticism, respectively) and make choices/take actions on the same time scale and in the same causal direction.

Frankly, I'm not sure that trait is best described as "simulation" but I think it is the desired player/character relationship that's being described.

 

[Faolyn]

Fair enough, but I'd really like to avoid having to worry about rules for all the various gunpowder-based weapons; never mind those weapons made earlier weapons obsolete pretty fast.

<shrug> That's not really a problem--nothing wrong with a game where the PCs are wielding guns in the dungeon instead of swords, other than that it's not traditional.

And the mages will buy them out and suppress the technology.

Why? They don't care about swords and windmills, even though those replace spells. And there's a lot more non-casters than there are casters. Should casters try to suppress technology, they'll become known as the bad guys pretty quickly, even if they have good reasons to do so (as opposed to GM reasons).

Agreed in principle.

Modern D&D magic is waaaay more reliable than TSR-era D&D magic. There, it could be very easily interrupted, and other spells beyond just teleport had some hazards built in.

Interrupts don't really count, because the people who would be making these magical wonders won't be doing it in combat.

Then you get DMs like me who add in wild magic surges to the mix, and magic becomes the high-risk high-reward way to go.

Which most GMs don't do, as you well know.

Yep, that's kinda been my approach all along. If I had to, I could just rationalize it by saying the components used to make gunpowder don't react with each other in game-world physics or something; but I've never really had to worry about it.

Stone or bronze age would deny all sorts of other things I'd really like to keep, though, all the way from heavy armour to ocean-going sailing ships to agriculture to etc. etc.

They had those in the stone and bronze age, though. The Greeks had the Dendra panoply (15th century BCE), for example, and the Japanese had Tanko (300 CE). The Austronesian people were able to sail the ocean with rather advanced boats in 3000-1000 BCE in order to populate the Polynesian islands.

And, as I've said many a time, it's a fantasy world. You have to take the fantastical into consideration. You want a game that uses bronze as its highest tech but also has sailing ships? Well, here are the Ocean Elves and their city-boats. And you have to accept that the world is going to develop but not in exactly the same way that Earth did, not in a world with magic and active gods.

 

[definiteFreakyFishGuy]

I don't find her arguments completely compelling, but I don't think that's her intention. She's arguing that the numerical representation of Str is not diegetic -- the 18/00 or whatever isn't diegetic. That Grog the Barbarian's wicked strong, stronger than puny halflingses, would be diegetic.

So it feels like what some folks are saying is that ability modifier like "STR +3" is not diegetic.

If I were to change the +3 to a more describe term, something like "STR very good," would that make it more diegetic?

 

[pemerton]

Not me. A simulation simulates a process that occurs in real life. I would(probably) recognize someone I met a long time ago, so a mechanic designed for wolverine to do the same simulates that.

If it can be simulationist for Wolverine's player to declare I met this person in the past, why can't it be simulationist for a character's play to establish, via an appropriate dice roll, that they are reading runes that reveal a way out?

These are both instances of players contributing to the establishment of backstory.

EDIT:

RPGs change that even further. Most of the game has no visual, but some parts do, such as terrain and figures. Even then those things don't include all the details that our character's experience with the terrain and creatures. It's also not experienced solely through the narration and visuals, but also through mechanics. The mechanics being a direct part of how the event is experienced and also part of the to the event in the fiction makes that mechanic diegetic.

Without the use of the mechanic, no event occurs for the character in the fiction to be experienced by the player. The mechanic is part of what is happening in the fiction. Without the climb check mechanics, there is no climb happening in the fiction.

So like the change to diegesis with the advent of film, where visuals can now be said to be diegetic because of how it can be perceived as narration, mechanics can also be said to be diegetic because of how they are the same as the event the character perceives. No mechanics, no climb. Yes mechanics, yes climb.

In that case, why is the mechanical process for establishing what a character learns when they read some runes also diegetic?

 

[pemerton]

Indeed. See my second mode - where the characters is the game.

The GM does hardly anything before the game. Meanwhile each of the players create a character. This is a highly creative process. During play, the GM is having a special creative responsibility in figuring out interesting situations to put the characters in. Meanwhile the player's main role lies in interpreting these situations in terms of their understanding of the characters, to determine how they should react.

My own view - which is based on both aesthetic preference and what I've experienced in RPG play - is that character-focused play becomes more satisfying when it is undertaken in a mode closer to Apocalypse World or Burning Wheel - foregrounding the player's creative act in playing their PC - rather than in the way that you describe, of seeking to express an understanding of the character.

 

[Old Fezziwig]

So it feels like what some folks are saying is that ability modifier like "STR +3" is not diegetic.

If I were to change the +3 to a more describe term, something like "STR very good," would that make it more diegetic?

I think, according to Cavegirl's definitions/usage, that would be more diegetic. For me, I think it still runs into some of the same problems that using numbers has, especially if it eventually has a numerical value behind it in the game (e.g., the old TSR Marvel Superheroes had numerical values behind the adjectives, at least in the Advanced rules). But my only real dog in this hunt is a good, consistent definition of diegesis/diegetic -- I'm a little suspicious of its value as a term in RPG theory.

Edit: deleted a spare "have" in my parenthetical.

 

[Maxperson]

If it can be simulationist for Wolverine's player to declare I met this person in the past, why can't it be simulationist for a character's play to establish, via an appropriate dice roll, that they are reading runes that reveal a way out?

Those are not quite the same. Unless I am not understanding it correctly, the DM said something like, "There are 3 juvenile boys in the game store, 1 middle aged man, and 3 young women who are playing Ticket to Ride." Then the player of Wolverine announces that he knows the middle aged man from back in Desert Storm. He's not inventing what the runes are with a success and not getting what he wants if it's a failure.

These are both instances of players contributing to the establishment of backstory.

In different ways.

EDIT:
In that case, why is the mechanical process for establishing what a character learns when they read some runes also diegetic?

Because the character is using his arcane knowledge skill to read the runes. The ability check mechanic is part of the process of reading the runes.

 

[pemerton]

I'm inclined to read the switch in the mix during the dance sequence as a switch to nondiegetic sound -- the music's representational of something in the fictional world but no longer the same as it is in the fictional world

I want to say - tentatively, perhaps - that the analogue of this in a RPG would be the GM drawing a sketch of what the PCs can see. Or the GM telling the players that their PCs are handed an elaborate map, and handing them a rather plain hand-drawn or simply printed map.

That is, the representation is not the same as the way that (eg) words represent the things they talk about. (I can't remember all my CS Peirce semiotic categories, but he has terminology to describe this contrast in modes of representation.)

 

[pemerton]

They take a scene we know could happen, and give us a way of removing ambiguity without merely declaring what happens.

Climbing occurs. Falling occurs. When we care about which thing happens, we either declare it, or we involve something that determines without us declaring which. The mechanic is not the action, it is simply and exclusively the resolution of a process we already know has started, which we wish to know about, and which we specifically wish to not declare the answer to.

It represents what the character is experiencing.

I think you were right the first time!

 

[Thomas Shey]

As always I dread to discuss immersion, but this whole thing feels like a diversion from arguing that player and character decision making should be aligned. It seems to me that the desirable thing is that players and characters share decision making incentives, information (or at least have strongly analogous information, like a +4 strength bonus and an understanding of their approximate athleticism, respectively) and make choices/take actions on the same time scale and on the same casual direction.

Frankly, I'm not sure that trait is best described as "simulation" but I think it is the desired player/character relationship that's being described.

For what its worth, that was more or less what the old RGFA simulationists seemed to think of as one of its defining traits. Its one reason genre emulation was not assumed into simulationism then, because there are elements in some genre conventions that cannot assumed to be present in the understanding of most characters of their world and action in those sorts of settings without getting degenerate results.